Wall Street and Main Street, Athens and Jerusalem

This week, a minister friend of mine from Boston visited Zuccotti Park, site of the Occupy Wall Street assembly, one evening. He observed, among the many picket signs, one sign that read, "For the first time in my life I feel at home." Home, on Wall Street?

Just think of it. The people of Zuccotti Park, rechristened Liberty Square, are making a home on Wall Street, a place less amenable to the practice of habitation than any other. There were some people who were actually talking about going beyond occupation of Wall Street to re-colonization. A colony of the Kingdom of God? my minister friend suggested mirthfully.

Mock-imperial dreams of eschatological grandeur aside, think about the revolutionary impact of the sign that captivated my minister friend. At home, among the cathedrals of capitalism. Living, on Wall Street. Turning the marketplace into a house of hospitality for all people.

I had thought about these paradoxical possibilities before.

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On Feb. 6, 2010, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, I delivered an address to an ecumenical assembly of clergy and faithful on the subject of "Building an Ethical Economy: Theology and the Marketplace." Our gathering in Cambridge, Mass., was a partner event with the 2010 conference of the Trinity Institute, held at Trinity Episcopal Church in New York City, the week before, on this theme. My remarks were a response to an address given there by the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury.

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Thank you all for having me here. I will keep my remarks within 15 minutes because we have so much already to meditate upon. Before I begin, let me offer a disclaimer: I am neither a professional economist nor a professional theologian. I am a community organizer, but for me even this is not a profession—it is a vocation, a calling. I consider myself an amateur in these fields, but in this I am not alone. Few of us here are professionals in theology or economics. But for today, insofar as we are talking about God, we are all theologians; and insofar as we are talking about particular forms of human exchange, we are all economists. 

I’m going to speak in an impressionistic manner and, like a Georges Seurat painting, make a few points. Taken individually and up close, they may not make much sense to you, but when you stand back, they may blend and give you a look at the big picture.

I will start with an anecdote. You have seen and heard the response to Archbishop Rowan Williams’ presentation inside of Trinity Church on Wall Street. What you may not know is how his perspectives on the good life were received outside the sanctuary and on the street. Let me read to you part of a New York Times article about the Trinity Institute conference:

It was harder to tell what the wealth makers and wealth seekers just outside the church, in the heart of the financial district, would make of the archbishop’s viewpoint. Few of them seemed to have registered for the conference.

When a reporter asked several well-dressed men walking by, “What does a good life look like?” he was regarded with suspicion.

“A good life is having a job, and I’m going to lose mine if I’m late for my meeting,” said one of the few who paused long enough to say anything at all, before striding past the True Religion Brand Jeans store.

The sanctuary and the street. Theology and economics. What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? Tertullian, the Christian apologist, posed the question 18 centuries ago. We have been asking a variation of the question in our conference. What has theology to do with the marketplace? To transpose Tertullian into a modern key, what has Wall Street to do with Main Street, or the Federal Reserve with the See of Canterbury? Theology and economics: two different worlds? That’s the kind of question St. Augustine would love. Of course I believe there is only one world, only one planet Earth, but there are different visions of what that world is. Do the visions of the theologians and the visions of the economists have anything in common? Are they seeing the same thing?

In light of the course of recent events, Archbishop Rowan answers that our vision of what life can be has been diminished by an unthinking economism. The trouble is not so much that we see things wrongly, much less sinfully, but that we see too little. Thus he pleads for us, whether as theologians, economists, clergy, students, professionals, or ordinary workers, to embrace an expansive vision of abundant human life, an enlarged understanding of human behavior and a hopeful view of the potentiality of human development, and to reject all forms of reductionism that narrowly circumscribe both our rationality and our agency. This is completely correct in my opinion.

Theology and economics: two different worlds? I heard Archbishop Rowan differently than Prof. Kathryn Tanner. If the archbishop is correct, it is more like a world within a world. I think he has raised the stakes for theology; he didn’t say this, but implicitly he was making a claim for theology as the premier discipline for understanding the purpose and meaning of human relationships. Theology shows us that what makes humanity human transcends the dimensions of human life that preoccupy mere economics. He has relativized the importance of our economic relationships in order to recover the plurality of activities and motives that mark our human relationships (and that mark the human-divine relationship), as well as to recover the priority of living itself. I want to go back to the New York Times article. The headline of the article was punchy and designed to stoke controversy: “Archbishop of Canterbury Challenges Wall Street on Its Home Turf.” I think that’s somewhat of a misnomer, not only because of the civility of the presentation and discussion, but also because of the juxtaposition of the phrases “Wall Street” and “home turf.” Does anybody really call Wall Street home? Some of us may work on Wall Street, but none of us live there. Some of us may believe that Wall Street, because it generates wealth, is the source and safeguard of the good life, but it is not where we partake of the goods of human life. It is not the space where we enjoy life. It is not home. That would be Main Street, where our houses and tables are found. Having said that, I need to hedge a little, because Main Street could be in Athens or in Jerusalem. Where do we live? What do we think the world looks like? What do we think the world should look like?

