Personal Reflections on Inequality

Note:  I wrote this sometime in 2020 after Joe Biden was elected President.  It felt like a promising time.  This was so not because all was well, but because we were seriously trying to address the ills of our society.  Trumps’ insurrectionists were being indicted.  George Floyd’s death spawned a self-reflective white community engaged in a deeper ant-racism approach.  The “Me Too” movement continued to have an impact with more women in solidarity exposing the predatory behavior of powerful men.  Trump was convicted of sexual assault.  Confederate statues began to be removed. Yet in hindsight, the reaction to this “progress” was even more powerful.  A white Christian nationalist movement began to develop alliances with autocratic individuals who played to a population that did not want to hear these stories.  They were not in a reflective mood nor wanting to be seen as complicit in these societal horrors.  They wanted to be freed from blame about these societal ills.  The result today in 2025 at the start of Trump’s second administration the reactionary forces have become the dominant voice in American politics, at least how the media portrays the situation.  Of course, the democratic process, has put in office leaders to satisfy this desire for less negativity and more positive view of large segments of society.  

However,  there is still and ongoing story.  We are in the middle of the re-making of the American pluralistic democracy.  I would maintain that the real majority in this country, not the voting public, (which includes so many people who have been either denied their right to vote, cynical about their vote having a consequence, or have been strategically jerrymandered out of influence).  Progressive ideas are still very strong and will regroup.  The sign that progressive ideas are strong is the vehemence of the Trump reactionary forces so focused on dismantling the institutions than have given rise to progressive ideas and have sustained them.  They cannot win the arguments in the arena of public opinion; they need to silence them.  They have received help from non-reactionary voices.  In my opinion, but with many examples, the public discourse has reinforced the ideological rights claims: “progressives have gone too far,” “the left is only about identity politics,”  “wokeism (aka, any progressive idea, from diversity programs and social safety nets to climate solutions and critical history) created indoctrination in our school systems. These are not voices that point out legitimate areas for reform, these are voices that suggest many of these initiatives are wrong-headed and are not a formula for winning elections.  A focus on the reform needed gets drowned out by how much people are tired of feeling uncomfortable with being reminded that they/we have been the beneficiaries of injustice.  From my experience these are often white people of privilege, mostly male.  Pinning an election loss on progressive ideas has an air of “let’s forget principle to win elections. The Democrats are particularly the target of this charge.  I would rather lose an election than give up key principles.  Democratic candidates lost with a peace candidate.  Democrats lost when they signed the civil rights legislation. Democrats lost by nominating women for the presidency.  And most recently lost by nominating a Black/East Asian woman.  Yes, candidates do have to be elected.  We need to be bold with the right ideas that preserve our progress to a more inclusive and economically just society.  For me a fundamental starting point is to create and alternative to our current economic system of monopolistic finance technology driven capitalism that strangles out higher human values of cooperation honesty, community, empathy, compassion and religious values of mercy and grace, to sustain our focus on the fact that all deserve to be treated with dignity.

In other sections of my website, I treat what I call, with Thomas Piketty, “participatory socialism.”  

It is instructive to review the journey I took in 2020 to be reminded of some of the bedrock principles that guide my thinks and yet how the world keeps evolving to challenge these principles and how best to apply then.  

Harlan

April 27, 2025

The Sea Ranch

Personal Reflections on Inequality: 

Progressive Religious Education Complicity or Mitigating Practice?

By Harlan Stelmach

It was another day of trying to find interesting yet meaningful topics for our salon.  Yes, a “salon.”  No typical “book group” for us.  We imagined ourselves having “good conversations” yet in an elevated fashion.  Three of us got together over lunch eight years ago to propose a discussion group that would meet over a shared meal and take on weighty subjects.  We would want a diverse group of individuals representing a broad spectrum of backgrounds and professions.  We were less successful on the diversity front, eight men (one of color) three women (one of color), but we kept working on it. Recently the pandemic made our conversations more and more relevant to the inequality of our society.  It became compelling to address issues, from sexism and racism to climate change and political intrigue during the Trump administration.  When I proposed the topic of “food” for the salon last year, it was met with some skepticism and a little indifference.  Was this the most important issue of our time?  I tried to explain that it might give us a fun topic during so much angst and utilize the expertise of a several members of the salon.  I was a card carrying “anti-foodie, “so it seemed out of character for me to push this topic.  But we did have one of the icons of Bay Area food, Narsai David in our salon.  So, some inside scoop on the topic was guaranteed.  Plus, all members of the salon had good “foodie” credentials. 

So, we created a planning group and what transpired was going to surprise me and educate me on the importance of the topic when we fully understood how it would inter-relate with all the other “serious” topics about inequality that we had been addressing in the salon.  The research I had been doing during my sabbatical got put on hold due to the pandemic.  I had less access to people for interviews and archives were closed.  So, it was convenient to take a break and do reading and discussing on what I thought would be an unrelated topic.

I was wrong. Discussing food  would deepen my growing unease about my complicity with inequality and racism.  

Capitalism: Natural or Contested?

In Michael Pollen’s influential book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A History of Four Meals, an analysis of what determines what we eat and why, on page 318 he levels a trenchant critique of capitalism.  A critique that underlies much of the book but not this explicit until late in the book: “A tension has always existed between the capitalist imperative to maximize efficiency at any cost and the moral imperatives of culture, which historically have served as a counterweight to the moral blindness of the market.” Very damning words indeed, “maximize efficiency at any cost” and the “moral blindness of the market.”  More of course could be said about other elements of capitalism such as “profit maximization” and “monopolization” but he goes on to say: “This is another example of the cultural contradictions of capitalism—the tendency over time for the economic impulse to erode the moral underpinnings of society.  Mercy toward animals in our care is one such casualty.”  Over the last two decades, with the recent financial crash and now the pandemic, so many critiques have emerged with urgency and deep analysis about capitalism in all its modern manifestations, from neo-liberalism, anti-globalization, surveillance capitalism, a new gilded age and more.  Yet the reforms never seem to become more than piecemeal policy tinkering, and never addressing the systemic factors that are needed, such as the core dynamic of capitalism. Why?  One would think that the very food we eat that is essential to a healthy life could be the place where a movement could arise and make a difference.  At least so I mused.

I may have been right for there appears to be some hope on the food front to confront capitalism.  In Mark Bittman’s Animal, Vegetable, Junk, A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal, he takes on the issue of capitalism early in the book in his third chapter on “Agriculture Goes Global.” He ends the chapter on a history of food production that is developed mainly for financial gain rather than supporting community needs with a full-throated indictment of capitalism which frames the story told in the whole book.  He states that “by the seventeenth century, after ten thousand years during which almost everyone farmed or at least depended on local farming, everything changed.  The old ways had been sacrificed to give birth to a new god—what’s euphemistically call the market economy, or what we know as unrestrained capitalism. “  This appeared on pages 49 and 50.  He did not wait 300 pages to level his economic critique.  Perhaps unusual for a New York Times food critic, Bittman’s book is impressive in its historical and deep social and economic analyses.  It is not about fancy menus and unique eating experiences; it goes right to the heart of our health and the health of the planet in all its forms.  

But more important are his concluding chapters that document “The Way Forward.”  There have been changes in how food is produced and distributed because there are movements and consumer habits that have forced some changes.  He believes that only with pressure from organized movements will more changes occur. He documents many such efforts around the world. 

With so many influential opinion makers writing “best sellers” why do we still have such a predatory economy going full spread ahead?  Wall Street has reached new heights, even with the pandemic and so much labor and small business dislocation, we are told that the economy is “recovering” assuming that we can address inflation or other irritants? Recovering for whom?

Perhaps embedded in the story about food there could be an experience that gives hope for confronting the suicidal tendency that is inherent in “unrestrained capitalism,”  giving credence to my speculation that food should be an obvious and most direct way to mobilize many people to confront our economic system.  For as Bittman says, “nothing is more important than food.”  He feels that it is the vehicle to expose and tackle the cultural contradictions of capitalism that Pollen identifies.  Bittman is explicit in his Introduction:

“You can’t talk about reforming a toxic diet without talking about reforming the land and labor laws that determine that diet.  You can’t talk about agriculture without talking about the environment, about clean sources of energy, and about the water supply.  You can’t talk about animal welfare without talking about the welfare of food workers, and you can’t talk about food workers without talking about income inequality, racism, and immigration.”

Pollen agrees that food could be the “linchpin” of a revolt of “local small producers and local consumers against the global industrialization of the corporation.”  This is so for Pollen because food is a “powerful metaphor for a great many of the values to which people feel globalization poses a threat, including the distinctiveness of local cultures and identities, the survival of local landscapes and biodiversity.”

I begin with this question in somewhat of a rhetorical fashion with food to help me propose a few assumptions about the economic context that we all must live with and even more, what we in fact help support and maintain.  Thus, we are in fact complicit in supporting the systemic inequality that we also decry.  The food story is both a great metaphor and real fact about the drama of complicity.  Both Pollen and Bittman remind us that we the consumers have much to say about challenging the current economic system that undermines the “moral underpinnings of society.”  Our complicity is not just about injustice, it in Bittman’s words, is suicidal. We are damaging ourselves.  Food can provide a cautionary tale about this complicity and self-destruction.  We first must admit that the economic system is human made, it is not part of a natural order. It is a contested system that must be treated as such.

This paper is an attempt to tell the story of my own complicity with systemic inequality and systemic racism.  I will use this personal story to address my analysis of two religious educational organizations and what lessons we can learn from these organizations about navigating the worst abuses of a higher educational system caught in the web of capitalism and its power brokers.  A big jump from food to education in religious organizations. To make the connections clear, first a little background.  I need to tell the story in some detail.  I assume it is a story that most of us share.

My story and Unraveling 

It was a typical day in my campus office.  Class preparation, answering multiple emails, reviewing my research drafts, and developing strategies for three more meetings before the end of the day, waiting for students to arrive for their academic counselling and congratulating myself on what a great job I was doing to juggle so many demands.  I had finally arrived at a sense of well-being about the job I was doing, with esteem among my peers and being supportive of so many students.  It was a long haul from a marginal academic status as an early adjunct to full Professor status.  Positions in the humanities for “white” male Ph.D.’s were in scarce supply in the late 1970s when I joined the teaching ranks. Moving from the Bay Area was not an option. My family was rooted here after seven years of me working on my doctorate.  

That morning in my office I had been tracking a student via email exchanges who had reneged on numerous advising sessions.  She was finally in my office.  I was not prepared to address the issues she raised.  They were all financial.  She was the first in her LatinX family to go to college.  It was the third week of a new semester, and she was still not attending classes, officially.  She was trying to find a way to develop a plan to pay her college bills.   It was her senior year, and she was determined to graduate.  She was hoping for more financial aid from Dominican University.  She had tapped out her own resources and her family’s resources.  Typically, my advising sessions were about class choice and sometimes about pulling strings to get the class the student needed.  After explaining that her family had refinanced their home and sold two cars, the family car and one from a grandparent to pay for her education, I was brought into the reality of many of our students. I was not aware that she was working fulltime.  My response, in retrospect was only minimally helpful to this individual, but did nothing to address the underlying causes of her plight.  I went to bat for her to gain additional financial aid, more student loans, and a small reduction in her tuition.  I congratulated myself on a job well done.  What I failed to do was to understand the predatory nature of student financial loans, whether private or government, especially when direct grants did little to “close the gap” in financial aid for most of our students, a large portion who were first in their families to attend college.    The fact was that these financial aid arrangements put the burden for college costs largely on the individual student rather than society, as was the case in many modern democratic societies.   The loans made lending agencies rich, provided funds to support other parts of the government and put major hurdles in front of students to keep them from a successful life with almost a lifetime of debt.   This affected the student from poor families in greater numbers as middleclass families “gamed” the system by orchestrating less assets by buying a car, for example, to show less assets.  Some had to sell cars to go to college, others bought cars to go to college with financial aid.   Something is wrong here.    

