[Dialogue] 2/26/09, Spong: The Politics of Greed: A Response to a Theological Vacuum

Thu Feb 26 12:20:43 EST 2009

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Thursday February 26, 2009 

The Politics of Greed: A Response to a Theological Vacuum

There is much acrimony abroad today in the economic recession that has embraced our nation. The political landscape is filled with "victims" and "victimizers." Some are overt, like Bernard Madoff and his newly poor clients, but others are vaguer, with victims wondering what has robbed them of their savings and financial future. The press has had a field day chronicling examples of outlandish greed and corporate excess which are symbols of our economic meltdown. For the first time, the public has been given an inside look not just at the compensation, but also at the huge bonuses and perquisites of business executives that are almost breathtaking. These executives have private jets at their disposal not just for business travel but for family vacations; paid gymnasium and country club memberships; paid personal assistants who actually shop, run errands and pay bills for them; home security systems installed at company expense; automobiles and chauffeur services like those on which Senator Tom Daschle forgot to pay taxes; and parking privileges and huge life insurance policies, just to name the more common perks. They receive not just health insurance, but state of the art health care plans, including access to annual physicals 
with America's finest doctors in vacation resort settings. These "extras" that amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars are justified as legitimate business expenses and necessities by the companies the executives serve. After all, the business world tells us, our executives should not have to be subjected to the dangers of traveling first class on some regular airline!
As these costs have skyrocketed, we have witnessed a rise in stockholder resolutions asking for full disclosures of a company's executive compensation. Excess greed was beginning to come to the public awareness. These resolutions, however, have always been defeated, since the various boards of trustees, acting in lockstep, assert that these matters are best handled by the compensation committees of the board, which are, in fact, all too frequently made up of other CEOs who want to make sure that the standards are set quite high so that they too will be treated "fairly" and can thus use the argument that their company must "stay competitive in order to prevent a raid on their executive talent by another corporation." 

As I noted last week, the explosion in executive compensation began in the seventies and reached outlandish proportions just before the collapse of the economy in the last months of 2008 and the first month of 2009. The ratio of executive pay to workers' pay was 35 to 1 in the 1970s. It is 275 to 1 today. It has not been unusual to hear of executives at Disney, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, the New York Stock Exchange and ma
ny others who have received compensation packages made up of salary, bonus and stock options that reach to more than a hundred million dollars a year. Golden parachutes of similar proportions have also been handed out to executives who appear to have managed their companies out of existence. In this same era of greed, top athletes began to sign contracts worth up to $250,000,000, as in the case of Alex Rodriguez. Television money fueled professional sports at every level, as big businesses found them one more lucrative side business. The result of this is today tickets to professional basketball games can be as high as $300 a seat and cities across this nation build new stadiums for their local teams with taxpayer dollars that are replete with luxury boxes sold to businesses for hundreds of thousands of dollars a year that are used for one more executive perk. In the meantime, the fans who once supported their teams with the price of their tickets and consumed bad food at exorbitant prices are now reduced to watching on television and usually paying a premium each year for that privilege. Next we begin to glimpse the lobbying salaries that are usually focused on former high government officials who are able to sell their contacts for millions. Senator Daschle's revelation that he made over $5,000,000 in the one year that he failed to pay $140,000 in federal taxes was an eye-opener to this practice.

It should not be surprising in this environment that businesses pay lobbyists millions of dollars a year t
o guard their interests when the laws that govern this nation are being considered in the Senate and the House of Representatives, and billions of dollars are actually raised by lobbyists to affect the choice of the candidates from the White House to the Congress to the state house and even to city hall. We live in an era of greed and influence peddling that is unprecedented. Have you ever wondered how this state of things has come about? I think it is the result of a theological vacuum that has grown in the hearts of our citizens.

When one looks back in history, one discovers that in the 13th century life in this world was actually denigrated. It was referred to as a vale of tears through which we had to journey to reach the real world in heaven for which we were taught to yearn. We dreamed in that era not of wealth and earthly pleasure, but of the beatific vision in the world to come. There was no passion in this life about making the life of this world fair. People were taught to accept the status into which they were born and to make no effort to change it, for only in the afterlife, we believed, would the unfairness of the world be redressed. Wealth and poverty, freedom and slavery were all said to be God-given. To work against this set status system was thus to work against God. This was the era of the divine right of kings and a class society of nobles and peasants. 

