TAG | Religious Left
Scottish Cardinal Keith O’Brien is at it again:
One of Britain’s most prominent religious figures, Cardinal Keith O’Brien, has accused David Cameron of immoral behaviour and of favouring rich City financiers over those struggling on lower incomes.
O’Brien, Scotland’s most senior Roman Catholic authority, said: “The poor have suffered tremendously from the financial disasters of recent years and nothing, really, has been done by the very rich people to help them.
Nothing? Really?
Amongst his suggestions:
O’Brien called for Cameron to introduce a Robin Hood or financial transaction tax on City dealings. “My message to David Cameron, as the head of our government, is to seriously think again about this Robin Hood tax, the tax to help the poor by taking a little bit from the rich,” he told the BBC.
Last year Cameron and the chancellor, George Osborne, led Europe-wide efforts to stop France and Germany introducing just such a tax, arguing that it would be uniquely damaging to UK interests.
In a BBC1 Scotland interview, O’Brien said it was immoral “just to ignore” those suffering as a result of the credit crunch.
“When I say poor, I don’t mean [only] the abject poverty we see sometimes in our streets. I mean people who would have considered themselves reasonably well-off.
“People who have saved for their pensions and now realise their pension funds are no more…”
Of course, amongst those hit by such a tax would be, uh, savers.
As O’Brien probably knows.
Cardinal O'Brien · Religious Left · Roman Catholicism · taxes · UK
One of life’s minor pleasures is the spectacle of ‘progressives’ calling for Christians to pay more attention to the Bible. Here’s David Sirota writing in Salon:
As the Pew Research Center recently discovered, “Most people who agree with the religious right also support the Tea Party” and its ultra-conservative economic agenda. Summing up the situation, scholar Gregory Paul wrote in the Washington Post that many religious Christians in America simply ignore the Word and “proudly proclaim that the creator of the universe favors freewheeling, deregulated union busting, minimal taxes, especially for wealthy investors, and plutocrat-boosting capitalism as the ideal earthly scheme for his human creations.”
Mr. Paul would, I think, benefit from a calming cup of tea and a nice lie-down. Nevertheless let’s look at the issue that he is trying to address rather than the childish caricatures he deploys. Few successful religions are static. They develop. They change. They split. They borrow from other faiths and traditions. The syncretism and supple nature of an always evolving Christianity is one of the sources of its strength and endurance. We should not be surprised that there is also room within it for variants more friendly to the free market than one confined within a crudely literal interpretation of some of the reported comments of a figure who was (probably) born more than two thousand years ago.
But Mr. Sirota, it seems, is more comfortable with at least some (ideologically congenial) strains of fundamentalism:
The good news is that this may be starting to change. In recent years, for instance, Pew has found that younger evangelicals are less devoutly committed to the Republican Party and its Tea Party-inspired agenda than older evangelicals. Additionally, surveys show a near majority of evangelicals agree with liberals that the tax system is unfair and that the wealthy aren’t paying their fair share. Meanwhile, the organization Faith in Public LIfe has highlighted new academic research showing that even in America there is growing “correlation between increased Bible reading and support for progressive views, including abolishing the death penalty, seeking economic justice, and reducing material consumption.”
And Mr. Sirota tut-tuts at those whose (presumed) studies of Christianity do not measure up to the standard that he deems appropriate.
Of course, many Americans who cite Christianity to justify their economic conservatism may not have actually read the Bible…
Or maybe they have just read it a different way from that laid down by Mr. Sirota. The notion that the Bible is a collection of texts that can, quite reasonably, be interpreted in many different ways does not appear to be one that he is prepared to accept, or debate. No wonder he likes those fundamentalists of his…
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For Thee But Not For Me
2 Comments · Posted by Andrew Stuttaford in Church & State, culture
Amy Sullivan grumbles in the Atlantic:
Without the work of women like Sister Carol Keehan, president of the Catholic Health Association, and Sister Simone Campbell of the Catholic social justice group NETWORK, there would be no health reform and therefore no contraception coverage mandate to argue over — not just for the employees of Catholic hospitals and universities, but for the estimated 24 million other women who will benefit from this aspect of the law.
So, yes, a little gratitude from women’s health advocates and other liberals would be appropriate. Instead, when these Catholic sisters and others asked for some flexibility with regard to the mandate, the advocates pooh-poohed as irrelevant their concerns about religious liberty and insisted that “the bishops” were the only ones who had a problem with contraception coverage.
