Social Justice

Review: Which Side Are You On

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Which Side Are You On?, Elaine Harger. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016.

Summary: An account of seven debates in the American Library Association Council over matters of social responsibility and how this body exerts its influence in broader social debates.

Most of us have the impressions of libraries as sedate places with librarians who are helpful, interested in serving the reading and information needs of patrons, and knowledgeable about the resources they have at hand. The most political act of most librarians seems to be supporting “Banned Books Months,” featuring attempts to remove books from circulation that patrons or others may deem objectionable.

This last is actually the tip of the iceberg according to Elaine Harger, who has served as a Councilor-at-Large within the American Library Association (ALA) and on the Social Responsibilities Round Table. In this book, she recounts what appear to have been lively and contested debates around seven issues that suggest a far from sedate, sometimes contentious, and sometimes very politically motivated association. In the course of these debates she explores some challenging issues such as the conflicts between intellectual freedom, censorship, and social justice; the tension between patron privacy and protection from surveillance and national security; relating to corporate partners whose products or views conflict with the social consciousness of librarians; and even the difference between stated views around climate change and climate unfriendly practices.

The first debate concerns the re-issuance of a 1975 film called The Speaker concerning the controversial race and gene theory ideas of William Shockley. Originally an ALA expose’, over the years it was deemed moral offensive to minority communities and its reissuance and presence on YouTube raised the ire of many, while receiving calls of intellectual freedom from others.

The second concerns the banning of anti-apartheid books in South Africa and how the ALA along with other library groups would advocate against this practice and boycott South African vendors. The third confronts a somewhat similar issue in Israeli and Occupied Territories and the censorship of materials deemed a threat to the State of Israel. Here interests favoring Israel and those opposing censorship clashed seriously.

The fourth and fifth debates concerned corporate partners. In the fourth, the concern was the sponsorship of McDonald’s of children’s reading programs, with its corporate logos prominent on all the materials. Can an organization concerned with the deleterious effects of the fast food sold on the McDonald’s menu work with such a corporate partner. This is even more tendentious with the Boy Scouts, an organization who had long worked in promoting reading with Scouts but whose positions around excluding homosexual boys and adult leaders from participation made it unsupportable.

The sixth discussion turns on privacy concerns, particularly in the face of Edward Snowden’s release through Wikileaks of massive amounts of documentation showing the extent of government electronic surveillance intrusion into all of our lives. For librarians concerned with patron privacy (that their searches, borrowed materials records, and other electronic activity with the library remain private), this was an issue that struck close to home. Yet a resolution to not only decry this intrusion upon Fourth Amendment rights but also to support whistleblowers like Snowden, although passed, was pulled for a tamer substitute because of pressures from the ALA’s Washington office.

The final debate, more a personal cry of the heart of the author concerns the gap between statements of concern around climate change and activities from cross-country travel to uses of resources and energy that conflict with the avowed seriousness of concern for climate change. One of the most interesting parts of this chapter was the author’s personal testimony and example that including resigning her Councilor position and restricting her airline travel because of her concerns.

The chapters give detailed accounts of these debates including transcripts of some discussions and various parliamentary maneuvers. I suspect that this may be of greatest interest to “library insiders” but I found several things fascinating:

  1. I’m glad librarians are concerned and speaking out about Fourth Amendment intrusions upon privacy. I wonder if librarians might also exercise a greater role in educating patrons on how to protect personal information from identity theft and from parties that might use personal information in other ways to their disadvantage.
  2. It is intriguing that librarians, as curators of information, may privilege certain forms of information to the exclusion of others. Even if there is intellectual freedom, if socially unacceptable views are not accessible, this can amount to a subtle form of censorship. In particular, many of our current social debates are framed in a very binary fashion, in which a person who does not fully embrace the socially privileged view is pigeonholed with the benighted “others”. Thoughtful dissenters from social orthodoxy are easily lumped in with outright bigots. My question is, will librarians allow a civil and pluralistic public square of ideas, even conflicting ideas, to flourish?
  3. It was striking to me that this association is hardly immune to political pressures from right or left. Its effectiveness would seem to rest in its skill to adequately represent its constituents, be transparent in its processes, and courageous when it takes positions and encounters opposition.
  4. The author’s final chapter underscores a great challenge any of us working in the knowledge world face. We can talk a better game than we live. Praxis is just as important as the positions we take.

