Rudy linked to an opinion by Jonah Goldberg on National Review Online, “The Spoiled Children of Capitalism.” “Leaving religion out of it, no idea has given more to humanity,” than capitalism, argues Goldberg. It has generated more wealth for more people than any economic system prior to it or since its inception and has given rise to innovations in health and sanitation that benefit all of humanity. Capitalism does produce goods and material wealth, but these are fringe benefits, Goldberg says. The real wealth that nations hold is more intangible, “the stuff in our heads, our hearts, and our books,” which “accounts for 82 percent of [the U. S.’] wealth.” Goldberg thus takes issue with the critics within capitalism that arise whenever markets take a downturn. He calls them the spoiled children of capitalism. These voices levy complaints that capitalism focuses too much on the individual and not on the group. Goldberg counters by naming some of the failures of socialism—inefficiency and infighting—and saying overall, capitalism has done more for humanity than the economic systems that state their primary goal is for developing community.

I think the opinion offers a helpful defense of capitalism. I appreciate his argument that a nation’s wealth is not only in terms of material goods. If the focus is merely on building more factories that produce products we want to consume, well then we don’t necessarily need a market economy to bring that about. I wish, however, Goldberg would give more attention to critics of capitalism that claim it has an atomizing effect on societies. Many of these concerns do not come from spoiled brats, but from considerate minds who have real questions about how capitalism shapes “the stuff in our heads, our hearts, and our books.” There is a feedback loop between our character and the systems we create. Yes, our values shape the market; we would do well to remember that the market returns the favor.

In a recent interview on the radio show, Speaking of Faith: The Business of Doing Good, Jonathan Greenblatt, co-founder of Ethos Water, discusses shifting capitalism away from the theories of economist and Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman, which have dominated capitalistic thought for the past fifty years. According to the program, Friedman was a strong proponent of the idea that the private sector can do a much better job than government at solving problems. (We certainly have seen great innovations come from the private sector to alleviate numerous problems around the world. Greenblatt agrees that governmental aid cannot be the only model for addressing global poverty. He sees much room and hope for an amalgamation of philanthropy, business innovation, and aid.) Greenblatt goes on to say, however, that Friedman saw, “that the purpose of a corporation is to generate profit for its shareholders.” Friedman argued, “the world runs on individuals pursuing their separate interests.” If that is not the definition of atomization, I don’t know what is, and I’m concerned that Friedman’s theories have dominated capitalistic thinking for so long.

How is the Christian to look at the data before us? In Philippians 2.4, Paul writes, “Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.” Friedman likely describes our natural instinct, that is, it does not take training to be selfish. Paul, on the other hand, gives us a vision of the world how God wants it and that vision demands character formation. Are Christianity and capitalism diametrically opposed to each other? I do not think so, but I may not say the same of Christianity and Friedmanism. Capitalism, if rightly focused on God and God’s purposes, can likely be a force of community, or social capital. While Greenblatt does not discuss any sort of a Christian basis for his understanding of economics, he does argue that our values should shape how markets and business operate. His vision is based in what he calls “pragmatic idealism.” With regard to Friedman’s understanding of shareholders and their inherent selfishness, Greenblatt says:

The challenge or the opportunity of today is that shareholders’ interests have changed, and they no longer think only about the bottom line. They realize that the bottom line needs to be considered on a more contextual basis. And so businesses that win in the marketplace will be those that deliver great products and services, make no mistake. They have to achieve profits and succeed in their categories, but at the same time you can drive social good in a way that creates a tighter, richer, and more enduring value proposition for everyone.

Goldberg is right to defend capitalism against those who see it as a failed system—I would not want to give up many of the innovations that have arisen because of it. Those that thoughtfully criticize capitalism for exploiting our selfish nature also have a legitimate argument. The criticisms of capitalism as it is now may be a matter of degree rather than kind. I would be curious to hear both Goldberg and capitalism’s critics respond to Greenblatt’s socially responsible business models and theories.

I plan on consulting FactCheck.org several times through the next few months. They’ve already got two corrections for the recent back and forth advertisements from the McCain and Obama campaigns.

Obama’s Celebrity Cred: A new McCain ad calls Obama a celebrity (true) who says he’ll raise taxes on electricity (false).

Obama’s Overstatement: An Obama ad says McCain’s campaign got $2 million from “Big Oil.” The total is actually $1.3 million.

On July 3, 2008, the Fresno Bee ran an article about kids of different faiths using their time and money to help others. The story, “Good Guys,” by Ron Orozco highlights, amongst other kids, my nephew Joshua.

They are doing a lot of good things for others, driven by loved ones setting good examples—and by their faith.