I am a professor of ethics and prided myself in analyzing not just the theories of ethics but also the “facts on the ground” that created ethical dilemmas.  Why did I stop at just “helping” one student and in fact creating even more debt for her?  The reasons are simple:  I just accepted as natural the system of funding education and maybe at some level, subconsciously, I realized that this system supported my salary.  It needed to be perpetuated to make sure my job and the survival of my institution was safe.  I thought I was doing my job just to teach, write and help students with their intellectual work.  This was significant enough, with low wages, large teaching loads, greater committee work and little support staff, being replaced by a computerized system that facilitated me supporting myself with greater paperwork.  I could also be a victim.   

There are personal ironies here.  I was part of the early political movements of the sixties and seventies.  I considered myself a radical with a Marxist critique of the capitalist system.  I often raised these issues in my teaching, especially with health care ethics and the notion that “health care” was a right.  This was my view of education as well.  It was a right not a privilege.  What happened to my own formation?  There was an unravelling of my own values.  I was “bought off.”  But it was even worse.  The only consolation was that I was not alone in the academy, too busy or too naïve or too self-interested.  A study commissioned to investigate the financial assistance programs for college in 1998 concluded that “The public’s lack of understanding can only be viewed as a failure by those of us who pride ourselves as teachers and educators.”  Perhaps one could include that people were intentionally kept in the dark. At least one could say that there was an aura of irreversibility of the way access to college was determined by a well intrenched financial industry bolstered by a conservative ideology that sought to privatize college costs and reduce government control.  But the inequality produced by this approach should have been obvious to me if I was really paying attention.

To answer this question of my complicity, I need to tell my story of an awakening (re-awakening) that happened once I had retired in the middle of the pandemic.  

The Pandemic and Awakening

My wife and I “marveled” at the disconnect between news stories about massive unemployment and economic and social hardship of so many people and the constant record-breaking news from Wall Street.  How could this be?  Wall Street and Main Street are two worlds.  The apex of American inequality, symbolically and factually. As long as the wealthy could increase their earnings via an economic system that favored the rich and powerful, the poor were not consequential, except as an irritant to manage, via bailouts that in fact gave even more money to organizations helping to distribute the money.  There were very few analyses that commented on this disconnect during the news cycle.  The market news was given with no comment and then we went on to stories about hardship.  When they did it was treated as a normal dynamic in hard times.  We were horrified by this disconnect.  Though we did pay attention to a significant increase in our retirement holdings. There was a little unease however, not that we should use our wealth in different ways, but that we mitigated any possible downturn by having great portions of our holdings in cash.  We were just being smart, and we no doubt deserved all the wealth we had accumulated.  

The arrest and death of George Floyd was another eye-opener for me.  It was not the fact that there was a built-in brutality toward people of color, especially women of color.  This was not surprising and well documented “old news.” What hit me again was the fact that regardless of reform attempts over the years, the brutality persisted.  Further, was the awareness that I had not made these issues a priority.  

I decided to educate myself on the latest anti-racist material and delve deeper into the underlying causes.  I had conversations with a friend who was the diversity Dean at Dominican University.  He led me to the readings of Ibrahim Kendi.  Because I was still on sabbatical I was searching for materials for our Salon and spent a good bit of time reading about white racism and white supremacy, explicit as an ideology and implicit is so many unconscious ways by myself and “white America,” in general.  I also knew that I would be returning to teaching and was looking to update my courses.   Robin DeAngelo’s work was instructive, and I could see myself operating with unconscious bias. But I needed more theory.  I read about “intersectionality” and “critical race theory.”  I was getting caught up on the latest works and revisiting historic texts, such as the work of WEB Dubois, James Baldwin, and the life of Nina Simone.  Simone’s life as revealed in videos of her performances and outspoken criticism of American culture was a graphic illustration of what racism does to a person.  It was clear she had become a tormented individual.  Her very sense of self was being destroyed along with her dedication to her art.

What continued to capture my attention, were two things:  First, I began to look at my world through a different lens.  I watched the news with a more critical eye.  I thought about my past practice on campus and began to evaluate a less than stellar response to issues of systemic racism and structural inequality.  This led me to ask new questions and want more answers.  Second, I wanted to better understand the roots of the current racial and inequality crisis.  I began reading more literature dealing with how our economic system works.  I wanted illustrations of past practices that led to both a bigger crisis and why so little has been done to address the injustices.  What I found was so many books and articles that spelled out the systematic way in which people of color, women and transgender individuals were blatantly discriminated against and their basic rights were intentionally denied.  It was already there in well documented material.  Why didn’t it make a difference and why didn’t I pay more attention?  Any topic I looked at there were examples, voting rights, access to health care and education, housing, food, sports, entertainment, and especially politics and access to power.

What hit home, again, was the case study of how education is funded.  This has remained a major access point to dig deeper into the causes of inequality.  I needed to better understand the way our capitalist system and the abuse of it by people with power functioned to provide a context for all the activities of our society and global activities.  This “backdrop” capitalism was crucial for me to better understand.  A better understanding of this would also help me understand my own complicity in the root causes of inequality.  I surmised that the entrenchment of systemic equality, also depended on an unwitting complicity at the heart of an economic system we have given God-like credence.  

It was fortuitus, as I mentioned above,  that I was returning from my sabbatical and needing to update my course offerings in the fall of 2020.  I was slated to teach two courses: “Rhetoric of Belief” and “Leadership Ethics and Meaning.”  I added more material that would help me work through with my students the issues that emerged from the pandemic and in particular the Black Lives Matter movement, as well as the right-wing populism that coalesced around Donald Trump.  I tried to develop a more cogent argument about the limitations of our capitalist system, especially in its neo-liberal and financial stage.  I wanted to better understand the new ways in which the economic context was a major driver in promoting inequality.  I realized that this was a life-long interest dating to my involvement in New Left activities in graduate school in Berkeley.  I was a member of an anti-imperialist research collective and the founder of a religious-socialist academic journal, Radical Religion, inspired by the early 2oth century version by the same name founded by Reinhold Niebuhr.  Therefore, It was not difficult to renew with vigor this effort.  But there was something different about this moment.  The starkness of how inequality and racism was exposed as a regular news item added a moral imperative to my work.  I also assumed that it was propitious time for real change.  I wanted to be part of the new expectation.  In addition, I was no longer in need of worrying about sustaining a family or tied to the constraints of an organizational setting now that I was on sabbatical and was soon to retire.  

I was enticed to take an “early retirement” with a year’s salary.  With the death of my first wife and the independence of my grown children, I had freedom to pursue topics of relevance to our global political, social, and environmental crisis.  There was time to reflect on these important issues.  My new wife and I bought a home on the coast of California and could enjoy a new life which provided time and space to read, think and write.  The topic of the American Academy of Religion’s fall annual conference, “provided the opportunity to pull together my thinking about Inequality as I contemplated refocusing my sabbatical research.

Just before the AAR opportunity I read a very challenging article in the New York Review of Books by cultural historian Jackson Lears that jolted my personal awakening about my complicity in helping to sustain inequality.  The article, “The Orthodoxy of Elites,” was a review of Applebaum’s book, The Twilight of Democracy, The Lure of Authoritarianism.  The review was very critical of Applebaum’s “center-right” ideas and lifestyle that epitomized “elitism” which Lears reasoned was a root cause of authoritarianism.  The review was a chance to put forth his critique of the downside of Americans version of meritocracy.  The consequence of this focus on merit had dire consequences for equality in the United States.  When merit joined hands with neo-liberalism it was a deadly potion creating winners and losers and breaking the bonds of solidarity and a sense of the common good.  Winners, deserved to be where there were, and losers were treated with disdain.  The seeds of Trump’s politics of grievance were given life in this scenario.  I could see myself as having imbibed in this orthodoxy.  Lears referred to Michael Sandal’s book, The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good.  At the time I made note of the book and eventually returned to reading it a few months later.  

Before reading Sandal, I worked my way through numerous articles and books to get a better grip on the current state of our economy and illustrations of systemic and structural racism and inequality. I suppose I could have gone directly to Picketty’s massive study of inequality but instead I decided to be more conversant with the inequality that faced me every day in my teaching, the student loan crisis.  Two books, The Debt Trap and Indentured Students: How Government-Guaranteed Loans Left Generations Drowning in College Debt, provided ample evidence of the relationship between educational inequity and capitalism.  A grizzly tale that keeps being repeated in a country that was founded on notions of equality.  

In telling this story in detail I hope to make a strong case for a new approach to education and for a movement to curtail the abuses of capitalism.  Yes, I will offer a clear notion of what I mean by capitalism and its relationship to intrenched power and self-serving elites, yes even those of us who unwittingly fit that judgment.  

The question I raised at the outset, why do we still have the abuses of capitalism also pertains to a similar question about student debt.  Even today, the Wall Street Journal reported on the abuses of student debt that allowed Baylor University to increase its wealth on the backs of the poor. Why?  Why do we still trust capitalist/private approaches to public goods, such as access to education?

A recent New Yorker article, that reviewed several books trying to analyze a decline in trust, made a startling observation that one thing we seem to still have trust in is “capitalism.”  As speculated before, for some reason we seem to think it is part of the natural order, “everything is predicated on its existence.”  Capitalism is like water or the air.  It is part of the natural order.  It seems as if we have come to accept inequality as also part of the natural order, even though equality is our goal as a society, what we do to make it happen, such as a focus on mobility and meritocracy, via a neoliberal set of financial mechanisms, exacerbates and deepens inequality especially for those with low incomes and people of color.

But I am getting ahead of my story.  During the pandemic, the nature of inequality in our society became visible and  transparent.  It laid bare the reality of a fractured and the truncated goal of the myth of creating a “more perfect union.”  As part of a daily news cycle, stories kept painfully flowing forth.  I decided to keep a running list of what the pandemic revealed about inequality in our society.  The presence of true oligarchs with massive wealth became what I would call my “oligarch watch.” Heading the list was Elon Musk’s tantrums about obeying public health requirements for how he should run his plant, partial closing, and social distancing.  He felt he could defy these orders.  His pay back was to “take his ball and go home.”  He decided to leave California.  What was exposed about flagrant use of wealth and power/influence by the tech giants is now common knowledge.  Bill Gates the hero of vaccines was less praiseworthy around his investment in land that he acknowledged was held for investment with little interest in how it was misused thus exacerbating food production for healthy eating. Bittman’s work on food, mentioned above,  documented the destruction of land and soil that Gate’s investments continue to denigrate.  

The rich did very well during the pandemic.  They got their share of the bailouts. They had insider information, changing their investments to gain from repositioning them in pandemic essential products.  The disconnect already mentioned between the loss of livelihood by so many people and the record-breaking returns on wall street, exposed the fact the money generated on wall street had little to do with the productivity of industry or what might help normal American families.  In an effort to forestall mass protests legislators created money to “soften” the dire impact of the unemployed and put money into the economy by consumption.  Short-term relief which still left in place the power and levers of systemic inequality and racism. 