I do think the title of this work is interesting. “Which side are you on?” conjures up a vision of those who are right, those who are wrong. Yet one wonders if it is really that simple in the library or the real world. It also suggests a form of conflict resolution with winners and losers. As I mention above, we love to create binaries, excluding the possibilities of third options, which may be possible at least in some cases. There certainly are some evils simply to be resisted, but not all things are like that in society. Often, better resolutions come as we understand situations better and also have a better sense of the range of options available. Librarians, it seems to me have a unique access to such information, that suggests the potential that they may contribute uniquely and significantly to conflict resolution where there are people of good will.

“Which side are you on?” may accurately reflect the social responsibility debates of the last twenty-five years in library circles. Who will be the people in the library world and elsewhere who frame a different “come together” conversation? I hope I will see that book someday.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher via LibraryThing. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: Rediscovering an Evangelical Heritage

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Rediscovering an Evangelical Heritage, 2nd edition, Donald W. Dayton with Douglas M. Strong. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2014.

Summary: An updated edition of a study of the pre-Civil War nineteenth century roots of evangelicalism in the United States and the combination of piety, preaching, and social reform characteristic of this movement in this period.

In the mid 1970’s, Donald Dayton, a church historian wrote a series of articles for The Post-American (now Sojourners) that was collected into the first edition of this work. In it, Dayton traced for a rising generation of socially-conscious boomer evangelicals (of whom I was a part) the reform, social justice tradition within American evangelicalism, going back to its nineteenth century pre-Civil War roots. That edition, called Discovering an Evangelical Heritage gave a generation of us the basis for contending that it was possible to care both about the eternal destiny of people and about social injustices within our society and in our international relations, that both were part of Christian faithfulness for people who took their Bibles and the kingdom that Jesus announced seriously. In 1988, the first edition was re-printed with new preface by Dayton. This new, second edition includes updated supplemental material by Douglas M. Strong as well as a new introduction and conclusion written by Strong. What we have is not only Dayton’s original work, but a sense of the trajectory of evangelicalism in the forty years since, including the rise of the Religious Right, and more recent Millennial efforts to recover this heritage.

Dayton began this work with a profile of Jonathan Blanchard, first president of Wheaton College. He came to Wheaton from pastoring a black Presbyterian church in Cincinnati, continued his anti-slavery work as president of Knox College in Illinois before going to Wheaton, founded by abolitionist Wesleyan Methodists, with a commitment to carrying on this reform tradition. Another, whose career trajectory was similar was Charles Grandison Finney, known not only for his revivalist preaching but also for his fervent abolitionism and his commitment to permit women to pray and speak. He carried these commitments into his presidency of Oberlin College, which Dayton traces in a subsequent chapter, particularly as the abolitionist wing of Lane Theological Seminary departed Cincinnati for Oberlin, forming a college that admitted blacks and women, preparing both for ministry and other professions. Later, Dayton recounts the resistance and civil disobedience to Fugitive Slave laws, culminating in the Wellington case, where fugitive slave John Price is rescued from custody in nearby Wellington.

Dayton also profiles Theodore Weld, converted under Finney and serving as an assistant to him. Instead of joining him at Oberlin, he heads up the American Anti-Slavery Society, using techniques he learned in Finney’s revivals to mobilize commitment to abolition. Eventually he marries fellow abolitionist Angelina Grimke, in what was clearly an egalitarian marriage, in which Weld renounced his “right” to her person and property. Dayton profiles the Tappan Brothers, wealthy New York businessmen who used their resource to fund anti-slavery efforts, including the work of Finney and Weld. At one point, Arthur Tappan pledged nearly all his annual income of $100,000 to Oberlin College (there was a Tappan Hall, eventually torn down to be replaced by Tappan Square, across the street from Finney Chapel).

The remainder of the book explores the evangelical roots of feminism, the development of ministries among the poor, including the work of the Salvation Army, and what happened to evangelicalism over the next century. One of the most fascinating trends is the tension between the tradition represented by Finney and the tradition represented by the Princeton Theologians. One emphasized experience and practice, the other theological orthodoxy. It seems these two have been in a kind of “tug of war” throughout our nation’s history. In the post-Civil War period, the focus turned more to matters of personal morality, and the resistance to theological liberalism and Darwinist science, leading to a retreat into fundamentalism, from which the movement began to emerge only in the post-World War Two period, the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam war era, as a rising evangelicalism sought resources to address these issues of the day.

