#474: What Would King Say?

      Had he lived, Martin Luther King, Jr. would have turned 90 this past week.  As the nation celebrates his birthday, it is easy to honor King as a champion of civil rights, perhaps even easy to note that in 2019 America risks losing some of the gains he championed. 

But it is much harder for us to actually honor him as our national prophet--as America’s conscience--because that means honoring all the causes he stood for.  And those causes taken together, have not merely lost ground; they have nearly disappeared from our public discourse. 

Let me survey what King called the “three great evils,” and ask two questions: What would King say now?  And: Who in our public life still speaks for King? 

Racial Injustice.  Most celebrations honoring King focus on him as leader of the civil rights movement.  And surely a key message in his mission was that people be judged not “by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” By 1968 King had witnessed many gains, including the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.  And since then, African-Americans have continued many gains. 

Still, were King alive today he might well say that too often people continue to be judged by the color of their skin, whether in efforts to suppress black votes, or in cases of police shooting unarmed Blacks, or in the rollback of the Voting Rights Act itself. 

And more recently the challenge of accepting people of color has increasingly focused, not only on the descendants of slaves, but also on immigrants and their children (indeed, our first Black president was the son of an immigrant, not the descendant of slaves).  And while King did not face the same issues over immigration that we face now, it’s easy to know what he might say--in fact he already actually said it:

“We may all have come from different ships, but we're in the same boat now."

Indeed, by the end of his career King would be increasingly clear that the evil of racism was not just a problem for U.S. blacks, but for all those oppressed by others:

“In one sense the civil rights movement in the United States is a special American phenomenon which must be understood in the light of American history and dealt with in terms of the American situation. But on another and more important level, what is happening in the United States today is a relatively small part of a world development.”

Looking around today, King might well say we remain far from fulfilling the goal of racial justice for all.

Inequality.  In later years King spoke more and more about economic inequality.  He often called it “poverty,” since up to 1968 the middle class was still gaining in wages and benefits, so it made sense to focus on those below the poverty line.  But since King’s death, the U.S. has seen nearly 50 years of steadily declining real wages even for the middle class, and we now see a wealth gap worse than any time since the great depression of the 1930s.  So when King spoke of poverty, he said:

“Why are there forty million poor people in America? And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth.’ When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy.”

This question of a “broader distribution of wealth” has changed since his death, with fewer below the poverty line but more struggling to make ends meet as wealth has been even more concentrated.  This makes King’s view not less, but even more timely.  Today he would surely repeat these words:

“Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God’s children... God never intended for one group of people to live in superfluous inordinate wealth, while others live in abject deadening poverty.”

War. King lost many supporters and became an even more controversial figure when he campaigned against the Vietnam War.  Even other civil rights leaders felt this was not his role.  But they did not realize that, for King, this was the inevitable result of his own growing vision. 

Once he decided that nonviolence was the key to fighting racism, and once he incorporated the theories of Gandhian nonviolence into his own Christian theology, that naturally altered his views on war, as he moved from a “just war” perspective to pacifism.  He called this his “pilgrimage to nonviolence”:

“I felt that while war could never be a positive good, it could serve as a negative good by preventing the spread and growth of an evil force. War, horrible as it is, might be preferable to surrender to a totalitarian system. But now I believe that the potential destructiveness of modern weapons totally rules out the possibility of war ever again achieving a negative good.”

Indeed, King seemed to know that without a concerted anti-war strategy, the threat of mass destruction would spread.  Today’s worries about North Korea, Iran, and the U.S. abandoning the INF treaty all echo King’s warning:

“Nations are not reducing but rather increasing their arsenals of weapons of mass destruction. The best brains in the highly developed nations of the world are devoted to military technology. The proliferation of nuclear weapons has not been halted…On the contrary, the detonation of an atomic device by the first nonwhite, non-Western, and so-called underdeveloped power, namely the Chinese People’s Republic, opens new vistas of exposure of vast multitudes, the whole of humanity, to insidious terrorization by the ever-present threat of annihilation.”

When accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, King made his rejection of militarism clear:

“I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of nuclear annihilation... I believe that even amid today's mortar bursts and whining bullets, there is still hope for a brighter tomorrow... I still believe that one day mankind will bow before the altars of God and be crowned triumphant over war and bloodshed.”

