Religion Can Fill Gaps In Society
As federal government scales back its discredited social programs, who will fill the void? For part of the answer, many look to the religious community, whose prominence in American society seemed over the past 30 years to decline - while families and inner cities crumbled, and taxes rose.
So far, though, the loudest voices from organized religion sound like priests for the Republican Party. At the beginning of religion’s fall from grace, the late 1960s, the loudest voices from organized religion sounded like priests for the Democratic Party.
Today in Spokane, a prophet speaks. One who challenges churches to escape the divisiveness and manipulation of secular partisanship, and reclaim their potential as a force for personal and societal regeneration.
Jim Wallis, a pastor and writer from Washington, D.C., is leading a workshop on youth violence and gangs. This event, at First Presbyterian Church, is just an example of a larger mission. Wallis contends a city’s religious folk can supplement government’s traditional tools with the tools of faith, service and reconciliation.
We do need police and prisons. But gangsters almost always get out of jail. And then what? Prisons don’t change people for the better. Nor has a government program been devised that can save a collapsing marriage or inject enduring hope into a neighborhood riddled with despair. Those are spiritual undertakings.
While religion at its worst has inspired self-righteousness and war, at its best it has freed slaves, fed the hungry, healed the sick, made peace, promoted justice, changed lives. Old Testament prophets used the fate of widows and orphans as the measure of a society.
Last spring, Wallis’ Sojourners Magazine issued a “Cry for Renewal” that won endorsements from many of the nation’s religious leaders. It says, in part: “It is indeed time to re-examine old solutions that control the poor instead of empowering them. We will join with anyone in the search for new solutions rooted in local communities, moral values and social responsibility. … To abandon or blame the poor for their oppression and affirm the affluent in their complacency would be a moral and religious failure, and is no alternative to social policies which have not succeeded.”
Idealistic? Sure. Yet as religious communities work together at a human rather than merely partisan level, they can put values into practice and become a strong contributor to social restoration.
, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Webster/For the editorial board