Fasting for the Poor -- Sightings

In the name of "deficit reduction" aim has been taken at a number of programs, from Planned Parenthood to NPR, but while these two programs have gotten a lot of press coverage, there are many other areas of the social safety net that are being sliced and diced, even as the defense department and tax cuts for the wealthy are being protected.  Martin Marty takes a look at a couple of protests through fasting against these plans (HR-1).  Take a read and offer your responses.

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Sightings 4/4/2011

Fasting for the Poor

-- Martin E. Marty

“Why We’re Fasting” is the title of columnist Mark Bittman’s essay in Wednesday's New York Times, the “we” being himself and David Beckmann, here described as a “reverend,” and “this year’s World Food Prize laureate.” The pastor heads “Bread for the World.” Yes, why fast? Readers can do their own sighting and hearing of all the media-reported clashes over the national budget, now in final crunch time. That scan will reveal the obvious: that lost in the necessary political and economic debates blighted by the side-tracking but focal partisan and sub-partisan disputes on the issue is one set of people. Biblical scholars in this “Judeo-” and “Christian” nation call them “God’s people.” They are the poor, disabled, disadvantaged, undersheltered and, yes, hungry, about whom some of the budget debates were supposed to have been waged.

Bittman and Beckmann discuss Isaiah 58, essential reading for believers and bystanders alike at such a time and place as this. G. K. Chesterton famously observed that one can look at something 999 times and then, on the thousandth sighting, see something revelatory, as if for the first time. We are asked to do such looking now. To bid each other to do so will sound embarrassingly pious, and yet. . . .

As Bittman tells it, he is fasting, or was, last Monday, when thousands of others also fasted to draw notice to those Congressional budget proposals (H.R. 1) which would “quite literally cause more people to starve to death, go to bed hungry or live more miserably than they are doing now.” Adds Bittman: “And: The bill would increase defense spending.”

Bittman confessed to some skepticism about whether things work out the way Isaiah 58, reporting on God’s revelatory word, suggests. That chapter also reflected God’s being bored by all of Israel’s fussing about how strenuous the people were about holy fasting. The prophet—in my own loose translation—says, for God: “You think you are going to impress me by fasting, but all you do is get hungry and thus get angry and then beat up on each other. Is that the fast you think I want?”

Also in elaborated but consistent paraphrase for the Bible-believers among us: “You can stamp ‘In God We Trust’ on all your money, fight for particular prayers in public gatherings and schools, sing ‘God Bless America’ and all,” but if the people would not feed the hungry, free the imprisoned, and take care of those in need, their fasting, they learned, was beside the point, if not futile and wrong. The ancient prophet said this more elegantly and with an authority that columnists cannot command, but his words should outrank other texts which are cherished by biblical literalists and their secular cousins during legislative and electoral conflicts. Beckmann: “. . . deficit reduction isn’t as important as keeping people from starving: ‘We shouldn’t be reducing our meager efforts for poor people in order to reduce the deficit. They didn’t get us into this, and starving them isn’t going to get us out of it.”

Bittman does not expect God to intervene, but he still hears the moral punch of the biblical language. Disagree with Bittman and Beckmann if they offend, one can suggest, but for the biblically-minded folk, proving that the two are wrong is hard to do. I hope both fasters savor their post-fasting food but stay on the cause. Those obsessed with budget-cutting will certainly stay on theirs. Note: Isaiah 58 speaks wonderfully, not grimly, about the promise of what could follow moral action in the face of human need.

References

Mark Bittman, “Why We’re Fasting,” New York Times, March 29, 2011.


David Beckmann, “God, Hear Our Prayer,” Bread for the World, March 28, 2011.

Martin E. Marty's biography, current projects, publications, and contact information can be found at http://www.illuminos.com/.

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Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

A Bishop's Defense of Government -- Sightings

Is government the enemy?  In some places, like Libya it probably is, but can we honestly say that government is the enemy in the United States?  It may be inefficient and ineffective at times, but is government really the problem?  And as we answer that question it probably is good to remember that even in a representative democracy, ultimately "we the people" are the government. 