One group of enlightened venture capitalists, gaining residence in a coastal California town for their second home, were able to fund covid testing for the whole town.  There should be a website for communities to advertise for venture capitalists to join them.  When poor communities in other parts of the state were not able to get tested, the local venture capitalist came to the rescue.  Other towns had to rely on a public health system that had been underfunded.  Is it possible to go all the way and even “privatize public health?  Joseph Heller would have field day with this.  To their credit the venture capitalist who stepped up to the plate to help their common folk, mused about how new wealth was pouring into this bucolic seaside town, so that in the future people with modest means could no longer afford to live there.  So, beware of inviting into your community the friendly trojan horse of inequality.

Sticking with wealth and privilege-exposed for more illustrations.  New Zealand has become a place where very wealthy could go to experience not just a gated community but a gated country.  It has become so obscene that even the New Zealanders have been offended and have tried to curtail the practice.  But money still talks.  So does the grand leveler, COVID.  Traveling to you compound in New Zealand to escape the virus has a new reality.  New Zealand is now one of the hot spots of the Delta variant.  There were so many stories about how private schools could find a way to stay open while public schools remained shuttered.  If you had lobbies with clout, you could get exemptions from the public health mandates.  Remember when real-estate agents become essential workers. Knowing how the economy works, this no doubt made sense.  But is this the kind of economy we want?  I continue to document these “facts” of life in the US

Then there were the protests.  We started seeing wildcat strikes.  But what galvanized the country more than even seeing the wealthy gain in the pandemic was to see the police brutality that was nightly reported on TV with the death of George Floyd. There was hope that we could finally confront the issue of systemic racism and with that systemic inequality that had the whole society in its grips.  Yet how quickly a reform movement was overwhelmed by the creation of a well-orchestrated attempt to make illegal attempts to further educate us on our history of racism that continues unabated today.  At a moment of self-analysis of our collective guilt and greater motivation to address and rectify this history, we now have laws outlawing education about our history.  Critical Race Theory (CRT) has been used to galvanize Republican voters to essentially nullify any of the gains of the Black Lives Matter Movement.  This is a remarkable turn of events.  So remarkable, what is being suppressed is any recognition and teaching of the existence of systemic racism or systemic inequality. 

The ironies and contradictions are so great that one has to wonder is blue, blue and red, red still true.  For two centuries our county denied the true story of our history to be told.  We in a sense “cancelled,” to use the most recent meaningless a historical concept, the voice of black and people of color, women, and indigenous people.  Now that the dominant society no longer controls the narrative, they are complaining about being cancelled.  No one should be cancelled but let us be honest about what we are doing.  We have gained a symbolic victory with Juneteenth holiday, but the underlying system and its supporters remain.

Again, why do we still have such power given to a system that creates inequality for so many people?  No doubt more people are better off today than before, but at what cost to them and society as a whole and oppressed people.  And if we are honest to our own well-being and our wager with the devil, our own soul. 

Capitalism: What is It?

During the recent presidential election and with great regularity, the supporters of the Republican Party have made a special point to characterize the Democratic Party and their policies as radical leftist and socialists.  This is not new in the United States, during the 1950’s anti-communism was the standard fare of the Republican Party. But they were not alone, many Democrats fell in line with this the winning political ploy to accuse people of being communists.  For much of the 1940’s Keynesian economists were driven from Economics Departments by accusing their policies as “collectivist” and leading to socialism.  This was the ground bed for instilling neo-liberalism and free market solutions to all institutions.  What struck me about the latest charges is that there was very little direct attacking of capitalism by politicians.  Therefore, there was less a need for politicians to defend capitalism. It is a good strategy to go on the offensive; by making the issue about socialism, the limitations of capitalism did not need to be defended.  

I have been a critic of capitalism for a long time.  I find its focus on profit and self-interest and solving public goods with private market driven solutions to be destructive of a humane life.  Since my graduate school days, however, I have not been specifically focused on honing my critique of capitalism.  My graduate course on “The Frankfurt School, was explicitly an attempt to help my students with a deeper understanding of a critique of Capitalism.  However, it has always been assumed in the work of what I find to be compelling.  My mentor, Robert Bellah, always had a trenchant critique of capitalism.  

The pandemic revelations have made me more focused on developing my understanding and critique of the current stage of capitalism.  The AAR held in San Diego, introduced me to the work of Kathryn Tanner, Christianity + the New Sprit of Capitalism based on her Gifford Lectures.  Harvey Cox’s book The Market as God was a standard text in my “Religion and Social Theory class.”  Yet my casual readings during the pandemic brought me in touch with two important biographies, one on John Maynard Keynes and the other on Thorsten Veblen.  The Keynes biography reminded me of how entrenched American academe was beholden to corporate business classes, forcing to stifle any critique of capitalism.  Keynes was no fire-brand socialist, but his followers with non-classical economics as their focus became targets.  

A serendipitous introduction to the author of a Veblen biographer allowed me to see how in the late 1800’s in America’s first gilded age, the stage was set to work out in the United States the future of capitalism.  In fact, capitalism was on its heels during this time.  The Progressive era did develop a critique and sought reforms that curtailed some the worst abuses.  But at theoretical level, in the academy there was a serious discussion about what the business owner deserved and what the producer of products (the wage worker) deserved.  Who contributed most to our economic well-being and what was a fair recompense for each of their talents? A rather arcane discussion about the marginal theory of value helped to decide the debate in favor of the capitalist owner.  

However, Veblen was clear in his book, The theory of Business Enterprise, the business enterprise was not a value which added to the good of the community.  The focus on profit maximization was its focus.  This was in the late 1800’s.  It sounds exactly like Bittman’s critique of the food industry.  The priority is not to produce healthy food on healthy land to feed people, it was to maximize profit by producing crops that could bring the owners greater wealth.  Products for private gain. Of course, there were workers employed by these enterprises who could earn money, yet not always for a living wage.   The dynamic was to hire low wage workers to again maximize the profits of the owners.  Very simply put for the capitalist enterprise, “the vital point of production…is the vendibility of the output, its convertibility into money values, not its serviceability for the needs of mankind.”  

Again, this type of economic system seemed destined to destroy many of the values of having a common life, one that values and supports social solidarity.  It destroys the positive parts of the traditional world of face to face helping each other.  

For me this led to a conundrum of why is it that Packer suggests that it was “critical theory” that breaks down tradition.  It seems to me critical theory is what helps us see the insanity of capitalism.  

It seems simple to me that capitalism, which harnessed technology for private gain, is not the answer.  Look at the technology/marketing organizations, the home ground of our oligarchs of today who have used a brand of “surveillance capitalism” to amass great wealth while continuing to foster an underclass. 

Who really is an honest supporter of capitalism and what do they say it is? As usual I stumbled across a book when cleaning out my campus office by Louis O. Kelso and Mortimer J. Adler, The New Capitalists: A Proposal to Free Economic Growth from the Slavery of Savings.  These were the authors of “The Capitalist Manifesto.”  Explicit apologetics for Capitalism. Not a set of statements that seem to be hiding something.  Kelso and Adler, or at least Adler, are not talking about, in Adler’s words, 19^th Century Capitalism, which was unjust, according to Adler.  He wants to promote an “ideal capitalism.”

19^th Century capitalism created the Gilded Age, monopolies, and massive wealth at the expense of the workers.  What Kelso and Adler want is a capitalism where everyone can benefit?  I assume where every household can be proud to say, “I am a capitalist.”  Their working definition of a capitalist “is a member of a household which derives not less than half of the amount the household spends on consumption from the ownership of capital, i.e. from interest, dividends, rents, royalties, and the like.”  At the writing in 1958, which became a New York Times best seller, they admitted that “Not over 1 percent of the households in the American economy would be capitalist households.”  They were projecting the future where one’s wealth was less from productive employment, that is, one’s labor, and more from their definition of capitalism.  Technology would force people to live by their capital.  There was a time in the 1950’s that commentators believed the stock market would be a democratizing vehicle to spread the wealth.  This belief seems to be driven by the fact that predatory investors were not dominating wall street. 

This type of thinking today is not possible.  What has emerged, even in the mind of popular movie-going culture, such as the “Big Short,” Wall Street bankers and investors are in a league of their own.  Retirement funds are part of middle-class wealth, but this is money that Wall Street gets to play with at our expense, or at least greater wealth in the hands of the privileged.  

It may be too simple to suggest that the internal dynamic of what creates wealth and eventually the way wealth has a way to make wealth making unhinged from human values of solidarity.  Kathleen Tanner put this dynamic this way, paraphrasing Max Weber, “Capitalism, at least in its startup phase, detaches…the pursuit of profit for the end of happiness, and in that way comes to make money and end in itself and to counsel hard work for its own sake. No matter how much money one makes, one is never satisfied.  Material needs may be met but that does not still the pursuit of more money; one always wants more of it, whatever one’s achieved state of happiness.  Indeed, one is willing to defer the enjoyment of life—perhaps indefinity—in favor of the hard work necessary to make more money.”

Not too much has changed over time, except “hard work” and an end in itself for the wealthy leisure class.  This was well documented in Veblen notion of conspicuous consumption” of the first Gilded Age, which still exists today, in more than just the wealthiest.  In a study commissioned by the Federal council of Churches in the early 1950’s to examine the relationship of ethics and religion in “a business society,” also documented a loss of “certainty of purpose.”  The businessman “somehow got his means inextricably confused with his ends.  He sought wealth, but beyond the limited wants of bodily comfort he had no real sense of why he was seeking it.”  The study went on to suggest that there were consequences such as resentment over the “abuses he was helping to cause. First, he was muckraked; later, with the New Deal he was pretty much ignored.”  The focus of this and other studies was to examine whether ethical and religious values could still be alive in business.  These studies were funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.  The assumption of the book written to interpret the studies was that even with abuses, there was and could be a counterweight to mitigate the abuses.  

Tanner’s work was set in the context of late-stage capitalism, what she calls finance capitalism.  A similar undermining of ends with means or when the means become ends is further explored in her book.  Other forms of capitalism are analyzed today, such as surveillance capitalism.  We need to take some time to better understand the consequences of new brands of capitalism.  But for now, we just have to understand that with the ascendance of neo-liberalism, when supported by center left and center right parties, solutions to the public goods, like heath care and education were important social ends and values, were addresses with the means of the market and privatization solutions. Resulting in the same outcome. The means became the ends.  The case of education, making money off student loans became the primary focus for banks, lending agencies and even the US government. Given that capitalism was natural, so was the market.  What was needed was what motivated Max Weber, to problematize capitalism.  He wanted to make capitalism seem unnatural.  It was the product of human made systems.  We needed to understand its origin and its role if we were to avoid its limitations.  

Unfortunately, Weber’s concern has had a weak history.  Harvey Cox in his book, The Market as God,  reminds us that the Market has taken on a divine nature, more than just natural, it has become a religion with many high priests as economics and their legions toiling in the day trading stalls. 