Well, cry me a a river.The likes of these “Catholic sisters” were happy to work for Obamacare to be imposed on the country (fair enough, that’s all part of the democratic process), but now that that law has gone through, what is good enough for everyone else is not, it seems, acceptable to them. Apparently these sensitive souls want the legislation they supported to be applied in a way that takes account of their particular ideological sensitivities.
Everyone else can just go hang.
Nauseating.
We’ve heard a lot recently from the Vatican on the “social justice” front, most of it the usual leftish sanctimony garnished with the distaste for the free market that has long been an important strand of Roman Catholic thought.
Well, now comes an excellent opportunity for the church to back up its words. The Daily Telegraph has the details:
The Roman Catholic Church in Italy is under growing pressure to start paying taxes on its massive property portfolio, in a move that could raise up to 800 million euros (£680 million) a year and help bail the country out of its economic crisis.
Campaigners, most prominently parties on the centre left, say it is deeply unfair that Church-owned properties with a commercial function — for instance convents and monasteries that charge paying guests similar rates to four-star hotels — are exempt from property tax. As the new technocrat government of Mario Monti seeks to slash the nation’s 1.9 trillion euro debt, attention is turning to the estimated 65,000 buildings owned by the Church.
They include around 50,000 cathedrals, churches and chapels — which would retain their tax-free status — but 11,000 schools, universities and libraries as well as nearly 5,000 hospitals, clinics and other commercial properties would face the tax.
The Monti administration has announced that Italians are to be taxed on their primary residences, reinstating a levy that had been abolished by Silvio Berlusconi, who resigned from his third term in office last month.It is one of a package of tax increases, labour reforms and pension reductions which will hit Italians hard in the pocket over the next few years. With millions of people facing a bleak era of austerity, politicians are now calling for the enormously rich Church to play its part in shouldering the burden. The potential windfall is enormous. According to an estate agency, Gruppo RE, a fifth of publicly owned properties in Italy are directly or indirectly controlled by the Church.
But calls for Church taxes may encounter resistance from the Monti government, which is heavily stacked with academics, bankers and lawyers with strong Catholic credentials. Under a law adopted in 1982 and backed up by an amendment in 2006, Church-owned properties are immune from taxation, even those that have a commercial element.
This will be a good test of both Monti and the Catholic Church. Serious or not?
Italy · Religious Left · taxes · Vatican
Via God’s Politics:
The Kumbaya-quotient is off the charts in Zuccotti Park and much of it rings authentic. The smell of Nag Champa incense hangs in the air mixed with the odors from nearby falafel, pretzel and Sabrett hot dog carts. There are lots of dread-locked white kids with nose rings and bare feet, plenty of tie dye, Che Guevera t-shirts and fresh-faced, lightly tattooed young mothers breastfeeding a few yards away from an impromptu meditation circle. There were also multi-generational family outings, where a grandmother was teaching her teenage granddaughter about the Catholic Worker movement, and small bands of young Lubavitch Chabad Jewish men — carrying date palm, willow and myrtle branches (and some impressive citron — or etrog — specimens) — who stopped passersby whom they presumed to be Jewish as well to ask whether they were celebrating Sukkot (the feast of booths) and offering to daven (pray) with any willing men.About 3:30 p.m. a contingent of Roman-collar-wearing clergy men and women — Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Buddhist, Native American and many others — arrived carrying the now-famous papier mache golden calf aloft like a sacrificial lamb or a statue of San Gennaro. The religious leaders and other people of faith gathered for the now-weekly Multi-Faith Service, that included litanies of prayers, petitions, scripture reading, and a lot of singing (accompanied by acoustic guitars and at least one auto-harp.)
Well, here’s food for thought (and, I suspect, just a spot of controversy) from the Hoover Institution’s Richard Epstein:
The terrible economic news from both Europe and the United States has led to much soul-searching on both sides of the Atlantic. How did we get here, and how can we get out of this jam? In my past columns for Hoover’s Defining Ideas, I have insisted that both economies will be able to extricate themselves from their deep slumps only by promptly reversing those policies that have brought them to the brink. A successful and sustainable political order requires stable legal and economic policies that reward innovation, spur growth, and maximize the ability of rich and poor alike to enter into voluntary arrangements. Limited government, low rates of taxation, and strong property rights are the guiding principles.
Unfortunately, many spiritual and economic leaders are working overtime to push social policy in the exact opposite direction. At the top of the list are two prominent figures: Pope Benedict XVI and financier Warren Buffett.