Strong traces the movement from 1976 and the election of Jimmy Carter, an avowed evangelical, down to the present. The rise of the Religious Right, and the strategy of Republicans to regain the white South led to political re-alignments and a re-focused agenda for many evangelicals that has continued to this day, along with the rise of a complementarian neo-Calvinism bent on defining orthodoxy for all evangelical scholarship. Strong traces the rise of Millennials, disenchanted with the polarized politics, and concerned with a new set of social justice issues and racial reconciliation as a counter-movement to these trends.

I had a lot of mixed feelings reading this book. There is a certain amount of pride that much of this evangelical history runs through my home state, from Cincinnati to Oberlin. Yet I feel a great sadness that by and large, we are not cognizant in the evangelical community in my state of that history or how we might carry it on. One striking exception has been a continuing effort to fight human trafficking, which harks back to the Underground Railroad, a prominent part of Ohio history.

I would like to be as sanguine as Strong about the rising generation. I can’t help but think about how the movement of the 1970’s by and large was co-opted by affluence and became part of a reactionary establishment. For most, there was neither a grounding theological vision, nor an orthopraxy of pursuing both piety and justice embedded in our lives and church communities. We grew intellectually lazy and comfortable. I hope the rising generation can indeed recover this great tradition of both vigorous piety and reform. My own hunch is that if it is to happen (and Strong alludes to this), it will arise not out of white evangelicalism, which I think is too far gone in its cultural and political captivity, but out of minority and immigrant communities, and multi-cultural church communities where whites may be in the minority. That may be a good thing, both for the American church, and the country that is its earthly home.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher via Netgalley. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

 

Review: Christians and the Common Good

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Christians and the Common GoodChristians and the Common Good, Charles E. Gutenson. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2011.

Summary: Explores what the teaching of scripture says about God’s intentions for how we live together and the implications of this for public policy.

The title of this book may be perplexing to some for different reasons. For some, their experience is one of Christians seeking their own good, or simply their own idea of the good, which smacks of privilege. For others, the perplexing thing may be the idea of a “common good”. In our current climate of polarized, indeed Balkanized politics, it seems that few people are talking about a “common good”–policies and community practices where both responsibility and benefit are shared by all constituents to a significant degree.

Charles Gutenson, in a book written during the debates on the Affordable Care Act proposes an approach by which Christians may advance proposals informed by their faith that genuinely advance the common good, not just their own. He argues that one gets there by reading the whole Bible to discover God’s intentions for how a people are to live together, not simply the few “government passages” (Romans 13 and Luke 20 in particular) that Christians often reference as the beginning and end of their political philosophy. He contends that this teaching is not to be woodenly applied in a context very different from the biblical one. And he proposes that the life and ministry of Jesus is the definitive expression of how the Triune God would have us live in imitation of him.

He follows these foundational claims with an extensive survey of scriptures from both the Old and New Testament concerning everything from Jubilee and gleaning laws to the continued protection of widows and orphans in the life of the church. A basic thread is a loving concern for the needy among us. It seemed to me that 2 Corinthians 8:13-15 was a particular “control text” for the approach he advocates:

“Our desire is not that others might be relieved while you are hard pressed, but that there might be equality. At the present time your plenty will supply what they need, so that in turn their plenty will supply what you need. The goal is equality, as it is written: ‘The one who gathered much did not have too much, and the one who gathered little did not have too little.’ ” (NIV)

He contends that it is not enough that the church act along these lines but that this is also a good principle to inform public policy. Often, he argues, private means are simply not sufficient to address the scope of public need, as important as private efforts are.

With this in mind, he thinks the following policies are in line with a biblically-informed concern for the common good: safety nets like unemployment, certain forms of welfare and Medicaid, a progressive (rather than regressive) tax structure, an honest reckoning with the issues of race and protections from racial discrimination, Social Security and Medicare safeguards to care for our elderly, minimum wages that provide a living wage, or absent that, tax breaks that recognize the benefits others enjoy by keeping wages low, earned income credits, access to health care, estate and inheritance taxes, bankruptcy laws, anti-monopoly laws, efforts to strengthen families, and addressing global poverty.

