Chris Hedges writes in part, "...the liberal church, like the rest of
the liberal establishment, looked the other way while the poor and
workingmen and -women, especially those of color, were ruthlessly
dis empowered and impoverished.."
For my thinking, the Church and the Liberal establishment did not look
the other way, so much as they were bought out.
Of course the Church, Liberal and otherwise, has always been the tool
of the Ruling Classes. The hollow promises of a Land Beyond the
River, has always been far worse than merely Hope Deferred. It has
been, Hope Denied. But despite all the evidence that God is unable to
manage His Earthly Affairs, people continue to cling to some vague
notion that God moves in mysterious ways, and knows where He is going.
I have said many times that one of the biggest barriers to true
democracy is our refusal to come to terms with the understanding that
there is no God. And we are not somehow above the other life on this
planet. Our own ignorance and smugness stand in our way of real
Freedom.
Carl Jarvis
On 1/25/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The Suicide of the Liberal Church
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_suicide_of_the_liberal_church_201601
24/
Posted on Jan 24, 2016
By Chris Hedges
The chapel of The General Theological Seminary in New York City. The
seminary, founded in 1817, sold much of its property to developers in
recent
years. (Julie Jacobson / AP)
Paul Tillich wrote that all institutions, including the church, are
inherently demonic. Reinhold Niebuhr asserted that no institution could
ever
achieve the morality of the individual. Institutions, he warned, to extend
their lives when confronted with collapse, will swiftly betray the stances
that ostensibly define them. Only individual men and women have the
strength
to hold fast to virtue when faced with the threat of death. And decaying
institutions, including the church, when consumed by fear, swiftly push
those endowed with this moral courage and radicalism from their ranks,
rendering themselves obsolete.
The wisdom of Tillich and Niebuhr has been borne out in the precipitous
decline of the liberal church and the seminaries and divinity schools that
train religious scholars and clergy. Faced with shrinking or nonexistent
endowments, mounting debts, dwindling memberships, a lack of employment for
their graduates and growing irrelevancy in a society that has little use
for
tepid church piety and the smug arrogance that comes with it, these
institutions have fallen into physical and moral decay.
The number of adults in the mainline Protestant churches-Presbyterian,
Unitarian-Universalist, Lutheran, Methodist, Episcopalian,
Congregationalist-decreased from about 41 million in 2007 to 36 million in
2014, according to the Pew Research Center. And the average age of the
congregant is 52. The Catholic Church also is being decimated; its decline
has been exacerbated by its decades-long protection of sexual predators
within the priesthood and the Vatican's relentless campaign, especially
under John Paul II, to force out of the church priests, nuns and lay
leaders
who focused their ministries on the poor and the oppressed. The Catholic
Church, which has lost 3 million members over the last decade, has seen its
hold on the U.S. population fall to 21 percent from 24.
Mainline seminaries and divinity schools have been merging or closing, and
enrollment at such schools has declined by 24 percent in the last decade.
Andover-Newton, founded in 1807, recently shut down. Lutheran Theological
Seminary at Gettysburg, Pa., and Lutheran Theological Seminary at
Philadelphia plan to merge. Union Theological Seminary, where black
liberation, feminist, womanist and queer theologies have their roots,
appears to be on the verge of selling "air space" to a developer to
construct a luxury 35-to-40-story condominium building on its campus.
General Theological Seminary in New York City, a school founded in 1817,
has
sold much of its property to developers, and it ended tenure for its
faculty
after the professors went out on strike to demand the removal of Dean and
President Kurt Dunkle. Dunkle, who epitomizes the infusion of corporatism
into the church, worked for many years as a lawyer doing commercial
litigation before being ordained.
"What doomed General Seminary was not just financial mismanagement, but
unethical leadership," Rob Stephens, a third-year student for the ministry
at Union and part of a student movement fighting Union's building project,
said when I spoke with him by phone. "That is what made the faculty walk
out. The Union administration, board of trustees and all of us need to
learn
this lesson and put a halt to the project. The Union administration has
said
that Union, by building this luxury condominium, was being as bold as the
original founders. This is one thing I can agree on. The original founders
envisioned a place for privileged, white men. The original founders called
abolitionism 'fanaticism.' The founders' values won't get us through this
storm. Union is bigger than the administration and board. Union should be
for all God's people. If built, this luxury condominium would be a middle
finger to Harlem. It would be a middle finger to faith-based social
movements.