One can only agree. The self-serving, sanctimonious drivel that has long been the stuff of Buffett’s preaching has come under fire around here before, but it’s certainly also worth spending some time looking at what the Pope has been saying. So that’s what Epstein does:
The Pope was on his way to recession-torn Spain—to lead the Roman Catholic Church’s weeklong celebration of World Youth Day—when he denounced those nameless persons who put “profits before people.” He told journalists, “The economy cannot be measured by the maximum profit but by the common good. The economy cannot function only with mercantile self-regulation but needs an ethical reason in order to work for man.” Standing alone, these words mirror the refrains of countless Spanish socialists, whose relations with the Pope have soured in recent years. Their shared premises help explain why Spain finds itself in such a sorry state.
Denouncing those who put ‘profits before people’ may stir the masses, but it is a wickedly deformed foundation for social policy. Profits, like losses, do not exist in the abstract. Corporations, as such, do not experience gains or losses. Those gains and losses are passed on to real people, like shareholders, consumers, workers, and suppliers. It is possible to imagine a world without profits. Yet the disappearance of profits means that investors will be unable to realize a return on either their capital or labor. Structure a system that puts people before profits, and both capital and labor will dry up. The scarcity of private investment capital will force the public sector to first raise and allocate capital and labor, though it has no idea how these resources should be deployed to help the people, writ large. A set of ill-conceived public investments will not provide useful goods and services for consumers (who are, after all, people), nor will it provide sustainable wages for workers (who are also people). Poor investment decisions will lead to a massive constriction in social output that harms all people equally.
The proper response to these difficulties is to treat profits as an accurate measure of the cost of capital, rewarded to those individuals and firms who supply some desirable mix of goods, services, and jobs that people, acting individually and not collectively, want for themselves. The genius of Adam Smith, whose musings on the invisible hand are too often derided, was to realize that private markets (supported, to be sure, by suitable public infrastructure) will do better than a command and control system in satisfying the individual’s wants and needs. The Pope offers no serious answer to Smith’s point when he talks about “the ethical need to work for man” and the “common good.” In both of these cases, he treats a collection of diverse individuals as though they form part of some harmonious whole. “Man” in the Pope’s formulation is a grammatical singular but a social collective. The “common good” speaks of some aggregate benefit to a community that is not securely tethered to the successes and failures of the particular individuals within the collectivity.
As a technical matter, it becomes critical to have some reductionist argument that transforms statements about these groups into statements about the individuals who compose them. Ordinary business people understand this intuitively when they speak of win/win transactions. These are transactions that generate gains to all parties involved in the bargain.That common expression, “win/win,” is the distillation of sound economic theory, for the more win/win transactions a society can generate for its people, the greater its economic prosperity.
The great advantage of competition in markets is that it exhausts all gains from trade, which thus allows individuals to attain higher levels of welfare. These win/win propositions may not reach the perfect endpoint, but they will avoid the woes that are now consuming once prosperous economies. Understanding the win/win concept would have taken the Pope away from his false condemnation of markets. It might have led him to examine more closely Spain’s profligate policies, where high guaranteed public benefits and extensive workplace regulation have led to an unholy mix of soaring public debt and an unemployment rate of 20 percent. It is a tragic irony that papal economics mimic those of the Church’s socialist opponents. The Pope’s powerful but misdirected words will only complicate the task of meaningful fiscal and regulatory reform in Spain and the rest of Europe. False claims for social justice come at a very high price.
Amen (so to speak).
And what Epstein has to say about Buffett is well worth checking out too.
Update
In reply to some points made by Ramesh Ponnuru on the Corner in response to the above, I added this later post:
Ramesh, viewed in isolation, the Pope’s remarks can be seen as a reflection of the fairly traditional Roman Catholic corporatism that lies, I’d guess, at the base of his economic thinking. That’s a doctrine that is in many respects profoundly antagonistic to classical free -market liberalism, but coming from a pontiff, and, not only that, a pontiff who has spent most of his adult life in a country run on the “Rhineland” social market model, it’s far from a surprise.
The trouble is that you cannot view those remarks in isolation. The Spanish economy is in a mess, thanks primarily to the distortions introduced by the euro and, of course, deep structural problems of the type identified by Richard Epstein. Resolving those problems will be difficult. That’s why a good number of Spain’s indignados (if not — yet — the wider electorate) have found it far easier to scapegoat a wicked, if ill-defined “capitalism.” By saying what he did, where he did, and when he did, Benedict XVI, maybe inadvertently, maybe not, has risked giving that scapegoating a credibility in a constituency that it might not have otherwise reached. That’s a pity.