Clearly, Gutenson advocates what would be a “left of center” social policy and he admits as much. He takes a muted approach to the “culture war” issues of homosexuality and abortion. The strength of his case is the argument that a flourishing society seeks the flourishing of all, and not just some, of its people. It looks out not only for one’s own interests but also the interests of others (Philippians 2:4). It recognizes the role that the public power of government may play when the private power of some interests gains benefits at the expense of others, especially those on the margins.

What troubles me is that while the author welcomes more conservative voices and recognizes that solutions to our pressing social problems will require a degree of collaboration absent at present, he is decidedly silent on some issues that I think require attention, such as the recognition of the deep injustice we commit against our children when we consistently ask the government to spend more for the services we want than we are willing to pay, leaving the debts to those who come after us. Also, redistribution of resources via taxation can help or hurt the poor. Why not for example provide tax incentives to companies who offer living rather than minimum wages? I’m troubled that some of these proposals go beyond emergency relief (such as unemployment benefits) to ongoing relief rather than economic opportunity fueled by economic development.

Nor does he say anything about fundamental electoral reform including re-districting reform and campaign finance reform. As it stands now, most elected officials in state and federal government do not have to be concerned about “the common good” because of the way their districts are drawn. And this further marginalizes people by race and economic status. The rich are basically able to buy their office, or that of those who protect their interests.

Where Gutenson’s voice is welcome is in its clarion call for Christians to pursue the common good, and to wrestle with the “whole counsel of God” on these matters to gain God’s heart for the common, and not just our own good. This can be helpful for thoughtful Christians wrestling with the role of Christians in public life, who want to go beyond proof texts and political pundits to constructive engagement.

 

Review: Faith and Fragmentation

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Faith and Fragmentation
Faith and Fragmentation by J. Philip Wogaman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

J. Philip Wogaman has served as a pastor to Presidents and so I was intrigued to see how he would handle the project of re-framing the Christian faith in a post-colonial age of rapid scientific and technological advance, an age of intellectual and religious pluralism. The book itself is a reprint of a book originally published in the 1980s. Most of the trends he notes have only continued to unfold so there is much of current relevance in what he writes.

He begins with an image of a broken, fragmented cup related by Ruth Benedict in Patterns of Culture, an image shared of the shattering of the cultural and worldview framework of the Digger Indians in California. Wogaman questions whether the same thing has happened with Christianity as it has been understood, and whether there are resources within the faith that provide an unfragmented cup, one that can hold water, or the new wine of new life.

I found his analysis of traps avoided by early Christianity (being held captive to a Jewish form of Christianity, anti-intellectualism, antimaterial spritualism, and sectarian aloofness to secular power) spot on. Likewise, his analysis of the “fragments” of a broken faith we are tempted to cling to was equally telling–nostalgia, religious feeling, liturgical formalism, institutional activism, fundamentalism, nationalism, rationalism and more.

Equally, I was impressed with the scope of issues he explores–the question of human knowledge, cosmology and science, the self, our relation to society and response to various forms of injustice, and missions in a post-colonial era. I will give Wogaman credit for not retreating to a privatized, interior faith that says little or nothing about these challenges.

Where I found Wogaman more problematic was in his core theology. Most critically, I find Wogaman denying the possibility of the miraculous and the bodily resurrection of Christ. For him, the incarnation is simply an expression of the transcendent love of God for all humanity. What this all seems to boil down to is a “moral influence” idea of the work of Christ. Wogaman’s vision is for a church that responds to this work as a “community of hopeful love”. Certainly I would affirm that love is the mark of disciples in Christian community and that we love because God first loved us.

Yet in the end, what Wogaman seems to advocate is a Christianity without power, and really without hope beyond this life. In his denial of the transformative power of the Risen Christ working through the Holy Spirit to work inner transformation, I find that all he is proposing is a form of moralism motivated by some vague gratitude toward God. In the end, it seems to me that Wogaman himself is offering us only fragments of what is a far more robust faith, fragments that cannot hold water, nor carry the new wine of new life.

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