When the nobles tried to pressure King John of England to share power with them by signi
ng a document in 1215 called the Magna Carta, the voice of western religion was solidly on the side of the king. The Magna Carta, however, represented the first tip of a democratizing tide that would not be denied. As science expanded, our understanding of the universe's size and how the fixed laws of nature operated eroded the certainty that people once had in the God who lived above the sky, kept record books on our behavior and promised that in the afterlife the virtuous would be rewarded and the rogues punished. Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo made the God above the sky homeless. Isaac Newton removed God from the realm of miracle and magic and rendered God unemployed. Louis Pasteur suggested that sickness resulted from agents called germs, opening the door to the possibility that sickness was no longer a means of God's punishment. Darwin then suggested that instead of being a little lower than the angels, human beings were just a little higher than the apes and of no more eternal value than any other creatures. Under the onslaught of this new thinking, the certainty of the afterlife, where fairness was established, came to be questioned. If this is the only life we have, a greater and greater number of people began to say, then tolerating unfairness or injustice expressed in the abuse of the lower classes for the benefit of the upper classes ceased to be tolerable. 

By the middle of the 18th century, these ideas coalesced and began to create pressure for change. It was not until this time t
hat revolutions against kings and the establishment of some form of democracy began to enter the Christian west. Liberal politics was being born. Revolution and counter-revolution were in the air. The American Revolution was rather mild when compared with the excesses of the French Revolution, with power flowing back and forth as a new political order came into being. The Russian Revolution in 1917 brought the thinking of Karl Marx and communism into the equation, while the First World War destroyed the royal lines of most of the ruling families in Europe. This revolution, which turned the human focus from life after death to life here and now, also gave rise to both the social gospel in the church and labor movements and labor unions in the secular society. Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries saw political power shift from the ruling classes to the people and various parties calling themselves things like the Christian Socialist Party, the Socialist Party and the Labor Party came into being. In America, trust-busting Teddy Roosevelt promised a "Square Deal" to the people, followed in time by his cousin Franklin Roosevelt's "New Deal," Harry Truman's "Fair Deal," John Kennedy's "New Frontier" and Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society." The desire for fairness to be accomplished had shifted its focus from a heavenly location to an earthly one. People determined that they had a duty politically to make fair an unfair world. 

Building fairness politically, however, proved to be impossible and when it failed disil
lusionment set in, causing the effort to be largely abandoned. This occurred in the United States during the Reagan years and in the United Kingdom in the Thatcher years. Now people faced a dilemma: If there is no fairness that we can count on beyond this world and if it is not possible to build fairness into this world politically, then what are the alternatives? The answer was: "Everyone gets theirs!' That is how the politics of greed began, which operated on these principles: Push the laws to the limit for personal gain; pay as little tax as possible, including the use of off-shore mailboxes; and bend the law to your advantage so long as you can get away with it. There were bubbles in technology that created enormous wealth in the 1990's and one in housing in the last decade. Then there was the tilting of the tax structure under George W. Bush, which succeeded only in rewarding the wealthy and punishing the middle class. The removal of the bank regulations made lucrative, but unwise, deals easy. These questionable loans were then sold to overseas bankers to spread the risks. Hit and run tactics were employed until excess and greed became rampant and open. Finally, the system collapsed.

At the heart of human life is the search for meaning and purpose, which human beings once located in the life after death. Then we sought to find it by making this life itself fairer. Next we sought it in rampant greed. This means that the crisis of our day is really a spiritual crisis. The question now
 is, where will we next seek both meaning and purpose? 

–John Shelby Spong

Question and Answer 
With John Shelby Spong

The Rev. Irving Letto from Nova Scotia, Canada, writes: 
If, as you have suggested, there was no literal empty tomb and the miracle stories do not describe events that actually happened in history, what was there about Jesus that so deeply captivated the first disciples? Is there something about the Jesus of history to which I can point today that anchors one as a Christian to see Jesus as an icon of faith?

Dear Irving,

Since I think that we can document that both the empty tomb story and the miracle stories included in the gospels are later additions to the Jesus story, your question actually carries us into the Jesus experience. It was the Jesus experience that caused people to see him as victorious over death and as the messianic figure around which the miracle stories gathered.

I see the primary Jesus experience as being that of a boundary breaker. His humanity and his consciousness seem to me to be so whole and so expanded that he was able to escape the basic human drive of survival that binds so many of us who are less fully developed. Unlike us, he appeared to need no security barrier behind which to hide. He could thus step across the boundaries of tribe, prejudice, guilt and even religion into a new dimension of what it means to be human and this is what caused people to experience God present in him
.. His call to us is therefore not to be religious but to be human and to be whole.

That is what every gospel symbol, from his miraculous birth to his empty tomb, is seeking to convey, so we read them as doorways into the meaning of God.

– John Shelby Spong

Send your questions to support at johnshelbyspong.com 

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