Where we are today with little understanding of capitalism and our own relationship to its clutches.  The chances of reforming it remains problematic, particularly when politicians present any reform efforts as undermining personal freedom.  In Kelso Adler book, we see the dog whistle codes that alert American’s to “creeping socialism,” particularly with new deal programs.  They highlight some of the most egregious policy effort in 1958 that need to be fought or rolled back.  Private market solutions are the answer.  Easy to argue when much of our public goods have been stripped of resources.  The list is instructive:

To understand the charge of “creeping socialism,” one need only make a checklist out of the ten-point program which Marx and Engels proposed in 1848 and which they described as a way of making progressive “inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production.” The measures they proposed for “socializing” the economy by wresting “all capital from the bourgeoisie” and centralizing “all instruments of production in the hands of the State,” are as follows: 

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes. 

2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax. 

3. Abolition of all right of inheritance. 

4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels. 

5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly. 

6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State. 

7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan. 

8. Equitability of all to labor. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture. 

9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equable distribution of population over the country. 

10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc., etc. 

Free education for all children in public schools.  How could this be controversial?  And a form of socialism?  

Higher Education: A Case Study 

Let me summarize the issue here which has been remarkably documented in two books: The Debt Trap and Indentured Student.  These two books combined with Michael Sandal’s The Tyranny of Merit give us a classic illustration of the destructiveness of using unchecked private financial institutions as the means to “use” education to alleviate inequality.  

The means in this case was a toxic brew of merit, mobility, financial lending, on the backs of the educational consumer, the student and his or her family.  The end was the realization that inequality by the late 1960’s was on the rise.  It continued unabated until on the eve of the Great Recession, like on the eve of the crash of 1929 the “upper decile of US national income peaked” relative to the rest of society.  In 2007, the “richest tenth of a percent of American households now control as much wealth as the bottom 90%.”  But in late 1960’s there was a moment that could have avoided this outcome.  At the time President Lyndon Johnson as part of his Great Society program wanted to guaranteed access to higher education for the American student of all classes.  This, he believed would allow for greater mobility and thus give the US an educated population and elevate the poor to middle class citizenship.  If you worked hard and played by the rules you would be rewarded with a successful lifestyle.  Education was the key for Johnson and for subsequent policy and rhetoric of future Presidents up through Barak Obama.  

In a sense this could be by creating for all that the GI Bill created for returning veterans.  The difficulty during massive spending for other Great Society efforts and the Vietnam war, was how to finance this goal.  In order to get financing passed direct government grants had to be morphed into a public-private partnership that included low-cost loans directly to students. The profit that a was generated by these loans to banks and other lending agencies, including the government authorized agencies that supplied government guaranteed loans became a scandal of predatory agencies amassing fortunes in debt repayments.  Reform of the process was difficult to attain when notions about education as a right and public good receded from the politics of Washington and the American republic.  Personal responsibility, fostered by a neoliberal commitment of both parties won the day.  By the early 2000s student debt was almost equal to the mortgage debt that drove the crash in 2007.

How did this happen?  The American public bought the notion, which was largely true, that without a college degree, your chance for a success in the US was limited.  Second, lending agencies gave out loans that were not likely to be repaid.  As guaranteed loans, the government aka the taxpayers would bail them out.  Colleges and University did not have to worry for they did not make the loans.  Student, families, and the taxpayers suffered.  But the drive for a higher education credential continued.  Once graduating the average student debt was over 50,000 and more if graduate education was added.  For profit colleges made promises for employment that were not real.  Poor students not only become indentured to their loans, but they had little chance to repay them.  The goal of reducing inequality in our society by this means was truncated.  Inequality increased. 

Eventually one of the “means” for equality, “mobility” became an “end.”  However, mobility could never deliver the goods, especially when colleges and universities were the vehicle to determine who got the chance to be mobile.  Entrance to college was based on a notion of merit.  A progressive idea that on face value made sense but, was not what the financialization of college access could produce.  There still was great disparity of wealth in the country, many graduated from college either with less debt or a built-in pathway for employment to repay the debt.  But if you were lucky enough to graduate there was a psychology of deserving what you achieved for you worked hard.  This created two classes, the winners, and losers.  The consequence of these dynamics, for the poor was even if you were told you were a winner, the cost of winning was a kind of servitude.  

As I mentioned at the outset, I became part of this charade  of equality as a professor. The real winners where colleges and University that did not have to be accountable for student debt and made it worse by raising tuition to the point that the gap between what the student could afford from their own resources and what college did to “discount” tuition always created a “gap” that necessitated larger and larger loans to finance their education.

The societal will to use it resources to guarantee a just educational access ended up making financial institutions rich.  The money spent to prop up this system was more costly than if we gave direct loans to students.  The lobbying efforts of financial interests controlled many legislators to keep them in business and bailed them out as well.  The first big organization to be bailed out as too big to fail in the 2007 financial crisis was Fanny Mae.  

What did we learn from this so-called public-private partnership?  Not much, the system still goes on.  Why, again it seems as if this type of “private” solutions for public good remains the social philosophy on which our country rests.  Not only has capitalism, in general, not been problematized, neither has its current most entrenched representative financial capitalism. 

Why?  Systemic and structural inequality has been exposed.  Who can come to its defense? Who benefits?  A book review of Sandal’s Tyranny of Merit may give us a clue.  Barton Swim is an editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal. His January 5, 2021, review of The Tyranny of Merit, acknowledges the loss of social solidarity and agrees with several key points of Sandal.  However, he takes so-called left liberals like Sandal to task for several failings.  First Sandal fails to trace the breakup of American life to “the invidious phenomena of identity politics back to the cultural revolution of the 1960s,” and for expressing “little regret for the left’s hostility to religion and contempt for tradition.”

He accuses Sandal of placing too much blame on this breakup of “various forms of market deregulation.”  Further, the left blamed the free enterprise policies of the 1980s and 90s for “legitimating greed and widened inequality.”  Swaim sees that liberals find the origins of our problems in modern welfare liberalism. Further liberals see the origins of our problems as “mainly structural and economic, and so the solutions must lie in institutional rearrangements and economic redistribution. This according to Swaim allows liberals to “blame markets for inequality and inequality for everything.”  I wonder what he would think about so many committed religious thinkers having a whole conference on the issue of inequality.???? 

Swaim puts his cards on the table with his final two sentences: “But markets didn’t give us no-fault divorce, rampant illegitimacy, welfare dependency, political correctness and elite contempt for religious belief.  Liberals did.”

The ideology behind Swaim’s sentiments is from a position of certainty very little need to defend or give arguments for why there is a direct causal relationship between societal breakdown and a critique of structural inequality, for example.  It would seem that a well-documented abuse of the lending institutions might motivate the victims to have greater confidence in their government and institutions.  Saying that welfare dependency is the cause of societal breakdown, when an argument could be made that this dependence is the product of an unjust economic system and an inordinate amount of societies wealth that goes to just a few people.  To give him the benefit of the doubt, might he be saying that we are a society that might be too forgiving to welfare fraud and creating a psychological willingness to be taken care of?  Yes, that should be addressed.  But what about our willingness to coddle corporate oligarchs and bail out banks too big to fail while the executives continue to amass large salaries.  Yes, this type of welfare needs to be addressed as well.  But in his critique of what I assume he thinks is a permissive society that has forsaken religious values, he misses the chance to use those religious values he subscribes to create a more just society, which does entail greater regulations.  He does not like government technocrats, but it seems to me he fails to admonish the technocrats in the corporate world who make 10 times the salaries as government officials. 

His real antipathy seems to be for the 60s and 70s, and “identity politics.”  This seems to me to be a code critique that covers anything the so-called conservatives want to rail against.  You just need to say the words, and you can fill in the blank, from feminism to socialism.  You don’t need to give arguments; you just need to claim either cancel culture or political correctness. 

As a professor of religion and practicing Christian.  I hang around many so-called leftists who have a great appreciation for religion and spiritual values.  As a Niebuhrian and a social scientist with a value for many parts of our tradition.  The need to continue to embrace healthy communities with mitigating efforts to sustain family and community ties is part of the commitment of many on the so-called left.  The destruction of tradition and community life in our rural communities have less to do with not valuing tradition and more to the avarice of agribusiness and corporate entities that are not tied to local communities.  Swaim wants the left to be more self-reflective, and perhaps humbler.  I guess I could agree that more of this is needed, by myself included.  How about a competition for more genuine self-reflection, game on with Barton Swaim?

The charge that “identity politics” are the most toxic reality working against social solidarity and a sense of the common good needs to be unpacked for it is also leveled by many liberals.  Swaim needs to read George Packer’s Last Best Hope book to find a liberal ally.  Maybe they are strange bedfellows.  Maybe they share some of the same elite orthodoxy that Sandal and others such as Jackson Leers addressed as recounted above.  

Before using the lens of inequality to address the topic of my comparative research on the Graduate Theological Union and the World Council of Churches’ Ecumenical Institute.  Let us evaluate the extent to which “identity politics” has become the whipping post of some on the left and almost all on the right. 

A Reflection on My Own “Bias”

In George Packer’s Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewalhe articulates the world view of four major strands of American life.  He lays out the narratives that inform each of the “Americas.  They are all common to us as they get much attention in the media and contemporary social commentary.  What Packer does is to put each narrative in a box that allows each group to have a sense about their understanding of the world without having to relate to the other narratives.  In classic ideal type methodology, Packer can dissect each narrative in detail.  While reading his cogently presented types, I felt an unease.  I felt the most unease about the fourth narrative, what he calls the “Justice” narrative.  I was not certain whether my unease had to do with him challenging some of my cherished ideas or was he misrepresenting them to build his case for his hope for a new America the that he calls “Equal America.”

My prejudice is that without the narrative of Justice America, there would be no hope for an Equal America.  He is right to point out some of the “dark side” of Justice America.  But he even grants that it maybe will fulfill its goal for an equal America.  For now, I just want to take issue with one of the key influences of Justice America, what is labelled “critical theory.”  As someone who has studied and learned from critical theory in its evolution from the Frankfurt school up through its most visible proponent, Jurgen Habermas I needed to examine my own relationship to Packer’s critique. Critical theory has never been a theory that I accepted in all its forms.  In fact, many strands of it are not in agreement.  I saw critical theory as a serious attempt to help me understand the world.  I had difficulty with some of the approaches that excluded a better understanding of religion and the role of some of the traditional values embedded in healthy and organic communities.  In terms of religion, someone like Habermas has evolved.  Other theorist, like Charles Taylor or Robert Bellah who have been informed by critical theory, have challenged some of the implications of critical theory that have dismissed “tradition.” I consider myself in the vein of Bellah and Taylor.  

In Stuart Jeffries’s Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School, we get a full disclosure history of the merits and foibles of the Frankfurt School.  Very simply he states what he thinks is the best way to understand agenda of critical theory:

“If Critical Theory means anything, it means the kind of radical re-thinking that challenges what it considers to be the official versions of history and intellectual endeavor.  Benjamin initiated it, perhaps, but it was Max Horkheimer who gave it a name when we became the director of the Frankfurt School in 1930:  critical theory stood in opposition to all those ostensible craven intellectual tendencies that thrived in the twentieth century and served as tools to keep an irksome social order in place—logical positivism, value free science, positivist sociology among others.  Critical theory stood in opposition, too to what capitalism does to those it exploits—buying us off cheaply with consumer goods, making us forget that other ways of life are possible, enabling us to ignore the truth we are ensnared in the system by our fetishistic attention and growing addiction to the purportedly must-have new consumer good.”

