Sadly the struggle for justice in Florida’s agricultural sector is far from over. It is still the case that a great number of the workers who labor in Florida’s fields, particularly in the Immokalee region, suffer from horrendous working conditions that often constitute outright slavery. Since 1997 more than a thousand people have been freed from involuntary servitude in Florida—that is to say, freed from egregiously abusive work environments in which they were prevented from escape by means of threatened and actual violence. They were the lucky ones. Slavery in Florida is not only alive but thriving. As Chief Assistant US Attorney Douglas Molloy put it, the Immokalee region in Florida is “ground zero for modern slavery.” You can read all about it (and sign a petition) at CIW’s website, or in Barry Estabrook’s very recent and very incisive articles in Gourmet Magazine.

The highly troubling cause of CIW’s current campaign is Florida Governor Charlie Crist’s inexplicable refusal to address the situation or discuss the facts with CIW, despite the fact that a broad and reputable coalition has called on him to do so. One only hopes that the CIW’s will succeed in pushing the state government out of its inaction. You can help by signing the organization’s petition here. It is important that we take notice. The vast majority of the tomatoes Americans eat in winter are picked by Florida laborers who quite likely are currently suffering under the systemic injustices in this industry. The Hebrew Scriptures tell us that there is a season for everything under heaven, a time to plant, and a time to uproot. Winter is not tomato season, and we need to be aware of the source of our out-of-season produce. In any case, it strikes me that, amidst the economic crises and continued political bickering which so easily capture our attention, it is vital that socially concerned Christians not forget these less-publicized struggles for justice. There are matters other than Rush’s latest pronouncement that deserve the attention of our minds and consciences.

The Devil’s Cave, Part I

In reading this article, I also wondered: do we name this the Devil’s Cave and in so doing, suggest that there is no hope? Do we name it in order to leave the systems unnamed, our roles unnamed in whatever way both may be responsible for this Cave?

Economic crises test our values and our resolve. Do we shut the door to immigrants?  Do we take away from them any access to benefits, even if they must sleep in the Devil’s Cave?

Can God be found there?

Lastly, I will paste below the name of organizations  that are sponsoring coat drives, among other initiatives to “help out.”  I think these efforts are valuable and I would encourage people to help out.  Practice beats theory in matters of life and death.

However, will we muster and/or find the spiritual courage and creativity to address the cycles and systems that create these “caves” in the midst of our cities, our congregations, our towns, and across the country?

Organizations you can contact for small ways of helping:

El Centro Hispano Americano
525 E. Front Street
Plainfield, N.J. 07060
(908) 753-8730 Primary purpose is to advance the rights and help meet the requirements of immigrants and expatriates through affordable legal, and social services.

The Salvation Army
615 Watchung Avenue
Plainfield, N.J. 07060
(908) 756-2595 All Salvation Army facilities in New Jersey and the Army’s Service Extension Program are able to provide assistance for basic needs
 
Fish Hospitality Program
456 New Market Road
Piscataway, N.J. 08854
(732) 968-5957 The FISH Hospitality Program is a shelter program, which serves homeless women and families by providing shelter and basic needs while assisting them to return to independent living in the community.
 
Meals-On-Wheels
305 E. Front Street
Plainfield, N.J. 07060
(908) 753-3506 Information on senior meals programs.

Especially relevant has been some recent news reports on faith-based investment practices that — because of their rejection of certain greed-risk practices — have been outperforming in this toxic market.

Muslim investors adhering to Islamic business values, which include a rejection of interest-based profit models, have been largely shielded from the risk-heavy parts of the markets that have been at the front of the free fall:

As credit markets have imploded, triggering a global economic crisis, Islamically correct investors have seen a change of fortune: The conservative principles this small group of devout Muslims clung to during the economic heyday has insulated them from the worst of the past year’s suffering.

…

Renouncing interest is the high-profile element of Islamic finance that relates to the current economic crisis. For Islamically correct investors, that means there are limits to how much debt a company can have or how much profit it can derive from interest-based investments…Islamic finance also prohibits selling assets you don’t own, selling someone’s debt and engaging in high-risk investments. Thus, there was no participation in practices that have been blamed for Wall Street’s meltdown: complex derivatives trading, short-selling and the $30 trillion market in credit default swaps.

Interestingly, however, these Islamic investing advocates make sure to insist that extra profit is not the rational behind these investment practices, but rather following their faith values:

But performance alone isn’t the point of compliance with Islamic law, known as sharia. For the committed, investing finance with faith is about living with values.

“We don’t claim to our investors that we’re going to be consistently outperforming the market because we have sharia criteria,” said Monem Salam, director of Islamic investing and deputy portfolio manager for Saturna Capital, which manages the Amana funds. “We’re going to give our investors the best return they can (get) based on the criteria. If that means outperformance on certain indices, then great.”