"This seminary has turned Black Lives Matter into a commodity," he went on.
"They sell this campus as being allied with Black Lives Matter and other
social justice movements. But if we are readers of the Bible, we know that
saying one thing and doing another leads to internal combustion.
Inconsistency of values and actions can only lead to failure. As a seminary
community, how can we have more faith in an unstable housing market than in
the Gospel? You can't reconcile luxury condominiums built by an anti-union
contractor and no affordable housing with the gospel of Jesus. This is
another example of mainline Christianity casting their lot with capitalism
instead of community. When will we learn?"
The self-identified religious institutions that thrive preach the perverted
"prosperity gospel," the message that magic Jesus will make you rich,
respected and powerful if you believe in him. Jesus, they claim, is an
American capitalist, bigot and ardent imperialist. These sects selectively
lift passages from the Bible to justify the unjustifiable, including
homophobia, war, racism against Muslims, and the death penalty. Yet there
are more students-2,067-at the evangelical Gordon-Conwell Theological
Seminary alone than at the divinity schools and seminaries of Yale,
Harvard,
Union, Vanderbilt and Chicago, whose combined enrollment is 1,537.
The doctrine these sects preach is Christian heresy. The Christian faith-as
in the 1930s under Germany's pro-Nazi Christian church-is being distorted
to
sanctify nationalism, unregulated capitalism and militarism. The mainstream
church, which refuses to denounce these heretics as heretics, a decision
made in the name of tolerance, tacitly gives these sects credibility and
squanders the prophetic voice of the church.
Kevin Kruse in his book "One Nation Under God: How Corporate America
Invented Christian America" details how industrialists in the 1930s and
1940s poured money and resources into an effort to silence the social
witness of the mainstream church, which was home to many radicals,
socialists and proponents of the New Deal. These corporatists promoted and
funded a brand of Christianity-which is today dominant-that conflates faith
with free enterprise and American exceptionalism. The rich are rich, this
creed goes, not because they are greedy or privileged, not because they use
their power to their own advantage, not because they oppress the poor and
the vulnerable, but because they are blessed. And if we have enough faith,
this heretical form of Christianity claims, God will bless the rest of us
too. It is an inversion of the central message of the Gospel. You don't
need
to spend three years at Harvard Divinity School as I did to figure that
out.
The liberal church committed suicide when it severed itself from
radicalism.
Radical Christians led the abolitionist movement, were active in the
Anti-Imperialist League, participated in the bloody labor wars, fought for
women's suffrage, formulated the Social Gospel-which included a huge effort
to carry out prison reform and provide education to prisoners-and were
engines in the civil rights and anti-war movements. Norman Thomas, a
longtime leader of the Socialist Party of America, was a Presbyterian
minister.
These radicals generally were not embraced by the church hierarchy, which
served as a bulwark of the establishment, but they kept the church vital
and
prophetic. They made it relevant and important to the oppressed, the poor
and to workingmen and -women. Radicals were and are its hope.
The loss of an array of prophetic voices on the national scene such as Phil
and Daniel Berrigan, William Stringfellow, Rabbi Abraham Heschel, Dorothy
Day and Martin Luther King Jr. left the liberal church as morally bankrupt
as the rest of the liberal class. James Baldwin, who grew up in the church
and was briefly a preacher, said he abandoned the pulpit to preach the
Gospel. The Gospel, he knew, was not heard most Sundays in Christian houses
of worship. And today with most ministers wary of offending their aging and
dwindling flocks-counted on to pay the clergy salary and the bills-this is
even truer than when Baldwin was writing.
The church is also a victim of the disintegration of the civic associations
that, as Alexis de Tocqueville observed, are vital to the maintenance of a
healthy democracy and the common good. Robert Putnam in his book "Bowling
Alone" chronicled the broad disengagement from political and public life.
He
lamented, correctly, the loss of this "social capital." Those who no longer
join parents' organizations, gardening and historical clubs or fraternal
orders, who do not show up at town hall or city council meetings, also no
longer attend church. There is little, given this cultural malaise-much of
it driven by the constant availability of entertainment through the
Internet
and electronic devices-that the church can do to blunt the public's retreat
from public space.