When all is said and done critical theory’s biggest sin in all its forms is to challenge the status quo that sustains power in the hands of a few, such as various forms of capitalism. The problematizing of capitalism cannot be allowed.  The other “sin” of critical theory is that it implicates all of us in some way, especially those of us who benefit from the system with our ignorance or benign acceptance.  

Packer wants to make critical theory a villain that has influenced unsuspecting students by higher education, creating a type of monolithic group thought that shuts down other points of view.  What does it take to analyze one set of monolithic system that is not even recognized as a problem?  This seems to me the dilemma that is before the Justice narrative as this has been the challenge of all radical reform movements in human history. It is good to point out the dark side of Justice America.  And Justice America will have attend to its own issues.  But my money is on the genuine protests that come out of an enlightened struggle, that seek redress not just for one group but for all groups.

My best example from my life is the woman’s movement. But the basic point I want to make is that, without the solidarity of woman to woman, the kind of activism that Packer wants may never happen.  It took a wide range of views within the movement to sort out what was best for an individual and what would keep the movement alive.  Also, the closing off of men’s voices at times, was a necessary event to give women the space to hear their own voice.  Of course, as a “target” of male privilege it was painful at times to be dismissed as not getting it.  Was I guilt ridden and turned into a self-hating person?  Yes, I did feel guilt and regret.  But that was a good jolt to self-examination.  In the end my relationship to my wife was deepened with our struggle together for her equality.  As a family, my daughters were given a better story about their own worth and aspirations. The blanket criticism about “identity politics” is wrong.  Can we point to excesses so that some of my students in the late 1990’s could use words like feminazi’s?  But this female student had a seat at the educational table for many feminists’ struggle before them.

Packer’s “condemnation” of identity politics like his blanket condemnation of “critical theory” play into a mindset that he wants to criticize, close-minded destructive group think.  A complex set of ideas get reduced to a code word that dismisses every Frankfurt school thinker and critical theory ideas, one’s that could be helpful to address the abuses of our society that he also analyzes and agrees with.  As someone who has taught courses to help students understand the value and limitations of critical theory, I can say that his characterization of critical theory does not match my understanding of the broad range of ideas that are represented from Benjamin and Adorno to Habermas and Butler and the many theorists who have learned from these thinkers from Hannah Arendt and Charles Taylor to Harvey Cox and Paul Tillich.  If Packer’s big beef with critical theorists is that they want profound change, which I think is likely the case, then I am bewildered.  For there are times in the book that the grievances he has with the lack of equality in our society will only be dealt with radical change.  He wants to put his hope on “journalism, government and activism.”  There is a substantive issue to be addressed in these categories:  what kind of journalism, government, and activism?  His use of Garvey, Perkins and Ruskin as his ideal proponents in each of these categories only begin to answer this question.  Critical theorists do have something to contribute to these categories.  How about the journalism of Nikole Hannah-Jones, the government policies of Bernie Sanders, the activism of Stacy Abrams?  It seems to me that they should be part of mix of each of these categories, even with their so-called “far left” credentials.  

If Packer wants to really understand the failure of higher education around the issue of “critical thought” it would be wise to see how much of higher education talks more about “critical thinking” than virtue or moral formation.  We have reduced education to the sound bite of critical thinking without much understanding that it takes moral judgement to be a thoughtful, and dare I say a critical thinker.  When we have detached the two, we do have a problem.  If Packer wants to put this failure at the feet of critical theory, identity politics or even political correctness, I am sure there is a bigger story to tell. The decline of the humanities could be one place to look. 

You could argue that some humanities departments in expanding the canon and developing critiques of patriarchy, racism, and colonialism, made them narrower.  It is paradoxical how expansion gets criticized for a narrowing.  Professionalization of education could be sited as another cause.   That is the student debt crisis, which “forced” students into majors that would produce jobs, as it was argued, even if of limited evidence was also a factor. The truth is that we lost a sense of the humanities at least in the sense of Cicero’s view.  According to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “Whiteness and the Humanities, An Impasse” by Simon During, a profess of English at the University of Melbourne, Cicero’s studia humanitis or artes liberales meant: “all the various ways of studying the human world were connected and affiliated.”  Cicero claimed “his ability as an orator owed much to the literature, history and Greek language” that his Syrian mentor, Archias had taught him. For Cicero, the humanities underpinned not just Roman society’s, but every society’s ability to achieve great qualities: politeness and generosity (which the work humanities also denoted at the time); consciousness of the past; the capacity to communicate successfully and to honor past and present achievements.” I would argue adding “education” to Parker’s trinity of journalism, government and activism.” A loss of humanities departments in the academy will mean that there is no counter narrative to the dominant departments in the academy.  During traces the beginning of the loss was when Latin and Greek were “sidelined in the West.”  This, according to During was “only at the point when capitalism required an increasing portion of the population to focus on topics thought to be of immediate material use. It is During’s thesis that the humanities own long history cannot just be seen as the tool of “whiteness.” He quotes from Gramsci and Du Bois the importance of the “classics” to the formation of individuals, especially for Gramsci a “revolutionary society.  But During is not sanguine that charges of white supremacy in the academy will not end unless the realities of white power and racism will be addressed in society in general.  In the meantime, he argues for a limited strategy in the academy: stay focused on telling the complicated story of the humanities which includes its warts and all.  A good starting point for all activism, journalism, and government with the help of education helping us to know our own history.

A New Formulation of the Project

What the culture wars and the commentary of Packer has helped me formulate is a clearer understanding of what is at stake in my evolving desire to look through the lens of how inequality has been increasing in our society and how little we seem to be able to do about addressing the issue.  For me, if it had not been for the pandemic, where inequality has been so exposed, I also may have not been so motivated to address it. 

What seemed to be at the heart of the inability to deal with inequality was the extent to which capitalism, in its current form, neo-liberalism, was seen to be natural and uncontested.  Or in the language of Max Weber, not “problematized.”  This was not a new reality.  It has been the strategy of wealth and power from the beginning of industrial capitalism; that is, to cast it as the normal course of human history, where the so-called benefits for the greatest number always had the collateral damage of the few, even though the evidence for this itself had to have ideological cover.  There have been many apologetics for capitalism.  The ideological cover that emerged out of evolutionary theory about “competition” and social evolutionary theory, was a powerful justification with the notion of the “survival of the fittest.”  Marginalization theory in economics also gave theoretical rationalizations for the business owner, the capitalist, to feel good about profiting from the labor of others. 

The recent notion about the “end of history” is another profound example.  With the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Thatcherism and Reganism it was assumed that capitalism in its classical form was the only game in town.  Other contributing factors were the fading of a left-wing resistance that had dissipated after the absorption of new left reforms manifested in civil rights legislation and new laws expanding the rights of women.  If critical theory was the only game in town to offer an alternative view, it too became disillusioned with its ability to offer a theoretical critique and to mobilize a viable practice of revolution.  As some feel it morphed into negation and the negativity of “postmodern” deconstruction.  There is merit in this assessment both within the critical theory circles and those outside wanting more than deconstruction.  A new vision, a new narrative, a new myth was wanted. Critical theory did not provide it, at least not with some of the original thinkers, such as Horkheimer and Adorno.

What emerged were theorists such as Jürgen Habermas who attempted to make use of existing liberal tendencies in social democratic societies, building on key aspects of the enlightenment and key insights from their critical theory sources.  Even as the “system,” defined by the capitalist logic of instrumental reason gained greater and greater control over the “life world” of everyday human relations, in the family, churches, organic community life, there could still emerge out of these changes a “dialectic” that would open new spaces of hope and critique of the roughest edges of system control.  This combined with the insights of critical theorists of a critique of capitalism and the perennial desire of values of the enlightenment of social solidarity that would not go away in the human soul or psychology.  What are examples about “new spaces” and how could they emerge and how could they be sustained?  

To sustain and aid these spaces was the need to advance and preserve public spaces of legitimate dialogue, according to Habermas, where respectful communication could lead to compromise for the common good.  For Habermas, certain parts of traditional and religious values could play a role in these conversations.  Habermas was unlike most of the early critical theorists who identified status quo power being aided by certain forms of religion and traditional life, functioning as an “opiate of the people.”  Habermas’s approach was criticized for romanticizing a period time when white men of wealth could hold such conversations; but the world today was different. How could you have conversations where women, and the underclass were not invited and assume something positive would occur for the good of society.   The social and movements of today put to test the ability of liberal democracies to reform themselves and include more voices.   

One could argue that in fact liberation movements operated in new “spaces” allowing for a challenge to the increasing clutches of neo-colonialism and neo -liberalism.  The perennial “cry of the oppressed” did not go away.  In fact, it increased in the 60s and 70s of the 20^th century.  These protest or “liberation” movements were an illustration of the wedding of three forces in alliance: criticism from critical theory, alternative values of American tradition and religion, and some of the human values coming from the enlightenment.  All of these combined for a desire for change, fundamental change.  It was not going to be easy.  Power does not give away to new power without a reactionary fight.  What emerged were the woman’s movement, the environmental movement, the civil rights movement, and the back to the land movement that gave up on status and technology.  There were critiques of capitalism, a flirting with socialism and small-scale communism.  However, these movements seemed fade into small enclaves of resistance and into academic circles in certain departments of the humanities.  Today he tight grip on the life world by the “end of history” ideology, seemed to provide few “spaces” of reform and resistance.  

Yet now of a significant dystopian culture, new protests emerged perhaps, still being seeded by the 60s and 70s.  What has emerged today with social movements, from Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter, aided by a pandemic is that capitalism is now a contested notion.  The good news is that at a moment when all of life seems to become a commodity, that is “the life world itself” the politics of subjectivity got energized.  For these movements there was a focus on my individual oppression, my experience, my identity.  This is an inheritance from the 60s and 70s. Many on the right want to blame everything of these efforts. There is a good reason for vilifying them.  They are challenging the status quo and their power.  I believe subjectivity is not the total answer and can lead to some of the excesses of so-called identity politics, but it is an essential first step to self-awareness for oneself, solidarity for one’s identity group and hopefully if channeled a great solidarity for society, with ever expanding solidarities for global society.  This was the hope and vision for early critical theorists when they talked about cosmopolitanism. Center-left critiques of “identity politics” also fail to give subjectivity is due. For some critical theorists, who had already rejected classical forms of “vanguard” politics of the proletariat, such as Marcuse, saw these movements as the new agents of change.  

I believe it will take criticism based on “negation” to start the process. Perhaps the danger is that it could lead to post-modernism.  Yet even these theories were crucial to relativize what for some had become gods.  Capitalism for example still maintained its status as natural.  Why? And how do we move forward.  For me the work of Robert Bellah offers a way forward.  In his book of the 1970s, The Broken Covenant, he offers a dialectic of understanding American society.  First, is the need to acknowledge the evils on which US society was built. Here is line with Benjamin on telling a truthful history. Without this history a constructive vision and practice cannot happen.  Second, he sorts through American history for those values which could be reappropriated for a continues project of a more perfect union. There are four traditions, which he later identifies with his co-authors of Habits of the Heart, Bibilcal, Republican, Expressive Individualism and Utilitarian individualism. 

