How Dark an Economic Night Does It Have To Be?

In the movie, The Company Men, the Ben Affleck character goes from success to failure in the moment he is let go. A corporation that once made things now profits from shedding jobs. A common story, though well depicted in his loss of home, moving in with parents, tension with wife (who goes back to work), the hits his ego takes at a job placement center, the non-union carpentry work he gets from a kind of friend during his long and fruitless job hunt.

The fear of unemployment and underemployment stalks the land, and lives in the church as well. It is the big story at this time in American life. That film has a hopeful but not quite happy ending involving a former near-top executive with a very golden parachute. This journal begins with hope and the conviction that we need to take grim realities head on. Far from a parachute, our country is shredding its safety net.

But why read an on-line journal about the current “great recession” when you can watch movies about it? Or watch movies about anything other than an economic crisis we think we know too well already?

Because this is not only an economic crisis. We chose this issue’s title as an echo of St. John of the Cross’ great poem about a mystic seeking an absent or hidden God, from which we get the common phrase, “dark night of the soul.” On one level, the dark night of the economy does keep people awake at night, worrying about bills to pay, savings to use, relatives to beg from. On a larger scale, there is a moral absence that drives us to figure out why positive measures are not being taken and how to avert further de-moralization.

As we launch this issue, the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement is posing the inequality question in a major way, but our pay-to-play political system is not likely to provide the stimulus necessary to take our economy out of the current prolonged recession. Our horizon for examining the “corrosion of character” (Richard Sennett) embodied in our economic system is long term—though we touch on the Occupy movement in a discussion elsewhere.

OWS and its relatives reflect a disillusionment with government as well as with the economic royalty of our day. The danger in any complex situation is that real solutions get displaced by symbolic fixations, such as debt-ceiling limits choking effective government stimulus. Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman compares the austerity measures being recommended to the use of leeches in the ancient treatment of disease. This is when we know we are on theological ground, rife with fundamentalism about salvific markets and demonic taxes, and with the ancient religious practice of scape-goating. A journal of any kind prompts reflection and invites analysis, in this case about the values for which a great many people’s vocations are being sacrificed.

The articles here present alternative views of what economies should do. These are Christian approaches from within a particular tradition, represented in General Assembly thinking, though we acknowledge and link to other approaches. There is some economic argumentation; economist John Winfrey’s article notes the challenges to our “American Dream” from both market and governmental failures. A mixed economy can be a mixed-up economy.

To review the articles briefly:
“Living Through Economic Crisis.” This is the General Assembly’s most recent word on the economic crisis, a social involvement report that stresses Christian compassion and constructive critique. This was the basis upon which a study team was authorized to report to the next General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) in 2012. Some of the papers in this issue were done as part of that study process, and will help understand the thinking going into that report. Already clear then, it is hard to sustain a “middle class church” when the middle class is being squeezed and educational opportunities reduced.

After the “economic crisis” is framed in that initial church statement, we shift to more experiential pieces in a “Talking Corner.”

“Loans for Life” by Emily Morgan is a seminarian’s testimony about her degrees of indebtedness, which affect her sense of call, the shape her family life, her relation to church, and the nature of her tithing.

“New Brunswick: The Plight of the Poor” by Dawan Buie is another seminarian’s encounter with people who are poor and the self-recalibration that follows.

“All about US” by Ariana Salazar-Newton is a poem by a Mexican-American woman reflecting on the migration of attitudes as economic conditions change.

Economic Perspectives includes critical thinking about globalization and corporations, workers, and worldviews: the question of accountability runs through them.

Bill Saint tests the description of our neo-liberal or anti-regulatory market system drawn from the 2004 Accra affirmation of the World Communion of Reformed Churches. Initially seen as quite critical, since 2008 Accra has been seen as more prescient of economic divisions and their consequences.

John Winfrey interprets the use of American Dream as an implicit covenant, not only of financial success for the individual, but of a covenant for the commonwealth. How similar are his views to those of Van Jones and other activists as they invoke an American Dream that includes Martin Luther King’s dream?

John Cobb and Progressive Christians Uniting have gathered much of their thoughtful analysis in the book we turned to; ­­Progressive Christians Speak. Cobb himself is a wide ranging scholar with strong environmental interests. His book with economist Herman Daly, For the Common Good (1984), was among those advocating a re-factoring of the GNP to include environmental ”externalities.”

builds on her contribution to the 2008 book she edited with Rebecca Todd Peters, To Do Justice. The churches’ concern for workers was a keynote in the Social Creeds of 1908 and 2008.

Elisa Owen, speaking from her business and ministry experience, looks at matters of value and values, consciously affirming the freedom and responsibility of Christians to resist idolatry of any economic system.

What we call “Unchained links” follow: links to data and other viewpoints, including a General Assembly study of the theology of compensation. Should there be maximum as well as minimum wages?

“Tomatoes of Wrath” gives a “view from below,” from the lowest level of the economy, where a penny a pound more for produce means doubling one’s income.

The Pew study link confirms not simply the income differentials among the races in the U.S., but the vast differences in assets accumulated.

Warren Buffet’s support for higher income (and inheritance) taxes on the wealthy is well known.

Jeffrey Miron counters Buffet bluntly.