What remains of the church, if it is to survive as a social and cultural
force, will see clergy and congregants leave sanctuaries to work in
prisons,
schools, labor halls and homeless and women's shelters, form night
basketball leagues and participate in grass-roots movements such as the
anti-fracking struggle and the fight to raise the minimum wage. This shift
will make it hard to financially maintain the massive and largely empty
church edifices, and perhaps even the seminaries, but it will keep the
church real and alive. I had a dinner a few months ago with fellow teachers
in the prison where I work. We discovered, to our surprise, that every one
of us had seminary degrees.
William Stringfellow, who worked as a lawyer in Harlem in the 1950s and
1960s, in his book "My People Is the Enemy," wrote of the church:
The premise of most urban church work, it seems, is that in order for the
Church to minister among the poor, the church has to be rich, that is, to
have specially trained personnel, huge funds and many facilities, rummage
to
distribute, and a whole battery of social services. Just the opposite is
the
case. The Church must be free to be poor in order to minister among the
poor. The Church must trust the Gospel enough to come among the poor with
nothing to offer the poor except the Gospel, except the power to apprehend
and the courage to reveal the Word of God as it is already mediated in the
life of the poor. When the Church has the freedom itself to be poor among
the poor, it will know how to use what riches it has. When the Church has
that freedom, it will be a missionary people again in all the world.
Stringfellow repeatedly warned Christians, as well as Christian
institutions, not to allow the fear of death to diminish the power of
Christian witness. Faith becomes real on the edge of the abyss. "In the
face
of death," he wrote, "live humanly. In the middle of chaos, celebrate the
Word. Amidst Babel, speak the truth. Confront the noise and verbiage and
falsehood of death with the truth and potency and efficacy of the Word of
God."
During the rise of the American species of corporate fascism-what Sheldon
Wolin called "inverted totalitarianism"-the liberal church, like the rest
of
the liberal establishment, looked the other way while the poor and
workingmen and -women, especially those of color, were ruthlessly
disempowered and impoverished. The church and liberals were as silent about
the buildup of mass incarceration as they once were about lynching. The
mainline church refused to confront and denounce the destructive force of
corporate power. It placed its faith in institutions-such as the Democratic
Party-that had long ceased to function as mechanisms of reform.
The church, mirroring the liberal establishment, busied itself with
charity,
multiculturalism and gender-identity politics at the expense of justice,
especially racial and economic justice. It retreated into a narcissistic
"how-is-it-with-me" spirituality. Although the mainline church paid lip
service to diversity, it never welcomed significant numbers of people of
color or the marginalized into their sanctuaries. The Presbyterian Church,
for example, is 92 percent white. It pushed to the margins or sought to
discredit liberation theology, which called out the evils of unfettered
capitalism, white supremacy and imperialism. The retreat from radicalism-in
essence the abandonment of the vulnerable to the predatory forces of
corporate capitalism-created a spiritual void filled by protofascist
movements that have usurped Christian symbols and provided a species of
faith that is, at its core, a belief in magic. This Christian heresy is
currently on public display at Donald Trump and Ted Cruz political rallies.
The last scenes of this decline are being played out at schools such as
Union Theological Seminary in New York City. Tillich and Niebuhr taught at
Union. America's most important theologian, James Cone-who opposes the
condominium building project on the campus-teaches there.
The president of the seminary, Serene Jones, says that unless part of the
seminary's quadrangle is handed over to the developer, the seminary will
not
have the funds to survive (although she and her administration have refused
to make school finances public). If Jones gets her way, Union will become
part of the vast gentrification project being waged against the poor,
especially poor people of color, in Morningside Heights and West Harlem.
"With these development rights, we envision the creation of a beautiful,
slender building that is visually in keeping with the neighborhood and that
is set on the northeast end of the quad," Jones wrote in an open letter to
the Union community last December. "We want our newest building to feel
like
it has always been part of the current campus. We chose this location after
thorough analyses showed that this was the best, and only, suitable site."
Union is working with the developer L+M Development Partners on
construction
plans. The firm has a history of hiring shady subcontractors-including MC&O
Construction (found guilty of stealing $830,000 in 2013 from workers on a
project of NYSAFAH contractor Procida Realty & Construction), RNC
Industries
LLC of Holtsville, N.Y. (repeatedly cited by the Occupational Safety and
Health Administration for unsafe working conditions that have led to
fatalities), and Ro-Sal Plumbing (which settled, for a class-action
complaint filed by workers over unpaid wages).