What is instructive here is that Bellah is affirming the need for critical theory, a serious discussion about the past sins of the United States.  I would maintain that critical race theory (CRT) is also in the tradition of Bellah.  It is an attempt to come to grip with our past and not an innocent nation. CRT not as the total answer to us moving forward, but it is an essential ingredient in coming to terms with the American project.  Out of this discussion we can then marshal the resources for fundamental change that need to happen.  If we do not acknowledge this past any future vision and practice will be truncated.  However, it must not just stay with criticism.  There are resources within the strand of theory represented by Bellah and his conversation partners that also include very prominently Charles Taylor and Habermas.  This has led to Habermas understand how religion could be a participant in the public square. A small book documenting a seminar event that included, Charles Taylor, Judith Butler, Cornell West and Habermas on The Power of Religion in The Public Sphere is worth noting.  

The conversation in this book is also an illustration of the crucial role of the insights of past critical theory, now re-imagined with insights of the heirs of critical theory, West, Taylor and Butler.  

Looking at the two institutions of my study I need to analyze and document this dialectic of critical theory and its accommodation with the enlightenment, with religion and with tradition. As explicitly religious organizations I will need to factor in whether their evolution might give us answers as to what their contribution might be a way out of the current impasse of our society where religion has been marginalized as a constructive voice.

Is there an implicit or explicit criticism of capitalism as a contended notion that might emerge from these organizations?  Will the vision of the imago deo be a constructive vision that is part of the discussion?  And where in their histories were they complicit in the drive toward neo-liberalism?

How do you make manifest the best of religious and spiritual values in life?  There is a long history from Rauschenbusch and the social gospel to the Niebuhr’s, and from Sojourners to Pope Frances on these points.  

If Packer is not able to incorporate these religious contributions, I am not sure he will be able to offer what is needed with his hope for a society that tries to live up to its visions of equality.  Allude to Richard Falk’s point about the role of religion here.  

I now turn to using these insights to decide what should be the story I tell about Bossey and the GTU.

As ecumenism recedes and is engulfed by neo-liberalism do new spaces open in inter-religious encounters and service to an “unchurched” world?  What might the contributions of animistic consciousness of Michael Pollen as promoted by Harvard Divinity School conversations?

Does the latest Wuthnow book help us?

In summary, my lens is to first document the latest narrowing of reality by the latest version of capitalism, marginalizing religion, and other enlightenment values. In doing this assess how the GTU and Bossey have been unwitting allies in this “system” colonization. 

But then turn to how this latest system control can lead to new spaces of humanity that will in fact “contest” the system.  I will then look at how the GTU and Bossey might play this role in opening up the spaces to problematize the system, especially in its neo-liberal form of capitalism.  

A new lens:  Looking at My Sabbatical Project through the Lens of Inequality 

My instinct was to craft a research project for my sabbatical two years ago, before the pandemic to compare two graduate religious educational organizations was based on a desire to contribute to human’s self-understanding about our religious nature.  Perhaps in retrospect it was more about a personal search about my evolution on as a religious person.  I was comparing two schools that I attended.  I felt that this self-exploration might still reveal some insights about the future of religious practice.  I was not sure, however, if this would turn out to be true.  But I guess I felt it would at least be personally helpful.  My plan was to do mainly archival work with some helpful conversations with individuals associated with both schools.  I wanted the data to speak for itself as best as it could without me formulating a thesis in advance.  I wanted this to be a discovery process.  

In retrospect, I am not sure what more could be said about the future of religion than what had already been written by so many with more intellectual heft or spiritual gifts than I.  My main professor in graduate school and friend, Robert Bellah, had just published his magnum opus on religion in human evolution.  What more could be said about religion when you think about the legions of books on the subject from practitioners to critics?

My early research was compelling, but often not for what I had assumed.  Much of my early research, especially for Bossey, was about how the origins were funded by large grants from John D. Rockefeller Jr.   The connection to US global capitalism after WWII interested me.  This led me to do research not just in the archives of the World Council of Churches but also the Rockefeller archives in New York.  The connection of liberal Protestantism to the ecumenical Movement struck me as an important story.  Recalling that Rockefeller also help establish the funding the for the United Nations seemed part of larger strategy to foster a global order on new foundations after WWII in both material terms, (US hegemony), and spiritual, (US ecumenical Protestantism).  The Rockefeller’s were Baptists.  John Sr. funded Baptist missionaries around the world, but now John Jr.  wanted a larger pallet of religious sentiment, ecumenism.  Very convenient for a “new world order.”  If it took a wedding of capitalism and Protestantism to create the Ecumenical Institute, founded even before the World Council of Churches for which Rockefeller also gave a grant to build the headquarters in Geneva, what would be the future of such a beginning strange?  And what exactly was the nature of this beginning, religiously?  Only questions were being posed at the beginning of my sabbatical project. 

The issue of expanding religious organizational life beyond Protestantism was another issue.  How did the WCC and Bossey think about the Orthodox, the Catholics; and if in fact ecumenism meant the whole inhabited world, what about other faiths or even the non-institutional spiritual traditions?  What kind of encounter would ensue with these other traditions? And what would be the material basis for funding such an encounter?  Who would benefit and why?  These questions are only now being posed by me.

On the inter-religious front, the answers seemed to be clearer or at least easier to research at the Graduate Theological Union.  From the beginning the GTU had its origin in something greater than liberal Protestantism:  Three Catholic seminaries, Jesuits, Dominicans, and Franciscans joined five Protestant seminaries, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Unitarians (not actually Protestant) and by virtue of the inter-denominational seminary, Pacific School of Religion, the United Church of Christ, and the Disciples of Christ.  Joining the Christian seminaries were two centers, The Center for Jewish Studies, and the Institute for Buddhist Studies.  Why this consortium emerged is a complex story, but aiding it were several important social and cultural factors.  First, it developed a partnership relationship with the most prestigious public secular University in the United States and maybe the world, The University of California, Berkeley.  Any graduate program was going to be defined to a large degree by cosmopolitan University standards not parochial religious ones.  Second, this was the Bay Area, the home of liberal values in religious life, encounters with other world faiths as witnessed by the Pan American exhibit in 1918, promoting peace among all religious traditions, facilitated by local church leaders, the UC Berkeley chancellor, and the Governor of California.  Thirdly, in the late mid 1960s we were in the height of the ecumenical movement both in the US and in the World council of churches. 

The material basis of the founding of the GTU was more inchoate.  Was it the synergy of the multiple schools pooling resources that created surplus capital to fund a central and coordinated center where all could gain?  Was it the growth of student enrollment in the late 60s that was generated by many seminarians coming to faith during the Viet Nam draft?  Was it the addition of elite Bay Area wealth that began supporting the GTU with the promise of access to prestige?  Was it the work of the holy spirit?   I have only begun to ask this material questions.  Why?

The pandemic’s revelations of inequality in our society made me think about my research in new ways.  I wanted to be more attentive to what drove the inequality in our society. This seemed to me to a more compelling way to spend my time if I really wanted to make a difference in understanding my world.  I concluded that my comparative study of these two organizations might yield some answers.  Also, I thought it a better focus than just why the two organizations evolved the way they did in terms of inter-religious studies.  Today I am asking whether the inter-religious focus at the GTU and the more orthodox Christian focus of Bossey might have been motivated more the more practical survival desire.  So, I am now more interested the in what will sustain their material viability, in crass terms, their “business plans.”  

The GTU has become a full-fledged consortium for inter-religious study, adding a Muslim Center, a Hindu university and partnership with other religious groups.  The viability of the original group of schools has faded with the evolution of the various Christian seminaries, either leaving the GTU or providing less financial support.  Evangelical partners were not likely, but other world faiths wanting to be more mainstream and having access to the UCB could be the financial token. 

The World Council of Churches as the home of the Ecumenical Institute was not going to go the route of the GTU.  Its financial future was only secure, and even that was debated, would be to remain a Christian Organization.  Though, with the reduction of American church and philanthropic support vanishing, the nature of the Christian material base had to evolve.  Europe was still capable of support.  The former missionary churches were not going to be able to replace the US.  New financing schemes have emerged so that today Bossey’s budget is supported by over 50 different church groups or agencies around the world and a hospitality hotel.

The question is how do we survive?  How do we now fund our vision?  And when we ask the survival question does the answer create a new vision……and then who are we?  We can see a shift in our behavior.  Analogously to an individual similar dynamics arise when we confront survival…..pay the bills, raise a family….etc.  

My awakening about inequality in the US was stoked by the higher education debt crisis.  In this case I had to look at the machinations of the neo-liberal capital forces that sought private profit instead of public good.  Was there a similar dynamic going on with the GTU and the WCC/Bossey that in effect fostered inequality?  What were the material contexts that might influence the educational experience of these two institutions to foster, at least inadvertently inequality?  For Bossey on the global scale, for the GTU within graduate theological education.  And in turn what impact would these forces have on religious education, scholarship, and practice?  

Is graduate education, especially with in theology, a different reality than that in the funding of underrate or graduate schools in the US?  Do religious values mitigate against some of the predatory practices in higher education in the US?  Do the more reasonable costs mitigate against these practices.  

For Bossey how most of its student cost can be covered by grants, when only a small portion of the students are full payers.  Who decides who is worthy of admission to the graduate school at Bossey?  Does the greater reliance of Bossey’s prestige on its affiliation with the University of Geneva, hinder a student body of diversity and create a global meritocracy of credentialed elites who return to their countries to foster even greater disconnect between them and their local religious populations?

What I am left with now is a series of new questions that are different and more focused on the issue of inequality.  Is there a connection between inequality and evolution of these organiszation to seek financial viability through survival and less about mission and vision?

And again, why hasn’t capitalism been contested by these organizations?  Why hasn’t systemic racism been address? Or if it has, what does it look like, and can we learn from it?

Here is the conundrum:

If we really understood how our economic and social system worked to privilege a few and if we were truly aware of our own complicity in this system, that is how we benefited to be bought off by the system, then we would have to face the existential dilemma and do something:

Either admit our complicity and join the privileged

Or admit the complicity and do something to change, realizing that the web we are in has to include a critique of others but also ourselves……

In regard to my research, I would have to see myself ensnared in the grip of inequality as well as the two institutions also ensnared.

What does this look like:

1. Need to describe the forces of inequality, like non-productivity theory

2. See the GTU buying into this system but often trying to get out of it, 

3. See the EI trying to get out of it….yet contradictions are too much, what about the move to become a hospitality center.

October 3, 2021

A further big issue for me is:

Why is it when we know so much of how inequality has happened that we still do so little to change it?  

There are various obvious answers:

1.  The nature of capitalism that seems to be normal and it the only game in town, 

2. We give up because, this is just human nature, tribalism, etc.  we are resigned to  it and just try to do what works for us

3. We are not the one’s most affected.  Not the victums.  Not black.  It is okay to just let other people suffer for we do not value them anyway or they are really not humans

4. My favorite:  we are bought off and participate in the spoils of the system, we justify it because either we deserve it due to our merit or others have just not had the motivation to do something to rise up

What are the consequences:

1.  We are in the dynamic of creating social unrest, whether it is the “left behind” whites or the victims of racism, sexism, classism, etc.

2. We diminish ourselves if we allow others to suffer when there are solutions that could be implemented

What are the signs of these conundrums and dynamics  in the organizations that I study?

GTU

It may be easier to answer this for the GTU for it is an attempt to be a place of elite education, at least historically.  What it is today to try to grapple with these self-understandings is not clear.  Also, it is not clear that it is able to do this without a total transformation of its funding and how it relates to and is embedded in the system that is structurally organized to foster inequality, even if it wanted to.