I have no doubt that he would say matters now have only become worse.  Since 9/11 the U.S. has engaged in multiple, seemingly endless wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and elsewhere. And unlike the Vietnam era, these wars are not even especially controversial.  In the 1960s a band of public leaders loudly opposed U.S. war policy: King, Robert F. Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern, and many others.  In 2019, who are the public leaders opposing our warlike foreign policy? 

Yet our troop deployments and arms sales (not to mention defense pending) far outstrip all other nations.  It is as if Americana have accepted that war is inevitable and peace is impossible. King would disagree:

“World peace through non-violent means is neither absurd nor unattainable. All other methods have failed. Thus we must begin anew. Non-violence is a good starting point.”

For Catholics today, King’s views are important for three reasons. 

First, his views on race, economic inequality, and peace fit almost exactly with Catholic Social Teaching of the last 50 years--especially with the teachings of the last four popes.  You can look it up! 

Second, King agrees with the Church that these three issues are linked:

“We must see now that the evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied together…you can’t really get rid of one without getting rid of the others…the whole structure of American life must be changed.”

Third, King’s vision of the contemporary world exactly matches the Catholic vision emerging from Vatican Council II (1962-1965).  The Council saw technological progress as the hallmark of modern life, and praised such progress but offered this caution: technological progress confers new power, but the good use of that power requires a matching progress in wisdom and goodness. 

Here is how King saw the same “moral lag”:

“Through our scientific and technological genius, we have made of this world a neighborhood and yet we have not had the ethical commitment to make of it a brotherhood. But somehow, and in some way, we have got to do this.”

For King, as for Vatican II, this “moral lag” is at the root of what he calls the world’s three great evils:

“This problem of spiritual and moral lag, which constitutes modern man’s chief dilemma, expresses itself in three larger problems which grow out of man’s ethical infantilism. Each of these problems, while appearing to be separate and isolated, is inextricably bound to the other. I refer to racial injustice, poverty, and war.”

And for King, as for Vatican II, the challenge lies in our moral progress catching up to our technological progress:

“Mankind’s survival is dependent upon man’s ability to solve the problems of racial injustice, poverty, and war; the solution of these problems is in turn dependent upon man squaring his moral progress with his scientific progress, and learning the practical art of living in harmony”

Based on his own words, then, King’s voice still speaks to our time, much the way Catholic Social Teaching does.  Taken together, they represent our brightest wisdom and our clearest hope--but who will champion of such vision? 

On a day when many seek to fence in King’s legacy to narrow questions of race, we should rededicate ourselves to his broader cause of waging nonviolent combat against racism, inequality, and militarism. 

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2019

#450: Attacking Brussels = Challenging a Catholic Dream

The historic importance of Brussels in recent European history deepens the tragedy of this week’s attacks.

During my junior year abroad as a political science major, one of my courses at the University of Paris’ Institute of Political Studies was a seminar in energy policies of the Common Market. In those days (1969!) “Common Market” referred to the six-nation cooperative that later expanded into the European Economic Community (EEC), and finally into today’s European Union (EU).

The highlight of the term was a field trip to Common Market Headquarters in Brussels. For 4 days, our seminar group participated in working conferences with Common Market diplomats discussing the future direction of the Common Market.  (In those days, simultaneous translation was available in French, Italian, Dutch, and German--but not English, since Great Britain had not yet joined the Market.)

On the final day of the conference we finished with a lavish lunch that reinforced our impression that our hosts were intent on recruiting as many of our seminar members as possible for the work of international diplomacy.  My classmates knew that I was the exception, since I would be returning to the United States at the end of the year.  Nonetheless, they wanted to know what I thought of the entire gathering.  My response was that I hoped, if I returned in 25 years, I would find a new “United States of Europe” waiting for me.  This pleased everyone, since it was exactly what they were hoping for as well.

In the nearly 50 years since then, what was the Common Market has expanded to more than 25 countries, continues to expand, has added political institutions like the European Parliament,  opened the borders among all its member countries, and even established the Euro as a common currency among most of them.  And through all this time, Brussels has remained the capital of the New Europe.

