The world's philosophy is a four-letter word: More. The church's theology is also a four-letter word, but it often means more's opposite: Love. Will the church be a force and a forum for love?
The problem with our world, our nation and our church can be summed up in one word: More. "More" has become, as Laurence Shames has put it, America's "unofficial national motto." We want more of everything: more fun, more money, more excitement, more love, more programs, more church members, more, more, more. "More is what Americans are used to, what we perceive as normal, here in the land of the escalation clause, the built-in increase. More is the way we think about 'success.'" And more is what America and the world is running out of.
The indecent discrepancy between the rich man's lifestyle and Lazarus' life-struggle was appalling. But for a long time Americans have considered themselves pretty much delivered from that kind of fearful inequality. That's why we have lumped nearly everyone into this country's great "middle class." Of course there have always been a few exceedingly rich individuals. And of course, any realistic person knows that a certain number of poor "will always be with us." But both rich and poor are still considered anomalies to the norm.
It is time to think some new thoughts about how class operates in American culture. America is increasingly becoming a caste society. We call it a two-coupon society - with severe social separation of the two coupon clippers. The top 10 or 20 percent of the population (50 million), clip their stock coupons and treasury certificates. Their kids go to private schools while the public schools are deteriorating. Their mail goes Federal Express while the postal service is deteriorating. Their bottled water is delivered to the door while the water system becomes more and more contaminated.
The rest of Americans, 200 million of us, are standing at supermarket check-outs, the poorest members clipping food stamps, while the dwindling middle-class members clip food coupons. Doug Henwood calls this "The Fortunate Fifth" versus the "Forgotten Four-Fifths". Both groups are unable to see reality as it is - one has its head in the clouds, arched in the air, above the pain and poverty, while the other head is in the sand and dirt, so enmeshed in the grind and grime of eking out a living in a service economy that they can't lift up their heads for hope or help or anything much else beyond survival.
Robert Reich, a liberal economist at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, portrays a more unnerving scenario. In his book The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st Century Capitalism (New York: Knopf, 1991) he argues that America's economic and political elites have "seceded" from the U.S. to join a borderless world, bypassing the "old-think" institutions and social agencies it deems in decay and disarray.
In similar fashion, New York University's Lawrence M. Mead shows how many of the ghetto poor are "seceding from mainstream institutions - breaking the law, dropping out of school, not learning English, declining to work." This "internal secession" he deems as threatening to the nation as the South's secession in 1861. (See Mead, "The Democrats' Dilemma," Commentary 93 [January 1992], 44.)
Like the rich man and Lazarus, these two groups are separated by a chasm predetermined by their economic status. Jesus told his parable to scandalize the Pharisees, forcing them to recognize the essential injustice of such an economic system. Unstated but implied is an imperative for action - encouraging the "haves" to reach out across the gap to the "have nots" before it is too late.
The author of the Book of James says that "religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself unstained by the world" (James 1:27 NRSV). Jesus hit the streets and healed the sick, raised the dead, gave sight to the blind, and told the people to go back and tell what they had seen: "the poor have good news brought to them" (Matthew 11:4-5 NRSV).
This cannot be said enough: How we treat the poor and homeless is God's primary evidence of our faith. What does this word "treat" mean? It means participating in what John M. Perkins calls the "three Rs of development:" relocation, reconciliation and redistribution. It is a demand that we approach the poor - becoming accessible to them and living with them as neighbors. To be neighbors of the poor, in turn, means we need to reposition ourselves - change our location. We must also acknowledge their dignity - change our disposition. To be reconciled to the poor requires us to receive their forgiveness and be forgiven - reconciliation. Finally, to help the poor to break out of the poverty cycle requires us to share with them skills, resources, technology, and education - redistribution.
So-called "middle-class" Americans are fooling themselves if they believe that the distance, dispositions and distributions between themselves and the "poor" are very significant. The increasing wealth and power of that tiny minority of the colossal rich stands as impressive testimony to that group's ability to grasp "more." The problem is that when there isn't any "more" to gather in, "more" must be found somewhere. This "more" then comes from the middle-class, which is not so much "shrinking" as it is being sucked dry by the appetites of the upper echelons and the needs of the lower echelons.
Ralph Whitehead, Jr., in "Class Acts: America's Changing Middle Class," (Utne Reader, January/February 1990, 50-53) has sketched out a frightening new social ladder to define American economics.
The old ladder, Whitehead explains, was composed of a small group of rich at the top, a larger but dwindling group of poor at the bottom, and in between a mushrooming middle class comprised of both white collar and blue collar - acting like some enormous jet-puffed marshmallow cushion between the rich and the poor. This middle class held such familiar folk as white-collar Ward and June Cleaver of "Leave It To Beaver", Mike and Carol Brady of "The Brady Bunch," and blue-collar Ralph and Alice Kramden of "The Honeymooners," and later Archie and Edith Bunker of "All in the Family." Schematically, it looked something like this:
THE RICH
THE EXPANDING MIDDLE CLASS:
White Collar
Blue Collar
THE POOR
The new ladder is very different. The two strongest forces in the economic strata are Upscale America at the top and Downscale America at the bottom. Sandwiched in between is a much smaller and fragile new middle class.
This middle class is itself composed of three sub-groups. The "bright collars" (a managerial-professional group of 20 million knowledge workers born since 1945, half of them women) are well-educated, lawyer/engineer/teacher types like "LA Law's" Victor Siefuentes and Grace Van Owen. "New collars" (comprising over 35% of the boomer work force and 2/3 women) represent mid-level workers with some technical training but little workplace clout (typified by Lucy Bates and Joe Coffey of "Hill Street Blues"). The traditional "blue collar segment" is a diminishing group increasingly living near the economic margins. It has even reached a kind of mythic level of existence in the voice of its troubadour Bruce Springsteen and the face of Roseanne Barr.
Downscale Americans are divided by Whitehead into the "traditional poor" (primarily holding part-time service occupations with no benefits) and a frighteningly expanding new group of the poorer than poor known widely as "the underclass" - two million-plus Americans who are permanently homeless and psychologically hopeless, without voice or face in popular culture.
Contrasted with this group are the two Upscale American divisions - the very rich and a rung just below the rich that is roughly the same size as the underclass called the "overclass" (CEOs and others holding highest level positions in media, marketing, finance, advertising, concentrated in a dozen metropolises). Schematically the new social class looks like this:
UPSCALE AMERICA:
The Rich
The Overclass
THE NEW MIDDLE CLASS:
Bright Collar
New Collar
Blue Collar
DOWNSCALE AMERICA:
The Poor
The Underclass
Whitehead sums up the reality of the new social order in stark terms: "The situation intensifies the shift of power in society as a whole. With the middle class divided, the center cannot hold. The dominant forces in society become Upscale America and Downscale America - or more precisely, Upscale America versus Downscale America. Upscale America uses its power to secure privileges such as proposed cuts in the capital gains tax. Downscale America strikes back blindly through rising rates of crime. Through the old social ladder, the expanding middle class acted as the nation's glue. With the new social ladder, the new middle class is merely caught in the crossfire" (53).