Frederick Clarkson  also has a similar piece up on Religion Dispatches on Christian investment firms that have taken conscientious investment practices on issues such as environmental issues that have proven largely prophetic:

Faith-based investors, [Laura Berry] says, have been way ahead of the curve on several major issues, noting that they had for years warned of predatory mortgage lending and called for full disclosure of risk. “One hesitates to use the term prophetic in this context,” she said, underscoring that they had “flagged a number of issues that could have been addressed sooner and at far, far lower cost to investors and to society in general.” On the other hand, Berry notes that they are not without successes, some of the issues raised about climate change over the past three decades, “are now a part of the business plans of many corporations.”

Of course, the divestment campaigns (on issues such as Darfur) also quickly come to mind when discussing values-informed investment practices.

I would sum up both of these Muslim and Christian investing articles like this:

1. Their investing guidelines have led to less hurt in this downturn market.
2. However, even if acknowledging some of the prophetic nature of their practices, they insist that the point is not to be more profitable but to bring their money management in line with their faith values.

After all, if we can say that anything is alarming about American culture it is the notion that dollar concerns always trump all others. Just even challenging this paradigm seems nearly revolutionary — which is all the reason more that it should be done.

I was struck by this article, which covered the town I called home as a child.

It wasn’t just the locality, but the title.  Around the world we hear about the Devil’s Mouth, the Devil’s Postpile, the Devil’s Cave, and the Devil’s Island, to name just a few.  One need only leaf through Weird New Jersey to find the Devil’s Tree, the Devil’s Tower, etc, etc.

Of course, there are sordid stories often attached to these names–a narrative of some great evil. What is the “evil” in this report?

This also made me think about those who are really forgotten.  The stimulus package, the refund check, the property tax rebate, there’s money somewhere in there for you. 

But I hope we don’t get too comfortable, anesthetized like executives making more than a hundred times the national average salary in a single bonus check.  Will we too succumb to a greed that leads us to look for our money? Our tax cut, but no assistance to the immigrant?

We look the other way.  And while we do, there are slums and ghettos in our midst.  Karl Barth (prolific theologian of the 20th century) wrote of such conditions while in Germany.

The theology remains relevant:  when the Church understands its role as the Body of Christ, than it can no longer look the other way.  The Church must always ask is this just or not, and must never “cease to speak out politically,” (as Eberhard Busch puts it in Barth).

Are we speaking in, to, about the Devil’s Cave?

Why don’t we know ourselves as a community?

I’d like to make a few suggestions, and then provide a theological reflection on a means to move forwards towards community or, scripturally put, Koinonia –

Milton Friedman Serving as Economic Advisor to Ronald Reagan

1) The United States fought a fifty-year war with ‘commun’-ism. As the heart of communism, at least theoretically, is a certain notion of community. And, while we now know that notion as flawed, it was very much a topic of debate for the previous 150 years. We don’t discuss it much, but many of the greatest theologians and Church leaders of the 20th century were at one point or another socialists. Yet, by the time many of us arrived the terms of the debate had been firmly settled. Reagan was able to call the U.S.S.R. – and thereby communism – the EVIL empire. The inverse of which places us, as non-communists, as the Good.

2) Out of the 150 year debate and fifty-year war all aspects that could be labeled as “socialistic” or “communistic” could be branded as “evil.” The fight between “socialized” or “universal” healthcare is emblematic of this phenomenon. Whenever an aspect of our society could be viewed as ‘communistic’ we adjusted to move strongly against it. The rhetoric beginning in the Reagan era and continuing through today is quite demonstrative of this mentality. For example, the famous line from the movie Wall Street, ‘Greed is Good,’ was recently the title of a Wall Street Journal editorial defending executive bonuses against the Administration’s proposed TARP legislation.

More Below The Fold. Sorry for the long post.  Lot of thoughts here.

3) While not always put so explicitly, “Greed is Good” has been the prevailing economic mentality since 1980. Greed is what we thought drove a capitalist economy. After all, ‘capitalize’ is simply a derivative of capitalism. Godfather of conservative economics Milton Friedman  – in fact the first economist I was taught as an undergrad – well demonstrated the immorality of our economic system when discussing “Greed.”

It is hard to listen to that clip of Milton Friedman and fathom that it was a Christian “Moral Majority” movement that put his ideology in office.  ”Where do we find these angels who are going to organize society for us?”  What a profound question.

4) The war on communism is not, assuredly, the only source of a strong anti-community sentiment. I’m sure other commentators on this site would just as readily point to standing racial, religious, gender, and economic inequalities as driving foundations to our anti-communal natures, as well as an undercurrent of hyper-individualism, profiled by thinkers like Robert Putnam, where the front-porch became the fenced-in back-yard in the second half of the 20th century. But I think the anti-community rhetoric very much reaches its full volume in the era of Reagan. The combination of the southern strategy with the free-market strategy – beginning in Lee Atwater and running through Karl Rove – took advantage of community splits on racial and economic lines.  False memes like the ‘welfare mom’ were perfect combinations of racial stereotyping and economic indifference.  By taking advantage of splits within our national community and demonizing or declaring evil (like the U.S.S.R) any governmental attempts to share (still a dirty work in politics) resources across economic, racial, or gender (ERA was also a major player in the 1980s) lines, the Reagan era was able perpetuate anti-community sentiments.