 But behind this history is a vision that was driven by Catholic leaders whose dream, while it has come very close to fulfillment, is now being jeopardized by the terror movements that surfaced once again this week—precisely in Brussels.

The Common Market started with something called the Schuman plan in the years after World War II.  Its chief architect was Jean Monnet, a Frenchman who represented an entire class of socially elite Europeans who belonged to Christian Democratic parties and espoused a world view rooted in Catholic “Personalism.”

The theology of personalism looked beyond the national identities dividing people to focus on the people themselves. It called for the reconciliation of former enemies, the reduction of animosities and divisions among European countries, and the creation of a transnational community that could end the long history of European warfare and provide the basis for both peace and prosperity.

Their notion was that European nations, tired of long generations of war, would be willing to sacrifice some of their national sovereignty and independence for a more interdependent federation that would end up looking something like the United States of America.

Their agenda was gradual and progressive.  They intended to begin with free trade agreements leading to an economic union, which in turn would gradually encourage nations to form a political federation.  When I visited the headquarters in 1969, things like a common currency, a European parliament, and open borders were far away--but they were part of the vision from the start.

It may be difficult for Americans to appreciate what Europe has accomplished.  Most Americans I meet have no idea that the European Union is a clear imitation of the experience in American history of moving from three distinct colonies, to 13 loosely federated states, to a unified republic of states under the U.S. Constitution.  And while the media consistently describes contemporary China as the world’s #2 economy after the U.S., the fact is that by most standards the EU is a bigger economy than China.

But now, as refugees pressure the eastern borders of Europe, as the open borders within Europe allow radicals to move freely, and as security forces prove incapable of preventing further attacks, the common wisdom is that Europe’s experiment may be in jeopardy.  Perhaps the open borders will be lost.  Perhaps the single currency will soon be gone.  Perhaps the vision of a unified Europe will not survive terror.

Brussels remains at the center of that vision.  It is not only the headquarters of the European Union’s daily operations, is also the where NATO has located its Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) since 1967.  In short, this small country finds itself the host of the major institutions that make the Catholic dream of a united Europe a reality.

But ironically, it is precisely in this small country that we see the critical flaw in that original dream.

Observers on the scene have been informing us that the neighborhood recently raided by intelligence and security forces, the same neighborhood where the newest assailants lived, is a kind of isolated, “no go” Muslim ghetto within Brussels, capable of harboring fugitives and providing a home base for planning terrorist attacks.

Such neighborhoods exist in many major cities in many countries, and are almost always the result of the failure to integrate newcomers into the general mainstream of the population.  And it is no surprise that this has been especially difficult to do in Belgium, a country which has not even succeeded in unifying its own people.

Belgium has long been torn between the Flemish and the Walloons--that is, the Dutch-speaking and French-speaking.  It has it is as though Belgian has been caught cultural and between France and the Netherlands, and never resolved its identity.  With such a fissure in the main population, it is no surprise that the Muslim community has fallen through the cracks.

But there is a deeper tragedy in this fact.  The Christian democratic parties that founded the vision of a common Europe on Catholic personalism came from the elite classes of France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Italy.  These elites assumed not only that it was the responsibility of the educated elite to forge the continent’s future--they also assumed that the continent’s future depended on its Christian identity.  In other words, the vision behind the European Union was a vision of Christian culture dominating the continent.

No surprise, then, that the influx of Muslims into Europe has been consistently out of sync with the progression of the European Union.  Just as many conservative Americans cling to the myth of the Christian nation in the United States, many of the governing class behind the European Union have clung to the myth of a Christian Europe. 

The explicit endorsement of Christianity has disappeared from EU documents, to be sure, in the interest of the secularized cultures that have emerged since World War II.  But the founding vision has never been quite prepared for the pluralism that Europe has witnessed in the wake of the end of colonialism.  As populations have flooded into Europe from North Africa and the Middle East, Europe has been consistently caught off guard.  And this week’s attacks have revealed that the very city which has become the heart of the European Union has been perhaps the least prepared to broaden the vision that would keep that union alive. It has become home to the vision of United Europe, but has failed to become home to its newest peoples.