Being tied to the “utilitarian calculus,” like us all, where organizational survival is paramount (like the United Presbyterian Church) there will be less of an orientation to values and mission.

This seems to me to be what has undermined the viability of the various organizations that are part of the GTU.  This dates back to how it handled the Gottwald affair and the Jock Brown affair.

How do I get at this issue with the GTU?

1. Talk to the institutions that are still viable at the GTU:  The Buddhists for example.  Did they “survive” because they had a better “business model” or they stayed closer to their core values and did not lose their faithful who did not become skeptical. Or was it in the nature of Buddhism, where growth was not the main thing.  Or was it because they were not tied to the myth of a supernatural God and could navigate the debunking of religion by the scientific world view, or the revealed hierocracy of the institutional church.  It also had a more philosophical core to its religion, allowing for greater flexibility in the individualistic American culture.  For example, Green Gulch was able to accommodate to the American setting.  Perhaps even become “Protestant” in its ability to embrace an entrepreneurial model: restaurant, summer guests and now a retirement community. So, the question is posed again:  how has Green Gulch shaken loose from Americanism and the Utilitarian calculus?

2. Priority interviews need to be defined:  

What are the questions:

1. Given the pandemic, and the exposure of systemic inequality and racism, looking back do you see signs of how the GTU was tied to a system that benefitted and help support this system?

2. What do you think you did to fight this, how might you have been complicit?

3. What would you do different today?

4. Do you think this complicity of the GTU with inequality had anything to do with it organizational demise?

5. What about the decline of liberal religion, especially Christianity?

1. Reactions to reading the reading of the Spiritual Care pamphlet:  In general 95% of the entries are not aware of the way in which their embeddedness will undermine their noble and lofty ideals.  They are truly counter cultural.  However one Dean of a seminary specifically has addressed what the seminary needs to do to counteract systemic racism.  Another student did deep reflection on the meaning of the pandemic for her that made her more aware of the exploitation of the indigenous land another student focused on her work with the Latino community.  But very few faculty were on the mark.  

2. My conversation with Donahue made me focus on the difference, perhaps, that theological education had stronger values and was less costly in terms of consumerism of higher ed, faculty salaries etc, than Higher ed in general.  

Ecumenical Institute/Bossey

Where do I hook into this story?

Off the top of my head:  Need to look into how the students are funded.  But in general, the material base of the WCC.  How tied to the economic system’s assumptions.  But there are other complications, like the idea of merit.  But religious institutions have a particular set of values.  What are they?  How do they get undermined?  Look at the elitism of religion, i.e. self-righteousness.  

Need to:

 Get Bossey’s financials

1. Review my archives

2. Think about the Riser debate about the funding of Bossey

3. Read the Challenged by ecumenism

Connect with Bob Welch

1. 
   

Possible Vision for “Cosmopolitan” Religious Institutions

Thinking about what the future for both the GTU could be and Bossey with all the above analyses in mind.  I am again, looking to the example of Bellah’s Broken Covenant and Religion in Human Evolution books and a little-known paper “Faith Communities Challenge—and are Challenged by—The Changing World Order.” In addition, I am highlighting the recasting of the tradition of the early critical theorists.  This is a way to break through the impasse of two miscalculations:  The negation of postmodernists and the end of history of neo-liberalism.  

First one needs to acknowledge the past ills and complicity, which includes a significant analysis and criticism.  But criticism is not enough.  

There needs to be an alternative vision, and in the view of Bellah’s work and the evolving understanding of the religious nature of humans, there need to be something more than an ethical humanism [Falk].  Yet in regard to religion, as with all human endeavors one needs to own up to the atrocities done in the name of religion and the way religion has been complicit in the atrocities of so-called “secular” movements.  

This two-pronged approach of historical realism and a vision grounding in this realism is what is demanded of all institutions for change but have a special compelling mission for religious institutions.  

Tracing the history of the GTU and the Ecumenical Institution on these metrics/values will be instructive to see how the issue of equality and inequality have played out.  And further, what might be their role in what Bellah calls a “dialectic of return.”  There is a sojourn in the valley of darkness, believing the myth of modernity, an essential stage, and returning to a religious view.  Bellah saw this personally, following Ricœur, “second naiveté” using the criticism of modernity, not in spite of criticism, as a cleansing critique.  “Having experienced something radically other, one returns to the one’s faith in a new way.”

There is a similarity in dialectics of the new critical theorists that say with greater system, colonization new spaces open up for a critique of the system. At least for now I want to assume some of the hopefulness of these two different yet similar dialectics.  It might be similar to what Thich Nacht Han says about embracing the problem……Hmmm

In the case of Bossey, it might be the owning up to the criticism of Richard Neuhaus’ in his charge of “radical chic.”  Yet at the same time understand that it was a genuine struggle, epitomized by RMB and Jewish scholars to put one’s body on the line, in fear and trembling.  Out of mistakes a new vision can emerge. 

Perhaps for the GTU it an owning up to the failures of liberal Christianity and aping after the foreign Gods of prestige of graduate education to be like Harvard and Yale.  Where does this lead to suggesting a new vision if these failings are not acknowledged.  In fact, Bellah was invited to address the GTU Board on these issues and he reminded them to be “the church.”  Spend time on deepening their theology as an alternative to the modernity and its false values.  

It could be the same way that an internal conversation about CRT needs to happen to move beyond criticism without emasculating the value of CRT to be the trial by fire necessary of US society to go through to develop a new set of stories about it, perhaps as a repentant nation that could continue a path to a more “perfect union.”

If critical theory, at least in the Habermasian version is able to be in dialog with religious voices what might come of this.  Taylor cautions in seeing religion as an instrumental ally.  Reifying religion and the secular.  He wants to see a total, integrated reality where religious voices get to be represented not as a function element of society but with Bellah as part and parcel of the human and social fabric.  

Are there new spaces when so conceived, new visions and new allies as real humans not bifurcated into my spiritual self and my secular self.  Or my enlightened self and my religious self.  

Bellah is offering a 3^rd way via symbolic realism.  What is this?  Can this provide a theoretical and experiential way forward for religious education?  Can doubt be the acknowledgement?  Can Rachel Held Lewis give us some clues?

What do my archival work and my personal history tell me about what to say about the GTU and Bossey?

For the GTU I would want to talk about the cultural context of the Bay Area and the Pan-American exhibit that fostered a vision of solidarity of the world religions for the sake of peace.  A time when major figures were part of a religious self-understanding.  Also, the origin story of a west coast prestigious graduate school of theology/religion open to other traditions.  My own history of new left politics and counter cultural protests leading to an institution more prestigious and focus on survival navigating the culture wars and inter-religious inclusivity.  Yet going through the institutionalizing of diversity via the various affiliated Centers.  

For Bossey I would want to focus on the origins in the rebuilding of a new religious consensus after WWII and the role of a new world order that prompted internationalism and ecumenism. Leading to becoming a critic of the new world order in solidarity with liberation movements.  Especially with the appointment of “third world” employees in key positions.  Many discussions about survival and who was the WCC/Bossey.  Debates about inter-religious activates.  Was there a “dialectical return” to theology for greater understanding of the meaning of the WCC, via critique of neo-liberalism support of liberation and a loss of conservative support.  Who then became Bossey and the WCC?  What was the result of the General Assembly?  Did it offer a new vision of Christianity in line with Pope Frances, a critique of modernity?  What is the new vision and what ae the leverage points for a new vision?

Assuming that a critique of the Musk’s, Zuckerberg’s and Bezos’ was in order what could be the new “vanguard?”  Or have we moved to a notion that each one of us is caught in the contradictions?  We are the vanguard.

We are all eaters.  We are all consumers.  We are all victims and complicit.  We are nature.

We have to liberate ourselves for we are killing ourselves.  

Add something about Michael Pollen’s journey from food to consciousness…

How to get the analysis to stick? Commonwealth Club.  Art and Theater, like Hamilton.  Consumer protest, boycotts, buying power.  Yet we have become commodified like organic food or even protest itself.  The logic of the system is stronger than protest of the system it seems.  How to break its hold is the question. 

What might be the role of Bossey and GTU?  How to conceptualize equality, if Bellah is correct that equality and justice are the end they are still another means. The end is what is ultimate.  Like happiness, as a means not an end or it is a byproduct of ultimate ends.  

We all need to be part of the new narrative making process.  The Habits project was just that for Bellah.  Arlie’s work is to work on solidarity through communication and analysis.  If all are victims and all are complicit, what does a mass movement look like?  

Where does this lead us in better understanding the issue of inequality.  Perhaps where we are is at the moment of a great leveling.  We are no different than the Afghan woman, or the ISIS warrior.  It seems that making amends with our deepest critic is what is necessary.  Where does this lead us with fundamentalism or the evangelical.  If the Pasadena seminary, Fuller Seminary, can do a conference on Christianity and China, the GTU and Bossey could perhaps join forces with others in just that kind of activity.  If Christianity Today can publish a critique of Trump. Maybe we need to look across these lines for dialogue.  Test the Habermas theory.  Maybe AAR is a vehicle.  Can Harvard Divinity School be a partner or are they still focused on their exceptionalism?  Why is Michael Pollen at HDS when he lives in Berkeley?

There is a need for leadership at the top and critics from below.  How to get this started?  Can it get started?  What are the consequences if not attempted? 

The Evolution of Two Religious Organizations: Implications for Addressing “The Study of Religion and Inequality” A scholarly and Personal Journey

Why were they founded?  Why did they evolve the way they did?  What can they tell us about the future of religious practice and belief? And further, by deeper analysis, the way each organization fostered  inequality in their approach to the study of religion?  And perhaps even deeper, a personal analysis, how I evolved my focus given the context of current ways in which systemic inequality has been exposed during the pandemic and racial justice movements.  I believe by telling my story,  the events of my research will speak for themselves, conceptual analysis will follow.     

The two organizations:  The Graduate Theological Union (GTU) in Berkeley California and the World Council of Church’s Ecumenical Institute (EI) in Bassey,  Switzerland (just outside Geneva).  My original question was formulated as:  Why did one organization evolve to become a center of inter-religious study  (the GTU) and the other remain firmly grounded in one tradition, Christianity (EI)?  My premise was that through a kind of institutional “biography,” largely through archives and informal conversations, I could discern the future of religious practice and belief within “liberal/mainstream” Christianity.  My premise was that ecumenism, at the time of their founding, was the most vital form of Christian expression; thus, looking at these two organizations over time, including their marginalization,  would help me discern something about the future of religion or at least the future of the study of religion.  In my research  I tried to stick close to the story of each organization through archival data and first-person experiences/interviews (my own included, for I attend both) with each organization.   It is important for me to tell this story as clearly as possible.  

However, the story gets an abrupt jolt when experiencing and witnessing the massive inequality that was exposed during the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movements.  Returning from a year -long sabbatical to my teaching, my courses were transformed with the urgency to bear witness to these stark  revelations.  The question remained for me; how did these events impact my comparative analysis of the two organizations?  And further, what role did I play in sustaining systemic inequality, particularly systemic racism?  