It is bad enough that Union would collaborate with companies charged with
safety violations, workers' compensation fraud and wage theft, but it is
also abetting the driving of poor families, many of them of color, from
their homes throughout the city. Apartment rents have risen in New York by
75 percent since 2000. The poor are being pushed out of neighborhoods
around
Union, in some cases into homeless shelters and the streets.
Students, and a few of Union's faculty members, have risen up in
opposition.
They charge, in the words of first-year student Yazmine Nichols, whom I
interviewed by phone, that "there is a lack of honesty and transparency on
the part of the administration."
"No one knows," she told me, "how far along the plans are, whether there
will be affordable housing units. All these things are question marks.
"It is hard to get the school galvanized around something they [the
students
and faculty] have no information about," she added. "And this is part of
the
administration's plan-divide and conquer by not providing information.
People are left guessing and speculating.
"We need to ask ourselves what it means to exist as a theological
institution," Nichols continued. "Are we truly existing if we do not hold
onto the core values the institution is predicated on? This is a question
about what it means to be a seminary geared to social justice. What does it
mean when homeless people are sleeping outside seminary dormitories? With
growing income inequality and a shrinking middle class, we must begin
asking
the question, 'Affordable for whom?' What we mean by 'affordability' is
that
housing ought to be affordable for people of color who fall at or below the
NYC poverty line. What does it mean to worship God and theologize in a
world
where people are suffering? What does it mean for an institution to thrive
in the presence of that suffering? What is the purpose of Union's
existence?
For Union to exist with a luxury condominium is for Union not to exist at
all, at least not the Union I applied to. Union may continue to exist
physically, but the soul of Union will be gone."
Fear has driven church and seminary leaders into the hands of those the
Gospel condemns as exploiters of the poor and the oppressed. They have
turned their backs on Christian radicals, who alone can infuse new life
into
the church. The institutions believe alliances with the powerful and the
wealthy will save them. They are wrong. Once they stand for nothing they
become nothing.
"There is a mourning among the declining members of mainline Christianity,"
Rob Stephens, the Union student, said in the interview. "I don't share
that.
The mainline churches, by which we mean white denominations, are
responsible
for many of our greatest social ills, including white supremacy and
patriarchy. If those parts of mainline Christianity need to die for renewal
to take place, we need to learn how to embrace that. There is no
resurrection without death."
http://www.truthdig.com/ http://www.truthdig.com/
The Suicide of the Liberal Church
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_suicide_of_the_liberal_church_201601
24/
Posted on Jan 24, 2016
By Chris Hedges
The chapel of The General Theological Seminary in New York City. The
seminary, founded in 1817, sold much of its property to developers in
recent
years. (Julie Jacobson / AP)
Paul Tillich wrote that all institutions, including the church, are
inherently demonic. Reinhold Niebuhr asserted that no institution could
ever
achieve the morality of the individual. Institutions, he warned, to extend
their lives when confronted with collapse, will swiftly betray the stances
that ostensibly define them. Only individual men and women have the
strength
to hold fast to virtue when faced with the threat of death. And decaying
institutions, including the church, when consumed by fear, swiftly push
those endowed with this moral courage and radicalism from their ranks,
rendering themselves obsolete.
The wisdom of Tillich and Niebuhr has been borne out in the precipitous
decline of the liberal church and the seminaries and divinity schools that
train religious scholars and clergy. Faced with shrinking or nonexistent
endowments, mounting debts, dwindling memberships, a lack of employment for
their graduates and growing irrelevancy in a society that has little use
for
tepid church piety and the smug arrogance that comes with it, these
institutions have fallen into physical and moral decay.
The number of adults in the mainline Protestant churches-Presbyterian,
Unitarian-Universalist, Lutheran, Methodist, Episcopalian,
Congregationalist-decreased from about 41 million in 2007 to 36 million in
2014, according to the Pew Research Center. And the average age of the
congregant is 52. The Catholic Church also is being decimated; its decline
has been exacerbated by its decades-long protection of sexual predators
within the priesthood and the Vatican's relentless campaign, especially
under John Paul II, to force out of the church priests, nuns and lay
leaders
who focused their ministries on the poor and the oppressed. The Catholic
Church, which has lost 3 million members over the last decade, has seen its
hold on the U.S. population fall to 21 percent from 24.
