Standing Out: Global Justice
Hey family, we’re looking at our values as a church community at the moment, and this week we are looking at global justice. Jacques Ellul once wrote “Think globally, act locally.” I think that’s a good phrase to have in mind. In a globalised world, what it means to act locally in a way that is actually just relates to having a realistic perspective on what the global picture is actually like.
So with that in mind, let’s overwhelm ourselves for a moment with just a smattering of some of the injustice and existential crises of our time.
We have, for a while, had a target of staying below 1.5 degrees Celsius, which some are now trying to push up to 2 degrees Celsius. Rejecting the former goal will be a death sentence to much of the global South, increasing climate migration which the global North, in already escalating nationalism, will not want to deal with.
A couple of years ago the UN warned that the world has around 60 harvests left before the soil is exhausted because of present systemic practices. At the same time the UN continues to pursue the objective of economic growth which requires increasing, not decreasing, material extraction from the earth.
The Bulletin of Atomic scientists illustrate that nuclear weapons are one of the most pressing threats to the entire planet. Countries continue to maintain and increase nuclear weapons which now have a destructive capacity that far outstrips the horrors unleashed by the US on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945.
Billions of people live in a poverty they are forced to exist in. The two richest people in America, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, now own more wealth than the bottom 40% of Americans combined. The fishing industry is totally unsustainable, destroying a marine life upon which all our lives depend. And yet governments are subsidising that industry worldwide to keep it going with more money than the UN says it would cost to solve world hunger.
The UK sells weapons to most of the countries on its own human rights watch list. And in this country we have an apartheid, in which undocumented and semi-compliant people and asylum seekers are forced to exist under totally different rules to everybody else, placing them in poverty, exploitation and abuse, while private companies profit from their deportation and their detention. Detention centres being part of a wider prison industrial complex.
I could go on but I won’t, but I do want us to be overwhelmed. Because if we don’t let ourselves, we will live our lives in response to a fiction, not a reality. If we want to be a community concerned with global justice, we have to engage with the reality of the world as it is. Part of the problem of trying to engage with what it means to respond with love and justice to the world around us simply by reading the Bible and using it as a kind of behaviour manual, or leaning into church orthodoxy and trusting its concerns, is that that process is totally insufficient for liberating us to be a people who are responsive to the realities of a developing world and new, emerging social realities.
Many of us have received an orthodoxy that says God gave rules to be kept, not a spirit to inspire. This religious bent towards conserving a status quo and the aversion to innovation and responsiveness in a changing landscape is a problem, because the times we are living in require huge amounts of imagination, creativity, responsiveness and innovation. A church that is unable or unwilling to look at the world as it actually is, prioritise its actual threats, celebrate its actual value, imagine alternatives and respond accordingly, is a church that cannot be part of the movements that save the world. And those Christians who want to act in justice will dust off their feet at their church’s doors and find a home with people who do.
Unfortunately, for a lot of Christianity, “having faith” has meant denying aspects of reality in order to hold on to beliefs we are more comfortable with. But we live in a time when we can’t do that. We have to emulate the prophets, and be people who are most willing to look at the reality of the world as it is, proclaim the severe threat that the times we are living in pose to humanity (more severe than was the case for any of the prophets) and then liberate our imaginations and our moral mindsets, to explore what it means for us to respond to the world as it actually is.
To be a people who say, if we choose to, that global justice is going to define who we are, what we care about and what our mission is about, we also have to make decisions about what we don’t care about, what we won’t make into a matter of major importance. None of you need me to tell you that the church has a penchant for becoming passionately obsessed about things that simply do not matter. Should we replace the hymn books with an overhead projector? At other times we obsess about topics that do matter, but our passions relate to scapegoating those who suffer most, presenting them as a threat to who we are as a people, rather than standing with them in solidarity against their persecution.
This happens a lot. I just want to reflect on one of the reasons Christians can end up doing that, because getting to the root of this is actually vital for whether we enable ourselves to be defined by a value of global justice or not. If we’re going to make the main issues of justice and renewal our mission, we have to be on guard for the way in which we can be steered off course by a manipulation of our passions and concerns. A manipulation that is in the very essence of empire. I’ll give one example of this, and I think you will all think of half a dozen more.