5) Greed is Good seemed to be a truth for quite some time – especially in the media, on television, in business success stories. We were economically successful. The proof was in the pudding, so-to-speak, until this year when it suddenly wasn’t.

6) I’ll point to three specific instances of these memes in the 2008 election;

Rudy Giuliani at RNC

We have the era of Reagan – 1980-2008: greed run amuck; the dominance of the much acclaimed ‘era of conservatism’ or what Karl Rove called the “permanent conservative majority;” the period of the electorally successful and socially regrettable southern strategy; free, unregulated, market ideology; the teaching that you are on your own; a lift yourself up by the bootstraps society; the myth of the self-made man; indifference (what George Bernard Shaw called the “Devil’s Disciple”) towards the poor and the weak and the most vulnerable amongst us; going from workers making $1 to their CEO’s $100 to workers making $1 to their CEO’s $450; a society that doesn’t give the poor food, housing, or clothes but instead the “opportunity” to “make it” in our market-based society. While “opportunity” is a powerful and important thing, more basic are clothes, food, housing, and community. Sometimes we need to
“give a man a fish:” After all, it would not have been such a miracle for Jesus to teach a crowd of 5,000 how to fish rather than “simply” giving them fish.

If “Greed is Good” then what is generosity?

The question highlights the trouble with what many of us took as economic truth for the past 28 years. In its glorification of greed America has lost what it means to be a community. So much so, that we created a whole slew of anti-community myths. We taught an ideology, at home and abroad, that to be against community was what brought prosperity, progress, and opportunity.

Crisis, though, is quite good at creating community. The era of Reagan, as we now know and scripture was telling us all along, was a house of cards. The society built on greed, individualism, myths of success, will crumble. The emperor (herein our financial dominance) had no clothes.  Scripture (especially in the economic realm) has a lot more to say about community than the self-made man. The term scripture uses is Koinonia, which I imagine we will be hearing a lot more about in sermons and theological journals in the coming months — Koinonia is a theologically richer term than our modern notion of “community,” and may be more current to our time.

So what are the meanings of Koinonia?

• Koinonia means participation with God in community.
• Koinonia is the term for “communion” or the sharing of a meal, and, in many traditions, the participatory taking of the body of Christ.
• Koinonos means ‘a sharer’ in classical Greek. Not necessarily a spirit of generosity but tangible giving acts.
• Koinonos also means a companion, co-owner, or partner. In Luke 5, James, John, and Simon are called koinonia or companions. The term can also be used to describe an companionship relationship with God.
• Koinonos is an antithesis of greed.
• Koinonos is considered of the most desired virtues in Biblical writings and Classical Greek literature.

When we are anti-community we are (what Thomas Aquinas once called) anti-Koinonia. I’m going to stop short of saying we are against the will of God. But we are definitely against what seems to be the desire of the Gospels. We are extolling a virtue in direct opposition to the virtue of community as apparent throughout scripture. Ought we be surprised that the house of cards fell?

Where were those saying Greed is Bad when Greed was Good?

Well, first, Greed was not good for everyone.  There were many voices of pain that we were not listening to during the era of Reagan. Secondly, while many churches changed their theology to encompass a theology of greed (see Time Magazine’s “Maybe We Should Blame God For the Subprime mess,” which asks whether the prosperity gospel caused the economic crisis), many other churches stayed true in their call of caring for community and standing against greed. Thirdly, it was in the Barack Obamas of the world who were working hard to organize communities to meet each other’s needs.

I hope, during these dark hours, we learn to depend on one-another. That we no longer just glorify the story of the successful small business owner but also the community she enriches and the folks who work there. That we speak of “us” instead of “them” when speaking of the poor among us. That the Gospel returns to being a living word calling us together across religious, gender, racial, and economic divides – in common (community) purpose in a single body.  The return of Koinonia.  The return of Ephesians 4.  The return of E Pluribus Unum.

If 2008 was about us coming together, then 2009 is going to be about Life Together (to quote Bonhoeffer’s title).  In this hopeful new day, lets discover what life together means in an American Community.

Leaders of the religious left were at that time, and still ought to be, advocates and partners with working folks. Be it the fairly conservative William Jennings Bryan, the realist Reinhold Niebuhr, or the wide set of unabashed progressives, all found a cause in advocating for working families.

So, as certain members of Congress – like the robber barrons of old – are doing whatever they can to prevent working people from coming together we ought to speak out against them. The Employee Free Choice Act is an important step in this partnership. Though, as is to be expected, interest are lining up against it. Corporate interests are committing hundreds of millions to defeating this specific bill. We cannot – in this uncertain economic time – purely protect corporations. We must protect their workers as well, and affirm corporations who treat their workers with dignity, respect, and gratitude. For more info on how EFCA serves that role check out Peter Laarman ’s write-up on Religion Dispatches.

We know that Prosperity and Community are only divergent concepts for the selfish. That this nation is the nation it is today because of those in the labor movement. Now is the time to stand beside our brothers and sisters.

In the coming months I’ll keep the site updated on where this important legislation stands and brief the M25 community on ways to help get it passed.

- Grant