Mainline seminaries and divinity schools have been merging or closing, and
enrollment at such schools has declined by 24 percent in the last decade.
Andover-Newton, founded in 1807, recently shut down. Lutheran Theological
Seminary at Gettysburg, Pa., and Lutheran Theological Seminary at
Philadelphia plan to merge. Union Theological Seminary, where black
liberation, feminist, womanist and queer theologies have their roots,
appears to be on the verge of selling "air space" to a developer to
construct a luxury 35-to-40-story condominium building on its campus.
General Theological Seminary in New York City, a school founded in 1817,
has
sold much of its property to developers, and it ended tenure for its
faculty
after the professors went out on strike to demand the removal of Dean and
President Kurt Dunkle. Dunkle, who epitomizes the infusion of corporatism
into the church, worked for many years as a lawyer doing commercial
litigation before being ordained.
"What doomed General Seminary was not just financial mismanagement, but
unethical leadership," Rob Stephens, a third-year student for the ministry
at Union and part of a student movement fighting Union's building project,
said when I spoke with him by phone. "That is what made the faculty walk
out. The Union administration, board of trustees and all of us need to
learn
this lesson and put a halt to the project. The Union administration has
said
that Union, by building this luxury condominium, was being as bold as the
original founders. This is one thing I can agree on. The original founders
envisioned a place for privileged, white men. The original founders called
abolitionism 'fanaticism.' The founders' values won't get us through this
storm. Union is bigger than the administration and board. Union should be
for all God's people. If built, this luxury condominium would be a middle
finger to Harlem. It would be a middle finger to faith-based social
movements.
"This seminary has turned Black Lives Matter into a commodity," he went on.
"They sell this campus as being allied with Black Lives Matter and other
social justice movements. But if we are readers of the Bible, we know that
saying one thing and doing another leads to internal combustion.
Inconsistency of values and actions can only lead to failure. As a seminary
community, how can we have more faith in an unstable housing market than in
the Gospel? You can't reconcile luxury condominiums built by an anti-union
contractor and no affordable housing with the gospel of Jesus. This is
another example of mainline Christianity casting their lot with capitalism
instead of community. When will we learn?"
The self-identified religious institutions that thrive preach the perverted
"prosperity gospel," the message that magic Jesus will make you rich,
respected and powerful if you believe in him. Jesus, they claim, is an
American capitalist, bigot and ardent imperialist. These sects selectively
lift passages from the Bible to justify the unjustifiable, including
homophobia, war, racism against Muslims, and the death penalty. Yet there
are more students-2,067-at the evangelical Gordon-Conwell Theological
Seminary alone than at the divinity schools and seminaries of Yale,
Harvard,
Union, Vanderbilt and Chicago, whose combined enrollment is 1,537.
The doctrine these sects preach is Christian heresy. The Christian faith-as
in the 1930s under Germany's pro-Nazi Christian church-is being distorted
to
sanctify nationalism, unregulated capitalism and militarism. The mainstream
church, which refuses to denounce these heretics as heretics, a decision
made in the name of tolerance, tacitly gives these sects credibility and
squanders the prophetic voice of the church.
Kevin Kruse in his book "One Nation Under God: How Corporate America
Invented Christian America" details how industrialists in the 1930s and
1940s poured money and resources into an effort to silence the social
witness of the mainstream church, which was home to many radicals,
socialists and proponents of the New Deal. These corporatists promoted and
funded a brand of Christianity-which is today dominant-that conflates faith
with free enterprise and American exceptionalism. The rich are rich, this
creed goes, not because they are greedy or privileged, not because they use
their power to their own advantage, not because they oppress the poor and
the vulnerable, but because they are blessed. And if we have enough faith,
this heretical form of Christianity claims, God will bless the rest of us
too. It is an inversion of the central message of the Gospel. You don't
need
to spend three years at Harvard Divinity School as I did to figure that
out.
The liberal church committed suicide when it severed itself from
radicalism.