Joshua, Shriya, Patrick, Alexandra and Faisal come from homes practicing Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism or Islam. And despite other differences, the world’s religions share common teachings on caring for and helping others, particularly the disadvantaged….

Joshua Watson, 5, earns quarters for feeding the family’s dogs, Leia and Lucy, and the cat, Mazie, and for helping in grandmother Pam Watson’s tomato garden at their Clovis home. But he never spends anything.

“He’s a good little boy,” Watson says.

Instead, he puts the quarters in paper rolls and donates them every Sunday at Quail Lake Community Church in Clovis, an evangelical congregation where he and his grandmother worship.

The quarters always go to Littlest Angels, a ministry that collects or buys new clothing, caps, booties, blankets and accessories for newborns who might not otherwise receive them. Joshua will enter kindergarten at Quail Lake Elementary School in August.

“He’s thinking outside of the box so early,” says Kim Espinosa, the church’s Littlest Angels coordinator. “He can become a warrior for God.”

There are a couple of reasons motivating Joshua. His grandmother saves money and gives it at church. He also listens to church members attending a weekly Bible study in their home and talking about the New Testament book of James 2, which is about faith and deeds.

Joshua also is aware of a family tragedy. His mother lost a baby girl in the seventh month of pregnancy. Pam Watson says: “He talks a lot about having a sister, Emily, in heaven.”

This story reminds me of the work Interfaith Youth Core does. Most religions have service for others at the core of their ethical practices. IFYC asks can greater religious cooperation occur around that shared value of service? Can we learn more about our faith and the faiths of others as we serve people who need help? The kids in Orozco’s story aren’t in discussion groups together, but I hope that this early service shapes them profoundly and creates an appreciation that other religions also value service. I hope that my nephew doesn’t just learn that Christians are called to help others, but that other religions call their members to service, and that he can learn to work alongside those religions in helping newborns, the sick, the hungry, and creation.

It certainly took me a long time, but I finally finished reading Jeffrey Stout’s political, theological, and philosophical tome, Democracy and Tradition. In the work, Stout sets out to defend a pragmatic approach to building a democratic society that takes seriously each citizen’s right to reach decisions via whatever means or commitments they deem important as well as all citizens’ responsibility to offer reasons to others for their conclusions. Democracy happens in the confluence of peoples’ beliefs and reason-giving. For Stout, democratic pragmatism is not merely a label that best describes how we interact with people who hold different ideals and beliefs than us, but it is a tradition in and of itself that deserves thought, defense, and promotion. America is in danger, he warns us, if the citizens of the United States do not take seriously the fact that we are all in this thing called democracy together. Stout, a self-labeled atheist, shows great appreciation for religions and religious people and articulately defends their right to use religious reasoning to shape their beliefs and ethics. (I reflected on some of the book earlier here.)

Stout critically engages liberal secularists like John Rawls on the one hand and the New Traditionalists within Christianity like Stanley Hauerwas and Alistair MacIntyre on the other as holding positions that do not help democracy. Though his two main interlocutors see each other as opposites, Stout points out that they actually share very similar views of what democracy actually is. His main argument against the liberal secularists is that we cannot guard the public square with rigid demands of what counts as reasonable data for democratic decision-making. The social contract theory of Rawls does not accurately describe how democracy has functioned, nor does it offer a hopeful vision for a pluralistic society in that it seeks to keep religious reasoning either out of the discussion altogether, or to be seen as weaker evidence. For those who say religion should not be involved in democratic reasoning, Stout not only says that ideal is unrealistic given the passion people have for their religions—how does one cast aside their deepest commitments that shape their ethics and values?—but he also says it is inherently undemocratic to do so. American democracy has benefited largely from religious reasoning—he cites the abolitionist sermons of the 19th century, Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address, and Martin Luther King’s speeches and sermons as high points in both religious and democratic thinking in America.

As seen above, Stout agrees with many of the New Traditionalists’ critiques of the social contract theory. He thinks, however, that the New Traditionalists have bought the line that this theory encapsulates modernity, pluaralism, secularism, and democracy. The New Traditionalists see democracy as a child of modernity that emphasized the individual over and often against community. They do not see how this system can engender virtues or community and thus it can hardly be described as a tradition in a classical sense. By its nature, democracy leads us towards an atomized society, they argue. They wonder if it is in their tradition’s (i.e., Christianity’s) best interest to continue to participate in democracy given the negative affects that system has had on their community (i.e., the Church). Stout pushes back against the New Traditionalists by saying democracy, which for better or worse, is our society’s system of organization, is not made better when groups of its citizens, whether they are Christians or Black Nationalists, decide to remove themselves from it. Nor are those other traditions improved by interacting only with others in their enclave. Again, he cites the religious reasoning of Lincoln, King, and the abolitionists to show religion’s positive impact on democratic thinking.