Therefore, there are three stories to be told: 1) the original research design and question; 2) the shift to ask the question about institutional inequality as a new focus and  3) a self-reflection about my own complicity, implicit or explicit  in the sustaining inequality, either in my teaching and in my research.  In telling these stories, I am interested in engaging in a dialogue with others who have similar experiences in their research and teaching.  We could begin with a brief story of our own and then ask each other questions to bring to life new elements while in conversation, then inviting the participants to also engage in the conversation.  I am open to this approach if it seems appropriate to the organizers.  

The original research effort clarified the different reasons for their founding.  Even though both the GTU and Ecumenical Institute were grounded in the hay day of ecumenism, from 1940’s through the 1960s, they came into existence for particular institutional and individual motivations.  The Ecumenical Institute was a response the desire to re-build a war-torn Europe in the late 40s, with a unique role played by John D. Rockefeller Jr. wanting to move beyond his families focus on Baptist missions helping to found ecumenical organizations and “re-Christianize” Europe.  The Institute was Rockefeller’s initiative,  though modeled on the German Evangelical Academies, by the key figures, founding the World Council at the time.  Ecumenism was still trying to institutionalize its gains at the time.  The WCC did not come into existence, formally until 1949.  Thus, the Institute was conceived before the WCC.  It was seen as the study arm of the WCC, and the ecumenical movement in general.  The Roman Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox Churches were initially not part of the WCC but they did play a role in the many conferences and courses of study at the Institute. 

The Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California emerged in the early 1960s, when the Ecumenical Movement was well established.  Most of the leaders of the various seminaries that formed the GTU were products of Ecumenism,  perhaps the “orthodoxy “of liberal Christianity at the time with conciliar (COCU) in full swing.  This was when a book such as The Social Sources of Ecumenism,  could be written.  Ecumenical activity was assumed.  Thus, the motivation to start the GTU was less about advancing ecumenism but more about how to establish a first-rate doctoral program for the study of religion.  The founders were less concerned to have all the seminaries in the GTU and more concerned with forging a partnership with either Stanford University or the University of California, Berkeley.  In fact, the founding documents state an interest in religious study, beyond Christianity.  The Center for Jewish Studies was an early member of the GTU. Very quickly the GTU had Roman Catholic Schools as members. This fact made the GTU the most inclusive Christian Consortium in the World.  However, there was more to come on the inter-religious side; the Buddhist Institute followed a few years later.  In each case the motivating factor, though, was less about religious inclusivity, that was assumed, it was how to build a doctoral porgam that provided the faculty with more prestige, resources and able to compete with the Eastern Seminaries. 

It is not too difficult to discern, just from their founding, why the GTU continued to embrace or be open to a full-fledged center of inter-religious study.  And why the Institute staid close to its roots in Christian Orthodoxy.  Yet, this is only part of the story.  In both cases it was not such a straight line. There were, are, financial difficulties, intra-organizational struggles and even questions about their very survival that are part of the story of their evolution today.  The role of constituent decline and of philanthropic money to bolster survival played a key role in what the two institutions were and are.  This story is where we find the answers to their roles in helping and hindering equality in the study of religion and its practice.  I was still trying to formulate the role of the Rockefellers and Bank loans played in the survival of the Institute.  I was still trying to evaluate the impact of GTU’s setting in the heart of the Bay Area elitism that played in its survival.  

Then the pandemic hit and the Black Lives Matter took center stage.  All in the context of the grievance politics of Trump.  In all three cases the inequalities of American/Global society became transparent and visceral.  I began to  keep a list of the various examples that made these inequalities real.  I returned to my teaching, having to revise my courses with my sabbatical research and the social/political/economic inequities so vivid.  This was easy to do to revise course materials for my ethics and religion courses.  What become more difficult was to look at my comparative research using the lens of inequality and tell that story of the two organizations.  Further, through self-examination I realized with my approach to the study of religion the focus on inequality was not well addressed.  My situation in a small college atmosphere also made me aware of how institutional racism and inequality were sustained giving me and my colleagues a privileged that needed to be challenged.   

The journey to this moment and my new awareness’s about my research, teaching, and my institutional setting will be heart of the story I want to tell.  The broad outline of these topics includes the following treatment of the two organizations.  

The concept of “equality” is understood to include but not limited to: an attempt to have all marginalized groups represented.  Attempts to not disadvantage women and people of color.  And understood that special resources needed to be made available to assist groups and individuals to get a foot on the ladder of equity.  

The Ecumenical Institute

• The Ecumenical Institute’s location in the World Council of Churches, both fostered a more inclusive global constituency with its southern hemisphere churches who were part of earlier missionary movements.  The students at the Institute were subsidized. The funding of “liberation movements”  put the Institute and the WCC on the side of social justice, especially people of color

• However, at the same time, due to constituent backlash from wealthy American Churches many of these programs were curtailed.

•  The southern hemisphere, mission churches were products of a more fundamentalist Christianity which at time put them at odds with more progressive ideas for gender politics.

• The way around these conservative voices was to set up parallel ecumenical organizations that were able to give voice to feminist issues without having to get agreements internal to the WCC and the Institute

• The imprint of the WCC as a partner in global capitalism in its early collaboration with the religious piety and financial interests of the Rockefellers is still present in the WCC and the Institute were Northern Hemisphere Churches till play a dominant role if not directly but indirectly in the socialization of its leaders.  

The Graduate Theological Union

• A product of the 1960’s Bay Area, hyper inclusivity, early establishment of the Center for Women and Religion, Urban Black Studies, Pacific and Asian Center for Theological Studies

• Promoted women faculty and attempts at faculty of color

• Institution resources typically used in more traditional seminary studies

• Hot bed of student activism, Against institutional Creep.  Rebirth of Radical Religion,  A Christian Socialist journal

• Board of Trustees influenced by wealthy Bay Area families with ties to large corporations and Law firms.

• Survival depended on agreement of eight seminaries to fund the Central Library operation and common registrar

• Building projects depended on Corporate philanthropy, especially the Hewlett Family and foundation

• Traditional definition of scholarship in tension with activist scholarship, tied to norms set by both the traditional seminaries and UC Berkeley’s view of legitimate scholarship.

• Christian Seminaries had significant influence on the Board of Trustees

• Decline and consolidation and loss of seminaries from the GTU created opening for a more inclusive religious representation, adding Muslims and Hindus and others.  

• Lack of student financial support undermined the stated commitment of inclusivity

These observations are the starting point to analyze how well these two organizations grappled with the issue of equality and equity.  The issue for me was now less of a narrow view of why one organization was less inter-religious than the other but what became of some of the early commitments to inclusivity and an expansive view of religious openness and cooperation.  

The overall narrative from this study is that they mirror the rise of liberalism and the challenges to liberalism both external and internal.  If the fate of liberal religious values were dependent on these two institutions or one’s similar to them, we can see that the education of the faithful was not being sustained, thus contributing to the decline in general of liberal religious practice.  Of course, there were many societal factors which contributed to this demise as well.  But looking just at these organizations we can see how their evolution mirrored the trend toward a decline in traditional institutional religion and at the same time a contributing factor in secular and individual spiritual alternatives.  These trends further exacerbated the divisions between the religious right and their view of the liberal religion as a debasement of their faith.  

If we stay within the bubble of liberal religion we see an equivalency to the liberalism’s disparagement of the religious right.  The psychology of the dominant religious liberalism is where the next story resides in my narrative.  It is safe to say that many of us, myself included, would write and think about the religious right in negative terms.  This arrogance of privilege also produced a complacency toward injustice and inequity.  Though we were rhetorically well meaning and individually active in important causes, we failed to see how key institutional structures and policies maintained our privilege and ensured that marginalized groups remained disadvantaged and increasingly so.  

Neo-liberal, that is policies that increasingly put the burden of survival on individuals and disproportionally increased the wealth and power of those individuals and financial institutions invaded our national life, not just in the economic markets but in the very structure of everyday life.  Those of us with wealth and privilege were able to  absorb and even benefit from these policies, but those without resources were further marginalized. We became complicit in the inequality that was exposed during the racial protests and the pandemic.  

Jackson Lears in his New York Review of Books review of Anne Applebaum’s Twilight of Democracy, entitled the “Orthodoxy of the Elites,” exposes the psychology of elites that have led to an increase in the inequality of our modern world, especially in the United States.  It is a profound critique of centrist politics that have put up with neo-liberal ideology and its attendant notion that individuals “get exactly what they deserve.”  More to the point, we who have risen through the ranks of elite educational institutions, Harvard, Geneva, and Berkeley, have come to believe in, perhaps unwittingly, or better yet self-servingly, a certain type of false meritocracy, “when merit is institutionalized…it becomes an ideology that sanctifies its proponents’ sense of entitlement to run the nation, maybe even the world.”  I  have to look at the above organizations through the lens of Lears’ critique that further states that “That the current ideology of meritocracy makes a further claim as well: that nearly all social goods can be distributed on the basis of reward for merit.  Which meritocrats have defined as technocratic, managerial expertise that depends heavily on elite academic credentials.”  

In self-examination, I have concluded that the meritocracy “shoe fits.”  This awareness is sobering in and of itself.  There are other implications of this state of deserving.  The most insidious is that it can put blinders on the fact that institutional policies and structures are just fine, on just needs to do as I have done.  One classic point that impacts all educational institutions, and for sure those that house the study of religion, is the way education is funded in this country.  Individual costs for higher education is out of reach for most Americans, unless they mortgage their future.  I have put up with this inequity for many years, assuming it was just something we had to navigate, even though it brought in millions of dollars to financial institutions.  The impact then creates a large educational divide between the college educated and the not college educated.  It constricts the choice of majors that first generation students can chose from due to their need to service their college debt.  The study of religion in most small colleges has been seriously damaged.  I have been complicit in this inequity.

The list of inequities that have become exposed recently is further evidence of the state of our democracy which translate to all institutions in our society.  I am sure we have all developed at least a mental note of examples.  Who gets a vaccine first begins a list of how  privilege, especially white privilege, compounded with meritocracy,  works in our society?  Private schools stay open when public schools stay shut. Stock market players get rich when the worker economy suffers.  Oligarch such as Elon Musk can defy state safety orders without serious consequences when other small business must comply.  Congressmembers get wealthy with insider information on the rise of the pandemic.  Right wing religious organizations play politics with the lives and safety of their parishioners while others have to adhere to strict guidelines.  

This presentation is an attempt to cut across several of the suggested proposal topics for this section on “Cultural History of the Study of Religion” and the general theme of “The Study of Religion and Inequality.”

Therefore, I have tried to answer the question of how “upheaval “ has prompted me “to question…normative assumptions and practices.”  In addition, I have tried to grapple with the issue of the ways in which “religion reflects, justifies, or challenges various inequities, especially that of access to and the retention of wealth.”  

“Scholarship in the Time of Catastrophe: A Scholarly and Personal Reckoning in Time of Pandemic, and Black Lives Matter” might be the appropriate title of my proposed presentation for the “Cultural History of the Study of Religion Unit in the context of the overall theme of AAR’s 2021 Annual Meeting, “The Study of Religion and Inequality.”  

It is my intent to tell the story of how the Pandemic and the racial protests laid bare the vast systemic inequality and institutionalized racism in the United States and our globalized world thus confronting me with how to revise my scholarship of teaching and my two-year research project comparing the origin, evolution and implications of two religious organizations, The Graduate Theological Union and the WCC’s Ecumenical Institute.  This is also a story of confronting my own complicity with these injustices, either wittingly or unwittingly.