I think back to the Civil Rights days when Martin
Luther King, Jr. with a prophetic voice pointed the way to brotherhood and
righteousness. His message was sourced
deeply in Christ’s teachings of the Golden Rule, of love and respect for our
neighbor and a plea to put away the acids of hatred that were most dangerous
and destructive to those that harbored it.
King also turned to economic justice—to the message that a market
economy can allocate wealth unjustly. It
became apparent almost at once that with this message King stopped preaching,
as the saying goes, and commenced meddling.
The fight against racial oppression would prove to be a picnic when
compared with the fight over the sacredness and sanctity of private property—no
matter how egregious and flagrant the manifestations of economic discrimination
based upon positional prejudice. If the
Civil Rights movement was the “good war,” the fight for economic justice is
eternally destined to be the war that breeds elemental dissention and deep-seated anxieties. How ideally would I
like modern day Christianity to deal with the conundrum of achieving economic
justice? The reliable Golden Rule becomes
problematic as the economic advances of one seem to be made at the expense of
the other. There becomes a strong bias
in favor of the status quo. Few want to experience
the unease generated when the rectitude of the market is seriously called into
question. Human resource departments all
over the country regularly refer to the labor market to determine a fair and
acceptable wage. How else could it be
done? Minimum wage laws seek to
establish a floor, but generally detailed regulations as a way to increase
income for the marginally paid seems impractical. My hope is that modern Christianity will in
faith pray for revelations of the mind and heart on how best to creatively craft
economic systems so that the low, inadequately paid can find relief. Surely, an essential condition will be the
worship of God rather than any economic system.
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