Ask Prof Wolff: Religion and Capitalism A Patron of Democracy at Work asks: .In his book .One Nation Under God: How Corporate American Invented Christian America, ...
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Readings for the 26th Sunday in Ordinary Time: AM 6: 1A, 4-7; PS 146: 7-10; I TM 6: 11-16; LK 16: 19-31
This week's liturgical readings couldn't be more relevant to the world that's unfolding before our eyes. It's a world where one person dies of hunger every four seconds, while over 215,000 individuals worldwide are now worth more than $50 million.
Ours is also a world where 60% of Republicans find themselves wishing that the United States would officially be declared a Christian nation.
But what would happen if people like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Ron DeSantis got their wish? What if America were truly Christian?
According to today's readings, it's not what Republicans think.
If "America" truly became Christian, we'd have to address the issue of hunger on the one hand and extreme wealth on the other. We'd have to deal with the fact (as Richard Wolff argues in the video above) that the tradition in question favors socialism rather than capitalism. We'd be forced to recognize the truth of liberation theology.
Let me show you what I mean by reminding you about liberation theology and then by showing how today's readings represent a virtual catechism on the movement as the Judeo-Christian tradition's most authentic interpretation -- its enfant terrible so challenging that even popes feared its world changing potential.
Liberation Theology
Well, you might ask, what is liberation theology?
To answer that question fully, please look at my blog entries under the "liberation theology" button. I've written a series on the question. In my blogs, you'll find that I always define it in a single sentence. Liberation theology is reflection on the following of Christ from the viewpoint of the world's poor and oppressed. That's the class of people to which Jesus himself belonged. They constituted the majority of his first followers.
When read from their standpoint, accounts of Jesus' words and deeds - the entire Bible for that matter - take on depths of meaning and relevance to our contemporary world that are otherwise inaccessible to people like us who live in the heart of the wealthy world.
From the viewpoint of the poor, God passes from being a neutral observer of earth's injustices to an active participant with the poor as they struggle for justice here on earth. Jesus becomes the personification of that divine commitment to the oppressed. After all, he was poor and oppressed himself. The Roman Empire and its Temple priest collaborators saw to that.
Going back to the Jewish Testament, the Exodus (Yahweh's liberation of slaves from Egypt) was God's original and paradigmatic revelation. The whole tradition began there, not in the Garden of Eden.
Moreover, the Jewish prophetic tradition emphasized what we now call "social justice." Even more, Yeshua of Nazareth appeared in the prophetic tradition, not as a priest or king. Jesus directed his "ministry" to the poor and outcasts. The Gospel of Luke (4: 18-19) has Jesus describing his program in the following words:
"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor."
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