As I was eating lunch I saw the headline that Tim Russert died today of a heart attack. My prayers go to his family. In recent years Carey and I have become a huge fan of Russert’s work on Meet the Press. I appreciate how he pushed politicians and officials as well as his contagious love for the political game. He will be missed.

“An Evangelical Manifesto: A Declaration of Evangelical Identity and Public Commitment,” is up on the interwebs. I’ve yet to read it, but really want to since the issue—faith and politics—is right up my alley. I hope to get to it and post on it soon.

Rosa Brooks, writing in today’s Los Angeles Times offers a reasonable assessment of what to do with Jeremiah Wright, his claims, and the larger issues he has unearthed.

With multiple televised performances, Wright has now definitively proved he shares that most quintessential of all American traits: a profound desire to hog the airwaves and proclaim, “It’s all about me.” Next stop: “American Idol”!...

With a campaign message emphasizing unity and hope, the last thing Obama needs is his former pastor running around espousing views most other Americans find offensive and deluded, such as the conviction that the U.S. government started the HIV/AIDS epidemic, or the suggestion that U.S. foreign policy is little different from terrorism….

Something about our collective willingness to throw Wright under the nearest subway train strikes me as a bit too easy….

Let’s turn to Wright, the man with all the answers. Here’s what he said this week: “Based on the Tuskegee experiment and … what has happened to Africans in this country, I believe our government is capable of doing anything.”

That’s not a completely unreasonable perspective. The Tuskegee experiment was a 40-year U.S. Public Health Service study on the effects of untreated syphilis. Who were the lucky human guinea pigs who got to experience untreated syphilis? Poor and mostly illiterate black sharecroppers in Alabama, that’s who. They were falsely informed that they had “bad blood,” not syphilis, and denied access to the necessary medicine. The study was terminated only in 1972, when an appalled researcher leaked reports to the media.

That could make you a little paranoid. And it’s not a form of paranoia Americans can afford to scoff at. As the 2005 Rand study concludes, African American distrust of the healthcare system—stemming from “well-documented cases of racial discrimination that led to substandard healthcare for African Americans”—may be “one factor contributing to the AIDS epidemic.”

In other words, if we want to score political points, we can dismiss AIDS conspiracy theories as crazy. But if we’re actually interested in ending the AIDS epidemic, we need to understand how rational people can end up believing such theories so we can persuade them to change their minds and their behavior. The same goes for most of Wright’s other seemingly far-fetched assertions….

[E]ven if it makes us queasy, we should take his theories about the world seriously enough to refute them, carefully and thoughtfully. If we truly want to move beyond the politics of division, we can’t afford to do anything less.

This past Friday I watched Bill Moyers’ interview with Rev. Jeremiah Wright on Bill Moyers Journal. I thought Moyers did a more than satisfactory job in taking an appreciative approach to this Chicago clergyman whose heated comments about the United States have become quite controversial in the past few months because he was the pastor of Senator Barak Obama for twenty years. (This video is a fair example of the coverage on Wright.) Moyers let Wright locate himself theologically and explain his positions. There were times I wished Moyers would have pushed harder, but I find it is generally easier to understand someone if you do not take an antagonistic approach. The interview gave a fuller picture of Wright and his ministry. When I watched the interview, I found myself inspired by his discussion of the community development work his church has undertaken.

Bill Moyers Journal also showed longer sections of the sermons that have been most played. Wright has taken a lot of heat for his sermon in which he proclaims, “Not God bless America; God damn America!” In the larger context, we see that Wright argues that we should not put our faith in any government, but in God. “Where governments lie, God does not lie. Where governments change, God does not change… Governments fail. The government in this text comprised of Caesar, Cornelius, Pontius Pilate—the Roman government failed. ” The danger, Wright sees, is that in the Bible God does not favor nations who do not do God’s will. God does bring curse, condemnation, and chastisement, even to God’s promised people. Wright offers a litany of powerful empires and governments that ultimately failed and therefore calls his congregation to trust in God, not in the government. As he tells Moyers in the interview:

If you look at the damning, condemning, if you look at Deuteronomy, it talks about blessings and curses, how God doesn’t bless everything. God does not bless gang-bangers. God does not bless dope dealers. God does not bless young thugs that hit old women upside the head and snatch their purse. God does not bless that. God does not bless the killing of babies. God does not bless the killing of enemies.

