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 ike most churchgoers, the eyes of people at Lafayette Avenue Church tend to glaze over when they hear talk of economics from the pulpit. But two economic trends have caught the attention of the people in the pews at Lafayette Church: (1) the growing disparity between rich and poor, and (2) stagnant wages of workers.
The United States now has the largest income disparity between rich and poor of any industrialized nation in the world. Ireland is a distant second. One in five children in the United States now live at or below the poverty line. These are the families that most Americans don’t see. More billionaires, fewer in the middle class, and more desperately poor is hardly the biblical version of the reign of God. “Lord, when did we see thee hungry, or thirsty, or naked?” (Matt. 25:44).
The second economic trend of concern is stagnant wages. The wages of working families in the United States have been stagnant or declining (in real dollars) since the mid-1970’s. In more and more Lafayette Avenue Church families, two spouses work instead of one, and some work two or even three jobs. Add this to the anxiety about layoffs, downsizing, and capital flight and you have more and more churchgoers looking for a word about economic justice from the scriptures. After all, more than any other subject, Jesus talks about the sin of self-righteousness and the love of money. More than any personal or sexual indiscretions, Jesus talks about equity for the poor. More than idolatry, apostasy, hypocrisy, or indolence Jesus talks about greed and false pride. Jesus forgave sinners (the woman at the well), he forgave the blasphemer, he forgave Peter’s denial and Thomas’s doubt. But when he entered the Temple and saw the moneychangers swindling the poor, that is when his blood ran hot, his whip came down, and he declared, “You have made it (the Temple) a den of robbers” (Luke 19: 46b).
In 1975, the salary of a corporate chief executive officer (CEO) was thirty times the salary of one of their average workers. In 2002, the CEO salary was 200 times as much! Because of the nation’s philosophy on trade, taxes, immigration, and foreign competition, we are quickly moving toward a two-tiered society. The descendants of American pioneers who fled the tyranny of aristocracy and two-tiered societies in Europe are finding themselves moving steadily toward two economically separate and unequal populations within the nation.
This is a new economic phenomenon. At no other time in our history have median wages for breadwinners fallen for more than two decades. Never before have American workers suffered real wage reductions at the same time the per capita domestic product was increasing. Within a global economy in full swing with trade barriers dropping everywhere, the supply of cheap labor in the Third World has a profound effect on First-World wages. The people at the Lafayette Church are experiencing this very economic marginalization.
This perspective rarely finds its way into the “family values” debate. As the one-earner, middle-class family becomes rare, as children need ever more costly education and health care, as the cost of raising a family rises as sharply as earnings plunge, parents are spending more of their time working to provide the needed money and less time on the nurture and guidance of their children. Parents spend forty percent less time with their children than parents did thirty years ago. Despite the conventional wisdom, traditional families are being destroyed not so much by misguided social welfare programs as by a global economic system that has no more loyalty to families than it does to countries.
With the blessing and involvement of the concerned and committed people of the Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church, the People of Faith Network was born in 1994. The network is a combination of hundreds of church people and others across the country. Using letter writing and phone communication, the network is able to quickly produce a substantial expression of opinion focused on a carefully selected issue. From the discussion of the founding group, the name – People of Faith – came about naturally. As we dialogued and debated we would say, “People of faith should. . .,” “People of faith ought to. . .,” “People of faith could. . .,” and before long we simply called ourselves People of Faith. Continued >>
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