This is the question that Martin Marty raises in today's edition of Sightings.   He makes reference to a Lutheran Bishop in Minnesota who decided to stand up and defend the importance of government, including taxation, as an expression of our existence as a people in compact with each other.  I may not always agree with the government, but I'm not sure that anarchy is better.  I may not like every regulation or tax, but the FDA and EPA provide important services that enhance our lives.  But, I'd like to hear what you have to say in response to Marty's essay.

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Sightings 2/21/2011

A Bishop’s Defense of Government

-- Martin E. Marty

Belgian sociologist of religion Henri Desroche once observed three functions of religion in society. Religion normally attests a society when it is in the business of “affirming.” There and then it serves an integrating function. That’s normal: think “God bless America.” Next, in a society that is examining its own premises and reorganizing its constituencies, the function of religion is to be contending “within the limit of contesting the status quo.” Think Martin Luther King, Jr. “In a society that is denying, challenging and refusing its own right to exist, religion appears as a function of protesting, revolting and subverting,” writes Desroche. Think recent Egypt.

Beyond these three functions of attesting, contending and protesting are chaotic movements like anarchism, or, closer to home in today’s America, simple “anti-government” actions, expressions, and tantrums. Think of Ayn Rand’s shrugs and the many current declarations in praise of the selfish individual. Now and then religious leaders, themselves aware of the attesting, protesting, and even, though too rarely, the contending functions of faiths, will examine and take on selfish declarations. One whose words reached publics in the Minneapolis StarTribune and subsequently, of course, on the internet, is Peter Rogness, a bishop within the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and president of the Minnesota Council of Churches. He had the sense to speak of the obvious to multitudes and the courage to take on the anti-government folk, in a column entitled “Government is not the enemy.”

His question is clear: “Is government us or them?” a question which he follows up with the observation: “With no public announcement, we have changed from a people sharing a common life to several hundred million individuals who happen to live near one another, and we risk losing our soul in that change.” His “we” is “the people” who appear(ed) in so many of “our” founding and later public documents. He adds: “As people withdraw into greater concern for their private welfare, government as public enterprise fades; the ‘we’ becomes ‘they,’ common purpose becomes interference and the poor and vulnerable are left on the margins.”

Government, in our history and for Rogness, is not an “it” or a “them.” “Taxes aren’t theft; they’re the means by which we pool our resources, fairly and with order, to underwrite this common life.” Ready to take on an icon, he looks back to 1981 when an unnamed U.S. President announced, “Government is not a solution to our problem; government is the problem.” The bishop anticipates legitimate debate over his words “fairly and with order.” No party, no policy, has a monopoly on “fairness” and good “order.” Contesting policies and programs is a right and duty of “we the people.”

Rogness asks, “So why is a Lutheran bishop writing a social and historical critique?” He is not unique. Numbers of other bishops do so, among them Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. They do it because at stake are “values rooted in the faith traditions of the people who make up this state and nation.” And: “A budget is a moral document.” Let debating over budgets continue, something that can’t happen in an “anti-government” moment, which one hopes will not become an era of potential destruction. It would be caused by the “I’s” who, Rogness writes, take care of themselves and do not notice or who do disdain the “others.” These others, the vulnerable and marginal, are prime in the faith traditions of which the bishop speaks.

References

Henri Desroche, Jacob and the Angel: An Essay in Sociologies of Religion (University of Massachusetts, 1973).

Peter Rogness, “Government is not the Enemy,” StarTribune.com, February 6, 2011.

Martin E. Marty's biography, current projects, publications, and contact information can be found at www.illuminos.com.

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In this month's Religion and Culture Web Forum, Jessica DeCou offers a comic interpretation of the theology of Karl Barth, bringing his work into a surprising and fruitful dialogue with the comedy of Craig Ferguson. Both men, she contends, “employ similar forms of humor in their efforts to unmask the absurdity and irrationality of our submission to arbitrary human powers.” The humor of Barth and Ferguson alike stresses human limitation against illusory deification. DeCou argues for understanding both the humor and the famous combativeness of Barth's theology as part of this single project, carried out against modern Neo-Protestant theology. The Religion and Culture Web Forum is at: http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/publications/webforum/

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Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.