Where is religion in OWS?

[Question Everything]

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I have ben watching Youtube videos on and relating to Occupy Wall Street several hours each day for over a week, and this is the first one I have seen that was done by a religious person.

Question for debate: Is religion ignoring or avoiding Occupy Wall Street? Should it get involved, and if so how?

[micatala]

OWS seems to be a secular thing. That is, no one mentions God on the loud speaker. It's respectful not to. Why try to find religion in things that aren't there- or even not caring about it?

Unless, of course, you believe all secular things are anti-theistic. Which, disappointingly, some people do.

I am referring to how organized religion views OWS. What is the Catholic Church saying? Evangelicals? Mormons?

I think some of those who might be described as liberal Christians are most certainly supportive of OWS.

See for example the Sojourners organization, headed by evangelical Jim Wallis.

http://www.sojo.net/

They have had a number of blog entries, articles, etc. on OWS. For example:

http://blog.sojo.net/2011/10/25/a-devot ... ll-street/

A reporter recently asked me, “As a Christian leader, does your faith have anything to say about Wall Street?� I said, “How much time do you have?�

The Christian message has a lot to say to Wall Street.

Theologian Karl Barth said, “We have to read the Bible in one hand, and the newspaper in the other.� For too long we Christians have used our faith as a ticket out of this world rather than fuel to engage it.

In his parables, Jesus wasn’t offering pie-in-the-sky theology … he was talking about the real stuff of earth. He talks about wages, debt, widows and orphans, unjust business owners and bad politicians. In fact Woody Guthrie breaks it all down in his song “Jesus Christ.� The song ends with Woody singing, “This song was written in New York City … If Jesus were to preach what he preached in Galilee, they would lay him in his grave again.�

The more I read the Gospels, the more they seem to confront the very patterns of the world we live in. At one point Mary, pregnant with Jesus, cries out: “God casts the mighty from their thrones and raises the lowly … God fills the hungry with good things and sends the rich away empty …� You can’t help but think if she were alive in contemporary America some folks would try to accuse the Virgin Mother of being Marxist or promoting class warfare. But all through Scripture we see this — more than 2,000 verses about how God cares for the poor and most vulnerable.

What would Jesus say about Wall Street?

It doesn’t get much better than Luke chapter 12. Jesus begins by saying, “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.� And then, as usual, he tells a story. The story is about a “rich man� whose business makes it big. He has so much stuff he doesn’t know where to put it all. So he decides, “This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones … and I’ll say to myself, ‘You have plenty of grain laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.’� But Jesus says God looks down and is not happy. God says to the rich man, “You fool! This very night you will die — and what will happen to all your stuff?� And Jesus ends the teaching by saying this is how things will be for folks who store up stuff for themselves.

It does make you wonder what to do about 401k’s and pensions. But it seems pretty clear that Jesus isn’t a big fan of stockpiling stuff in barns and banks, especially when folks are dying of starvation and preventable diseases.

One of the constant threads in Scripture is, “Give us this day our daily bread.� Nothing more, nothing less. Underneath this admonition is the assumption that the more we store up for tomorrow the less people will have for today. And in a world where 1 percent of the world owns half the world’s stuff, we are beginning to realize that there is enough for everyone’s need, but there is not enough for everyone’s greed. Lots of folks are beginning to say, “Maybe God has a different dream for the world than the Wall Street dream.�

Maybe God’s dream is for us to live simply so that others may simply live. Maybe God’s dream is for the bankers to empty their banks and barns so folks have enough food for today.

Woody Guthrie may be right. If Jesus came to Wall Street preaching the same message that he preached in Galilee … he might land himself on a cross again.

Shane Claiborne is a Red Letter Christian and a founding partner of The Simple Way community, a radical faith community that lives among and serves the homeless in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia. He is the co-author, with Chris Haw, of Jesus for President.

[micatala]

Here is another article addressing OWS. This is from Christianity Today, a magazine in the evangelical tradtion.

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/201 ... ll-st.html


The title is "Prophets Against Profits? What Occupy Wall Street Misses"

On interesting paragraph was:

The Occupy Wall Street movement shares more than it would like to admit with the Tea Party, its populist complement on the right. Rather than taking the approach of self-reflection and personal ownership of sin that Jesus imparts to his followers, each of these movements seeks to externalize blame onto a culpable Other. It is Immigrants or Muslims or Obamacare or Greedy Corporations or Corrupt Wall Street Financiers who are to blame for our problems. But obviously not … Us.

Wydlick does address religion at a couple of points. However, the article ends with this disclaimer.

Bruce Wydick is Professor of Economics at the University of San Francisco and Visiting Professor at the University of California at Berkeley. "Speaking Out" is Christianity Today's guest opinion column and (unlike an editorial) does not necessarily represent the opinion of the magazine.

[Slopeshoulder]

IIRC, catholic social economic ethics has among its principles that of Proportionality and Stewardship.

Both of these would be amenable to the concenrs of OWS.

[jmac2112]

I was reading a humorous article on OWS that characterized the message of the movement as "We Demand Sweeping, Unspecified Change!" I'm Catholic, and I'm pretty sure there has been no official Catholic pronouncement on OWS. Probably some head-scratching, though.

[Question Everything]

OWS seems to be a secular thing. That is, no one mentions God on the loud speaker. It's respectful not to. Why try to find religion in things that aren't there- or even not caring about it?

Unless, of course, you believe all secular things are anti-theistic. Which, disappointingly, some people do.

From what I can see, the only religion being referenced by the OWies is Judaism...and that not so much because of the religion as it is about the people and stereotypes attached to those who are Jews.

And that, most definitely, is 'anti"

Oh, really?

This is from a group that is strongly allied with OWS, and is very likely to be one of their originators:

[youtube][/youtube]

Uploaded by iamanonymous2012 on May 8, 2011

I am Anonymous, this is a warning.
Neo-Nazi's


Your incomprehensible actions, and , reluctance to accept the Freedom and Equality that ever e single, human being possesses by right from birth, causes Hate, and worldwide Racism.

After the World War, your ideology plunged the world into chaos. You have taken over a deadly plague, known as anti-Semitism, and made sure that racism was drilled into our collective consciousness, in order for humanity to accept these crude ideas as a given, mostly without ever questioning them.

Your misdirected politics and your hate filled crusade against humanity have not only blurred your perception, it has also affected other countries worldwide. You have robbed irretrievable evidences of history as well as valuable art objects and architectural structures which belong to mankind, or were part of the cultural heritage of humanity. You were anxious to cause trouble between continents, which involved a collapse of political dialogues. The result, the cold war, lasted for years and its voice still echoes today. The holocaust against the Jewish, the Sinti, and the Roma, your so called "euthanasia", imposed on disabled people, all of them are considered the cruel climax of the Second World War, to a cost of 6 million innocent people's lives. You have combined the ideals of industrialization with the abomination of mass murder, a circumstance that led to destruction of human life, on a scale never before seen on earth!

Again, please support or retract your claim.

[bjs]

Question for debate: Is religion ignoring or avoiding Occupy Wall Street? Should it get involved, and if so how?

My view is that the church should not commit herself to any political group or party. There are certain political doctrines and actions that, as a Christian, I support. However, there is no “Christian� political party.

The OWS movement has aspects to it that are wise and fit with the teachings of Christ. However, Dianaiad (post 5) is correct that it is a political movement and not a religious one.

Individual Christians may choose to be a part of OWS, but no one should pretend to commit the entire church to any political group.

[East of Eden]

Here is some anti-relgion in OWS:

http://www.christianconcern.com/our-con ... n-ministry