As I listened to Wright, I could sense that he falls well within the tradition of Black Liberation Theology, especially the theology James H. Cone. There are things I agree with and disagree with that school of theology. While I do not follow all of that school’s conclusions, I am challenged by it and I do think it stands firmly within orthodox Christianity. I think Wright clearly articulated in the interview with Moyers that Black Liberation Theology does not say Christianity is only for African-Americans or Africans—it says that people of African heritage do not have to give up that heritage to be Christian. It challenges my views because when I have read Cone, I wonder how can I relate to this faith as a white person? Where is the Christ that can be universally accepted? Black Liberation Theology, like all Liberation Theology, accurately argues, in my opinion, that there isn’t a “universal Christ” understood apart from our backgrounds. We all come to Christ in a specific context and those contexts have inherent strengths and weaknesses.

Liberation Theologies make the grand claim that God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and the Bible are radically and exclusively for the oppressed. While one may argue against the claim that Bible is exclusively for the oppressed, Wright articulately argued that the Bible was written by oppressed peoples. The Bible was written by Israel and the Church. The Egyptians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Persians, Selucids, Greeks, and Romans did not write the Bible. Israel and the Church wrote the Bible in the midst of and in response to invasion, captivity, diaspora, and simply dwelling in the midst of foreign superpowers. How does this fact challenge our reading of the texts, especially when America is the superpower?

That the media does not understand the nuance of Black Liberation Theology does not surprise me—I’m not sure I understand it completely either. As Wright says, he has different responsibilities as a pastor than Obama does as a politician. Some have jumped on Wright’s response to Moyers’ question regarding Obama distinguishing himself from Wright in his Philadelphia speech on race. Wright said to Moyers, “And so here at a political event, he goes out as a politician and says what he has to say as a politician. I continue to be a pastor who speaks to the people of God about the things of God.” Larry Mantle said today on Airtalk that he found Wright’s answer dismissive and tantamount to claiming that Obama made his speech solely for political purposes. And though Obama agrees with Mantle’s assessment, I didn’t hear Wright’s statement saying that Obama’s speech was merely “political posturing.” I think Wright made the point that as a politician, one needs to unite as many people as possible to move forward as a nation. A pastor, on the other hand, is more concerned with engendering faithfulness to God than with negotiating all the allegiances and values people bring to the public square. Don Frederick writes in his blog on latimes.com concerning Wright’s press conference at the National Press Club yesterday,

Wright told his audience: “As I said to Barack Obama, if you get elected, Nov. 5 I’m coming after you, because you’ll be representing a government whose policies grind under people.”...

As political analyst David Gergen summed up on CNN: “I’m sure Rev. Wright has many virtues. Loyalty to his former parishioner is not one of them.”

Wright may not help Obama get elected, but we must ask, is that his job? Would we be more comfortable if Wright went easier on America with an Obama presidency, or would we immediately call Wright a hypocrite? It seems the media has not paid attention to where Wright says his allegiance lies. Wright has clearly argued his allegiance is with God first, not with any government, or with any politician, even if that politician is a friend and former parishioner. He views his role as one that speaks truth to power. Wright seems to be getting most in trouble because he has not seen America’s sins as merely slip-ups in an otherwise beneficent history. He questions whether those sins actually are isolated incidents or are they more reflective of our character and he wonders if our nation has ever repented from them. These are fair questions, in my opinion, and require thoughtful discussion. (Actually Wright gets most in trouble because of his association with Obama. Wright has engaged in this rhetoric for decades but the national spotlight was never on him before.)

While I do not agree with many of Wright’s political conclusions or historical statements, I think he is an interesting case that Christians need to consider. Namely, he views his allegiance first to God and Christ, over and sometimes against his responsibilities as a citizen of the United States. Wright espouses a faith far from a civil religion that either compartmentalizes church and state or that uses religion to baptize the government. To what extent can the Christian make claims on America and vice versa?

This story from the New York Times didn’t seem to get much attention in the news in the past week, but I think it is of extreme importance.

The Bush administration has failed to develop a governmentwide plan to combat terrorism in Pakistan’s unruly tribal areas, even though top American officials concede that Al Qaeda has regenerated its ability to attack the United States and has established havens in that border region, government auditors said.

That ripping sound you hear is me pulling my hair out of my head.

A PDF version of the GAO report can be found here.

Oddly enough I came across the story in watching clips from The Daily Show—still creating some of the best satirical material in the US. Their correspondent Rob Riggle comically expresses much of my frustration in his heated “analysis.”

61 years ago today, Jackie Robinson became the first African-American to play in Major League Baseball in the modern era. We’ve still got a long way to go, but thanks must go to Robinson and Dodgers president Branch Rickey for having the courage to move us forward.