Radical Christians led the abolitionist movement, were active in the
Anti-Imperialist League, participated in the bloody labor wars, fought for
women's suffrage, formulated the Social Gospel-which included a huge effort
to carry out prison reform and provide education to prisoners-and were
engines in the civil rights and anti-war movements. Norman Thomas, a
longtime leader of the Socialist Party of America, was a Presbyterian
minister.
These radicals generally were not embraced by the church hierarchy, which
served as a bulwark of the establishment, but they kept the church vital
and
prophetic. They made it relevant and important to the oppressed, the poor
and to workingmen and -women. Radicals were and are its hope.
The loss of an array of prophetic voices on the national scene such as Phil
and Daniel Berrigan, William Stringfellow, Rabbi Abraham Heschel, Dorothy
Day and Martin Luther King Jr. left the liberal church as morally bankrupt
as the rest of the liberal class. James Baldwin, who grew up in the church
and was briefly a preacher, said he abandoned the pulpit to preach the
Gospel. The Gospel, he knew, was not heard most Sundays in Christian houses
of worship. And today with most ministers wary of offending their aging and
dwindling flocks-counted on to pay the clergy salary and the bills-this is
even truer than when Baldwin was writing.
The church is also a victim of the disintegration of the civic associations
that, as Alexis de Tocqueville observed, are vital to the maintenance of a
healthy democracy and the common good. Robert Putnam in his book "Bowling
Alone" chronicled the broad disengagement from political and public life.
He
lamented, correctly, the loss of this "social capital." Those who no longer
join parents' organizations, gardening and historical clubs or fraternal
orders, who do not show up at town hall or city council meetings, also no
longer attend church. There is little, given this cultural malaise-much of
it driven by the constant availability of entertainment through the
Internet
and electronic devices-that the church can do to blunt the public's retreat
from public space.
What remains of the church, if it is to survive as a social and cultural
force, will see clergy and congregants leave sanctuaries to work in
prisons,
schools, labor halls and homeless and women's shelters, form night
basketball leagues and participate in grass-roots movements such as the
anti-fracking struggle and the fight to raise the minimum wage. This shift
will make it hard to financially maintain the massive and largely empty
church edifices, and perhaps even the seminaries, but it will keep the
church real and alive. I had a dinner a few months ago with fellow teachers
in the prison where I work. We discovered, to our surprise, that every one
of us had seminary degrees.
William Stringfellow, who worked as a lawyer in Harlem in the 1950s and
1960s, in his book "My People Is the Enemy," wrote of the church:
The premise of most urban church work, it seems, is that in order for the
Church to minister among the poor, the church has to be rich, that is, to
have specially trained personnel, huge funds and many facilities, rummage
to
distribute, and a whole battery of social services. Just the opposite is
the
case. The Church must be free to be poor in order to minister among the
poor. The Church must trust the Gospel enough to come among the poor with
nothing to offer the poor except the Gospel, except the power to apprehend
and the courage to reveal the Word of God as it is already mediated in the
life of the poor. When the Church has the freedom itself to be poor among
the poor, it will know how to use what riches it has. When the Church has
that freedom, it will be a missionary people again in all the world.
Stringfellow repeatedly warned Christians, as well as Christian
institutions, not to allow the fear of death to diminish the power of
Christian witness. Faith becomes real on the edge of the abyss. "In the
face
of death," he wrote, "live humanly. In the middle of chaos, celebrate the
Word. Amidst Babel, speak the truth. Confront the noise and verbiage and
falsehood of death with the truth and potency and efficacy of the Word of
God."
During the rise of the American species of corporate fascism-what Sheldon
Wolin called "inverted totalitarianism"-the liberal church, like the rest
of
the liberal establishment, looked the other way while the poor and
workingmen and -women, especially those of color, were ruthlessly
disempowered and impoverished. The church and liberals were as silent about
the buildup of mass incarceration as they once were about lynching. The
mainline church refused to confront and denounce the destructive force of
corporate power. It placed its faith in institutions-such as the Democratic
Party-that had long ceased to function as mechanisms of reform.