The lesson, for both Europe, and for America, is not to hold back the movement of new peoples.  That strategy would be little more than a finger in the dike of global migration.  Rather, the lesson, the moral of the story, is that we must learn better than ever how to welcome and integrate new peoples, adapting our vision of the future so that these people, rather than radicalizing into dangerous attackers, develop a sense of ownership and investment in the vision itself.

Ironically, the EU’s founding Catholic vision of a peaceful Europe will only work if it opens beyond Catholicism, and even beyond Christianity.

Nothing could be clearer about this week’s attacks than this: the attackers felt no stake in the status quo, and had nothing to lose by attacking it.  And nothing is more common sense than this: the survival of our hopes for the future--for the kind of life we would lead, and for the kind of world we want--all that depends on creating for such people a stake in our way of life.  Only when they have everything to gain by joining us, and everything to lose by attacking us, will the threat recede and civility return to our life.

But for both Europe and America, this means abandoning the destructive myth of a culture dominated by Christians, and accepting that the global future--and in all probability the providential will of God--calls for a single human family learning to inhabit, in civility and peace, what Pope Francis has called “Our Common Home.”

   © Bernard F. Swain PhD 2016

#448: 10 Reasons Why Pope Francis Was Right about Trump

The controversy following the Pope’s remarks about Donald Trump included overblown reactions that missed the point.. 

 1. Context.  If you read the entire interview text, you see that the pope’s statement comes only in answer to a question about Trump calling the pope a pawn and an instrument of the Mexican government.  When Trump took offense at being called “not Christian,” he was the pot calling the kettle black.  

2. A Hypothetical Comment.  Francis qualified his answer by saying “If a person…” and then offered the benefit of the doubt.  It was as if he could not believe a Christian would say the things attributed to Trump, and thus presumed that Trump must be something else than Christian. 

3. Not a Personal Attack.  This was how the Vatican clarified later.  But note that Francis spoke of “A person who thinks only about building walls…and not building bridges.” He did not specifically apply this to Trump.  And the key word is “only.”

4. Off the Cuff. The pope was speaking spontaneously, and his point would have been clearer had he said such a person “Is not acting Christian.” In other words, that would have made it clear that his comment was not about Trump’s religious membership (clearly the pope has no idea of Trump’s personal life) but about the public behavior attributed to him. 

5. No Magic Potion.  The focus on behavior is relevant because even a baptized person does not automatically follow the gospel.  Baptism is not a magic potion, and neither is church attendance. One may be officially a member of the Christian church, but the clear test of following Jesus is following Jesus’ command to “Love your neighbor.”

6. A Wall Along The Road.  The parable of the Good Samaritan is Francis’ favorite image for loving our neighbor--no wonder, since Jesus offered it to answer the question “Who is my neighbor?” The answer, of course, is: “the person who needs me.”  Imagine if we revise the parable to include someone who builds a wall around the man on the road so no one will help him!  Would anyone call that a Christian act?

7. Immigration.  Thus immigration becomes a key test for authentic Christianity.  The Church teaches that migration is a human right, so walls designed to prevent immigration (not just regulate it) are denying migrants their rights.  Francis is quite right that “this is not in the gospel.”

8. The Pope’s Job.  Trump professed offense that the pope “question another’s faith.” But the pope’s job description, as “moral leader,” includes challenging us all to live up to our faith by reminding us of its true meaning and obligations.  If Trump wants to be a “proud Christian,” he will need to show that his positions fit the Christian message.  He cannot claim “proud membership” but avoid the ethical test that goes with it.

9. The Vatican’s Walls.  It is true the Vatican has high walls, although one may enter St. Peter’s Square openly at almost any time (you need only walk over a white line). It is also true that since Vatican II (1962-1965) popes had been breaching that wall to connect with the world--especially with the world’s poor.  Donald Trump has dated himself by pretending that popes still hide in the Vatican, protected behind walls, as he wants Americans to be.

10. The Real Drama.  The media constantly marvel at the “theatrical” power of Trumps candidacy. 

But the pope’s comment came hours after 200,000 Mexicans gathered with him at the U.S. border while Americans watched from 300 feet away, across the Rio Grande.

All prayed for those who had died at the border, and also prayed for more open borders. 

  

 Is there any real doubt  whose performance is more powerful—or better reflects the Christian faith?

   © Bernard F. Swain PhD 2015