The archbishop teaches us that the trouble is not so much that we see things wrongly, much less sinfully, but that we see too little. But it’s not just the Wall Street bankers who can’t see the whole—it’s all of us, even we who are sitting here today talking about “theology and the marketplace.” Now ask yourself: How come this event is subtitled “Theology and the Marketplace”? Have we also fallen prey to a reductionism that subordinates all human exchange to the exchange of products and services? We talk consciously about God, but unconsciously our words about God actually justify the primacy of stuff in our lives. Have we yielded the sacred space formerly occupied by the person, the human being, to her products and services? I believe the economy is vaster than the marketplace. It is the workplace, too. It is nature. It is the household, the primary unit of the economy. We have heard Sir Partha Dasgupta call for a renewed study of the rationale of household decisions. And Archbishop Rowan reminds us that the science of economics finds its origins in the theories and practices of “housekeeping.” Surveying the economic crisis of the last two years, he observes that “there can be a housekeeping strategy that ends up destroying the nurture and stability that make a household what it is.” And with the chief rabbi in the United Kingdom he calls for us to rediscover “the home we build together.” Again, I think this is completely correct.

We must re-discover the home we build together. This remark reminds me of Sallie McFague, a theologian who teaches that it is more important for followers of religion to learn where they are instead of focusing only on the unknowns of why we are here and where we are going. There is a tendency when we ask questions of why to separate ourselves from the God we believe and the creation in which we live. When we ask why instead of where, we tend to underscore God’s power over God’s love, God’s transcendence over God’s immanence, and God’s distance from the world rather than God’s intimate involvement in it. And as we image God, so do we image ourselves: we see ourselves as all-mighty agents who exercise dominion over creation from a perch set far above nature and everything beyond ourselves. In hubris or in forgetfulness of our ultimate origins we imagine ourselves, if not as perfectly powerful or perfectly knowing, at least then as beings whose power and knowledge surpass all other beings. Sallie McFague denies explanatory models of creation that set God over and against humanity and that set both God and humans over and against creation. She introduces a descriptive model of creation as the body of God, the home in which we dwell. God is the source of our existence, and the world is flesh of God’s “flesh.” She believes this model enables us to focus on our neighborhood and shifts our priorities from unleashing raw power and exercising dominion over the world to living together in love within the body of God.

Think of what our economic talk would be like if we believed our global household was within God; if we believed Athens was not separate from Jerusalem, but a part of Jerusalem.

There is only one world, with visions of differing breadth and depth. Which vision of the world will prevail? A narrow vision of Athens and the marketplace, or a broad vision of Jerusalem and the household of God? Where are we? Where is our home? Where are we building our house? I believe that how we build our house indicates where we live. We hear the words of Jeremiah: “Woe to him who builds his house on wrong, his terraces on injustice; who works his neighbor without pay, and gives him no wages….The burial of an ass shall he be given, dragged forth and cast out beyond the gates of Jerusalem.” I can see why Tertullian sneers at Athens: for him, it can only be a desolation bereft of life, bereft of God. Indeed, if Jerusalem is the only place we can live, then let us make every neighborhood a New Jerusalem. But Tertullian did not wager that, perhaps, in every age, Athens is a part of Jerusalem, is contained by Jerusalem.

At Interfaith Worker Justice our mission is to give workers a voice in the workplace, not only in order to secure their civil and human rights as workers, not only to promote economic democracy, but also in order to strengthen the neighborhoods and communities where they live. We do this work so we may know the one neighborhood we share in God, and we do it to practice good “home economics.” When we fight for security guards’ right to organize a union, we do it to know our neighbors living in Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan, families who depend on a living wage and good health care benefits to keep their bodies fed, clothed, sheltered, and healthy. Good jobs stabilize these neighborhoods and liberate working parents to participate fully in the life of their communities—civic, cultural, social, religious. It allows their children to be educated and nurtured in stable environments and to aspire not only materially but also mentally and spiritually. When we protest restaurants that fail to pay workers the wages and tips they were owed, we do it for the households in Chelsea, East Boston, and Somerville that depend on those wages, the spouses and infant children here and relatives from home countries.

There is only one world, one neighborhood. We must get to know our neighbors. We live in the same world with Corporina Belis, Lucine Williams, and Wanda Rosario, my friends who were fired from their job at Hyatt last August and are boycotting the Boston Hyatt hotels. We live in the same world with Mario Paul, who has acted courageously to defend the right of his co-workers at Andrews International to organize and stood up for the security of his fellow security guards. They are tired of being made to live in a world apart from those who imagine all the world is a marketplace and all the men and women merely products who have their prices. They are tired of being divided selves, made by others to live divorced from themselves, their true selves, their fullest selves. They fight for worker justice because they are not mere products, and they are not merely services. They fight for worker justice because they are not merely workers!

One final point I would like to make: While I agree with Archbishop Rowan that theology does not solve economic problems or provide a formula for creating the ideal common life, I hold that it does more than provide a rationale for pursuing the good life lived in common. To bear a theology is to bear a definite interpretation of reality, of human history. It is to carry a particular story about the origin and destiny of our world. This narrative forms us and conditions our intellect and our choices. In short, our theology does more than indicate which paths we may feel justified taking; it makes the choice of paths inevitable. This is because theology is something we do: it is an embodied practice of imagination that constantly re-creates the world we live in. The stories we tell about our world generate the practices that make the world what we experience it to be.

Where do we live? Egypt or Israel? Athens or Jerusalem? Wall Street or Main Street? Where do you want to live? Where can we live? What kind of world will we have? Thank you.