When the German theologian Jurgen Moltmann was in the US, he was asked about his support for gay relationships, and he responded that it just wasn’t an issue for the church in Germany and that they didn’t understand why it was tearing the church in America apart. Why this, he said, was more important than war and peace for example.
To answer Moltmann’s question, we have to understand that in empires, or states, societies of hierarchy and inequality, the actual causes of harm and destruction, which are the violent hierarchies of state and empire, cannot be labelled as the actual causes of harm, because this would lead to rebellion. Maintaining such unjust order has always been dependent upon constantly misdirecting the blame and passion of ordinary people. If American Christianity had put its passion into opposing war, as Moltmann suggests, it would have been in constant conflict with the American empire, whose foreign policy has been an incessant tirade of terrorism and genocide. During the same time, the US has produced a string of scapegoats, and funnelled the passions, fears and frustrations of citizens towards those people. These have often been people from the countries the US was destroying. Instead of opposing the logics and ideologies of the American empire, lots of the church has instead partnered with and mirrored them, and created unreasonable obsessions and traumatised scapegoats. The church can be the worst for this, because we don’t just say, “Oh, we blame you”, we say, “God blames you too”.
If we cannot label the actual causes of threat and destruction in our world, then we will worry and obsess about all of the wrong things. If we are not distinct from and opposing the logics and agendas of the empires that threaten us all, then we will partner with and mirror the agendas of empire, as the church has done so often in devastating colonial projects of the past, and which it continues to do in the present. If we only compare what we care about to a specific verse in the New Testament we’ve been taught to obey and worry about – women’s head coverings or obedience to authorities – and we don’t compare what we care about to the causes of injustice in the present world, then we end up just pretending – pretending that we are being the people we need to be to those who are suffering. Being a people that hold global justice as a key value, means being a people who are responsive to what the world is actually like and what its problems really are, whether that maps on to our prior understandings or not.
The same goes for what we think is valuable and what we attribute to the gifts given by God. I don’t expect any of us here would admit to believing in a prosperity gospel. But so much of the language of the church, speaks in simplistic ways about God blessing us and giving good things to us, when what we are speaking about is the produce of corruption, destruction and slavery. Numerous studies have shown that that those who become rich or victorious based explicitly on factors that have nothing to do with merit, will still choose to interpret their privilege through a meritocratic lens – that we have earnt the benefits we are reaping. The church is no exception. But just as we can be the worst scapegoaters by drawing on God, we also don’t just join in with the lie that our merit has got us where we are, we compound it by saying, “God wants us to have all of this. He has worked through the oppressive poverty of the world to us bring us this indulgence.” I am not suggesting we cease to be thankful for what we have, I am saying we radically need to integrate our engagement with the filthy reality underlying our lives.
Whether we’re speaking about value or harm, when we don’t consciously engage with the reality, it doesn’t stop affecting us, we’re just unaware of how it does so. So we end up thinking that we are reading something directly from scripture not knowing how much our cultural context is informing what we read into the Bible. So the church fails to acknowledge the political, economic reasons which underlie ideas that we frame as spiritual or religious. So for centuries white Christians embraced the denigration of people they racialised as black for political and economic reasons, but framed this denigration as religious and Biblically supported.
In the story of the sheep and goats, Jesus says that when we feed the hungry, welcome in the stranger, clothe the naked, and visit those who are in prison, that when we do these things for the least of these – the most persecuted and downtrodden people – we do it for him. The emphasis here cannot be upon our noble gestures. If we go and visit people in prison, we are putting ourselves in a position where we will see something of the reality of the world because we are looking through the lens of those whose lives are broken by what the world is actually like. We will see what our privilege stops us from seeing all the live long day. We learn about what is just by listening to people, not just the Bible. We may not be geographically near to all of those who suffer the consequences of global injustice. But right here in the UK, right here in Manchester, we are near to those who have suffered at the hands of climate breakdown, racism, capitalism, Immigration Controls, patriarchy, poverty and more. We have the capacity to read and learn and dialogue and act. We can be distinctive for this. What the actions need to be we will only know when we gaze unblinkingly at what the world is actually like, when we listen believingly to those who are broken by the injustice, and when we dialogue, imagine and act with courage in response.
Global justice is about a church responding to what the world tells us it needs. What do we believe Jesus has the power to save people from? If we have faith to believe that our lives can transform, that the pained of the world can be saved from slavery, poverty, environmental collapse, incarceration…then we have a gospel worth sharing.