The church, mirroring the liberal establishment, busied itself with
charity,
multiculturalism and gender-identity politics at the expense of justice,
especially racial and economic justice. It retreated into a narcissistic
"how-is-it-with-me" spirituality. Although the mainline church paid lip
service to diversity, it never welcomed significant numbers of people of
color or the marginalized into their sanctuaries. The Presbyterian Church,
for example, is 92 percent white. It pushed to the margins or sought to
discredit liberation theology, which called out the evils of unfettered
capitalism, white supremacy and imperialism. The retreat from radicalism-in
essence the abandonment of the vulnerable to the predatory forces of
corporate capitalism-created a spiritual void filled by protofascist
movements that have usurped Christian symbols and provided a species of
faith that is, at its core, a belief in magic. This Christian heresy is
currently on public display at Donald Trump and Ted Cruz political rallies.
The last scenes of this decline are being played out at schools such as
Union Theological Seminary in New York City. Tillich and Niebuhr taught at
Union. America's most important theologian, James Cone-who opposes the
condominium building project on the campus-teaches there.
The president of the seminary, Serene Jones, says that unless part of the
seminary's quadrangle is handed over to the developer, the seminary will
not
have the funds to survive (although she and her administration have refused
to make school finances public). If Jones gets her way, Union will become
part of the vast gentrification project being waged against the poor,
especially poor people of color, in Morningside Heights and West Harlem.
"With these development rights, we envision the creation of a beautiful,
slender building that is visually in keeping with the neighborhood and that
is set on the northeast end of the quad," Jones wrote in an open letter to
the Union community last December. "We want our newest building to feel
like
it has always been part of the current campus. We chose this location after
thorough analyses showed that this was the best, and only, suitable site."
Union is working with the developer L+M Development Partners on
construction
plans. The firm has a history of hiring shady subcontractors-including MC&O
Construction (found guilty of stealing $830,000 in 2013 from workers on a
project of NYSAFAH contractor Procida Realty & Construction), RNC
Industries
LLC of Holtsville, N.Y. (repeatedly cited by the Occupational Safety and
Health Administration for unsafe working conditions that have led to
fatalities), and Ro-Sal Plumbing (which settled, for a class-action
complaint filed by workers over unpaid wages).
It is bad enough that Union would collaborate with companies charged with
safety violations, workers' compensation fraud and wage theft, but it is
also abetting the driving of poor families, many of them of color, from
their homes throughout the city. Apartment rents have risen in New York by
75 percent since 2000. The poor are being pushed out of neighborhoods
around
Union, in some cases into homeless shelters and the streets.
Students, and a few of Union's faculty members, have risen up in
opposition.
They charge, in the words of first-year student Yazmine Nichols, whom I
interviewed by phone, that "there is a lack of honesty and transparency on
the part of the administration."
"No one knows," she told me, "how far along the plans are, whether there
will be affordable housing units. All these things are question marks.
"It is hard to get the school galvanized around something they [the
students
and faculty] have no information about," she added. "And this is part of
the
administration's plan-divide and conquer by not providing information.
People are left guessing and speculating.
"We need to ask ourselves what it means to exist as a theological
institution," Nichols continued. "Are we truly existing if we do not hold
onto the core values the institution is predicated on? This is a question
about what it means to be a seminary geared to social justice. What does it
mean when homeless people are sleeping outside seminary dormitories? With
growing income inequality and a shrinking middle class, we must begin
asking
the question, 'Affordable for whom?' What we mean by 'affordability' is
that
housing ought to be affordable for people of color who fall at or below the
NYC poverty line. What does it mean to worship God and theologize in a
world
where people are suffering? What does it mean for an institution to thrive
in the presence of that suffering? What is the purpose of Union's
existence?
For Union to exist with a luxury condominium is for Union not to exist at
all, at least not the Union I applied to. Union may continue to exist
physically, but the soul of Union will be gone."
Fear has driven church and seminary leaders into the hands of those the
Gospel condemns as exploiters of the poor and the oppressed. They have
turned their backs on Christian radicals, who alone can infuse new life
into
the church. The institutions believe alliances with the powerful and the
wealthy will save them. They are wrong. Once they stand for nothing they
become nothing.
"There is a mourning among the declining members of mainline Christianity,"
Rob Stephens, the Union student, said in the interview. "I don't share
that.
The mainline churches, by which we mean white denominations, are
responsible
for many of our greatest social ills, including white supremacy and
patriarchy. If those parts of mainline Christianity need to die for renewal
to take place, we need to learn how to embrace that. There is no
resurrection without death."
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