Benedict XVI · Corporatism · Religious Left · Roman Catholicism · Warren Buffett
Time’s Amy Sullivan (she is the religion writer who dreamt up the story that Republicans were drumming up Obama-as-antichrist rumors during the 2008 election) was also thrilled by Paul Ryan’s encounter with a member of the religious left:
These days, when people question a politician’s “morality,” they usually mean his or her personal behavior and choices. But an interesting thing is happening right now around the GOP budget proposal. A broad coalition of religious voices is criticizing the morality of the choices reflected in budget cuts and tax policy. And they’ve specifically targeted Ryan and his praise for Rand, the philosopher who once said she “promote[d] the ethic of selfishness.”
A broad coalition. Really?
It is, however, certainly a dishonest one. As its members well know, it’s quite possible to pick and choose what one admires about an author without agreeing with everything that he or she said. After all, there’s some pretty rough stuff in the Bible. Are we to take it that this posse of ‘progressive’ clerics has signed up for everything that is in their holy book?
But back to Amy Sullivan:
Across the street from the Faith & Freedom Conference Friday afternoon, a group of religious leaders continued the attack on what they now consistently refer to as “The Ayn Rand Budget.” Father Cletus Kiley, a Catholic priest, declared the Ryan budget “does not pass our test” of Catholic teachings, and suggested that supporters of the budget “drop Ayn Rand’s books and pick up their sacred texts.”
Who, I wonder, is Father Kiley to set “our” test? As for the infinitely patronizing suggestion that supporters of the Ryan budget should “pick up their sacred texts”, well, those supporters should just pause to ask themselves how much tax this church of Kiley’s pays and move on.
Andrew Sullivan discusses some of these issues here. There’s an enormous amount with which to disagree, not least his implicit rejection of the syncretic nature of Christianity, a religion that, after two thousand years, amounts to rather more than the possibly apocryphal words of its presumed founder, but this, in particular, caught my eye:
It seems to me that one of the core messages of Jesus was that his kingdom was not of this world. Politics is a necessary evil, but it is not a spiritual vocation. Between a life in the world and a life that is otherworldly, it is hard to see Christianity in a political mode.
I’m not sure that’s a distinction that holds up. Thus Father Kiley may believe that his agenda is spiritual, but it sure looks political to me…
Paul Ryan was chased by a protester waving a giant Bible and decrying libertarian author Ayn Rand on his way out of the Faith and Freedom Conference, a social conservative gathering in DC where he delivered a speech on his budget.
“Why did you choose to model your budget on the extreme ideology of Ayn Rand rather than the faith of economic justice in the Bible?” the blond, 20-something male asked. He said he wanted to “present” Ryan with a Bible to teach him how to help the “most vulnerable.”
Public nuisance Jim Wallis and a motley collection of other “religious leaders” have taken a new tack on the budget debate. The Republicans, they allege, are in thrall to Godless Ayn Rand (who knew?) and their plans (such as they are) for tackling the deficit apparently run against God’s “instructions” to us.
Remarkable.
On November 2, 2009, five Catholic activists — one nun, two priests, and two laypeople, all age sixty or above — cut through a series of chain link and barbed wire fences surrounding Naval Base Kitsap in Bangor, Washington, where roughly one-quarter of the United States’ nuclear warheads are reportedly stored and a fleet of eleven submarines equipped to deploy Trident nuclear weapons is stationed.
The five unfurled a banner reading “Trident: Illegal + Immoral,” poured their own blood over the site, and beat on the ground and the fences with household hammers before being apprehended and arrested. “We walk into the heart of darkness,” they wrote in a statement distributed to supporters and media, “as one step up the holy mountain where all nations can unite in peace” (read the group’s full statement here).
The five, who call themselves the Disarm Now Plowshares, were found guilty in December on four felony counts: trespass, damage to federal property, injury to federal property, and conspiracy to damage federal property. A week and a half ago in Tacoma’s federal court they received prison sentences of six to fifteen months, with an additional year of supervised release. The days surrounding their sentencing, during which supporters gathered in Tacoma for a “Festival of Hope,” highlighted the importance of legal consequences for this group of activists, and shed light on their aims.
I’m not sure that much is gained by jailing this sad little group of fanatics, but the inclusion of the word “illegal” in their banner reminds us of the game they are playing. The Trident missiles are, of course, perfectly legal. That the Disarm Now Plowshares (oh please) choose to claim that these weapons are illegal (under a distinctly dodgy interpretation of an advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice) is telling. The law they are really talking about is their vision of God’s law, a law that they may think is already in force (read the account of their courtroom behavior) or should be. The rest of us will, of course, be expected to knuckle under.
So much for Thomas Jefferson
