Civilian Empowerment: A Theological Inquiry

A theological inquiry into civilian empowerment approaches “god” or “gods” as sources of power. Since our conception of god depends on what we can say—our language—the gods of empowerment belong to our various social worlds. We could understand the flow of power here as one where God empowers the church and then shares it with society, or where God empowers people in society and the church gives witness to it. The protestant theologians Paul Lehmann and Edward Hobbs take the second view. Lehmann’s approach opens us to a community-creating power that other language communities besides the Christian church could articulate and celebrate. Hobbs explains how the Christian trinity exposes our limitations, hubris, and the call to care for others. These theologies reveal our human capacity to create caring communities with the power to call for change.

The Social

The social is constituted by on-going communication and behavior patterns that influence participants perceptions, expectations and moral boundaries. For some, moral boundaries protect the racial hierarchy of American prosperity by calling natural what is actually social. Controversary about the meaning of sex, race, and ancestry can help us understand this difference, and thereby sharpen our awareness of our experiences of the social from social diversity to social amnesia. Social amnesia eliminates any awareness of the climate of injustice. In this context, a disturbing trend is our increasing reliance on private philanthropy to solve social problems, which moves us toward a new form of feudalism instead of a civic democracy. In a civic space that arises from the connections between our shared humanity and social differences, it is possible to listen to diverse voices and to make incoherent stories coherent.

The Sharecropper’s Story and An Ethics for Environmentalism

The progress and now the danger of American Prosperity has relied on the treatment of the Earth as “land.” The story of “lands” around the Atlantic include people viewing the Earth as “Mother,” as “sacred,” and a gift, and as a thing. While the English Common Law treated land as property, the Latin/Roman view saw land as having a “social function.” This view seems implicit in the decision of freed Blacks after the Civil War to choose sharecropping over wages. They believed that “the tillers of the soil should be guaranteed possession of the land” (from the Creed of the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union). Returning to the sharecroppers’ desire opens the possibility of changing the current course of history by taking reciprocity or “balanced social relations” as our guiding star. Balancing social relations would entail reparations of unbalanced relations and sharing a city’s land wealth with all the city’s inhabitants.

An Invitation to Civic Dialogue

Those of us who have benefited from the climate of injustice need an invitation from others to join with them in changing our social climate to a climate of justice. The controversaries over national monuments opens the door to explore the question of who needs an invitation from whom and what white people need to learn in order to respond to the civilian invitation from others. The others include future generations, Syrian refugees, migrants at our Southern border, and personal invitations from People of Color. Personal invitations depend on our aptitude in engaging in dialogue, as is illustrated by an imaginary dialogue involving a white man and a black woman. Such dialogues can create the conditions for good conversations, and these conversation can move us toward a climate of justice—an ethical foundation for developing policies to protect our habitat for future generations.

The Earth

The Earth is both our home and our provider. It’s meaning for us depends on how we interpret our human, social, and civic relationships with it. All humans exist as participants in the earth’s dynamics, from breathing its air to consuming its provisions. Our social relations with the Earth span the range from indigenous groups who see the Earth as sacred to some modern groups who see it as a commodity. We are dwellers on the Earth and our dwellings exist as homes in a natural and urban environment and yet they can be treated as nothing but real estate. Still, since Earth Day in 1972, there have been “environmental victories” in preserving the Earth’s vitality, and yet today as citizens we face a stark alternative between a stable or “hot house” Earth. Making the right choice depends on breaking through the climate of injustice that now prevents us from both repairing our relationships with each other and from restoring the Earth as a habitat for all living things.

Our Humanity

Neurobiological research highlights the significance of our physical existence as feeling, conscious, and purposeful beings. Antonio Damasio describes the core self as a witness to one’s own purposeful existence—a possible location for the notion of human dignity. In contrast to the notion of the isolated individual, Damasio defines the self as a conductor created by an orchestra. Daniel Siegel sees the self as a composite entity determined by the flow of information and energy among internal and external events and responses. He also points out the significance of Attachment theory is revealing our need, like other primates, of a secure base; grounded in social relationships with others.

The Civic

We bring forth a civic realm with the mutual recognition of our shared humanity that allows us to repair violations of human dignity and to restore social coherence. Given our social inequalities, this takes the form of those who have resources (citizens) responding to the rightful demands of those do not (civilians). The paradigmatic model for civic engagement is the Civilian Review Board, where citizens listen and respond to civilian claims for justice and limits of the use of force. The civilian call for limits can be applied to the other three parts of the four-part framework: the Earth, humanity, and the social. This gives us permission to recognize that we have only one Earth, that death is a natural limit to human life, and that social trends, such as American Prosperity, should not be treated as limitless. Acknowledging these limitations is a necessary condition for creating a climate of justice.

White Compromises and American Prosperity

The development and protection of American Prosperity was contingent upon Northern and Southern white men making compromises that allowed the continuance of slavery. These white compromises in 1787, 1820, 1850, and 1877 not only protected white supremacy, but also unity of the settler’s economy. The Federal government invaded the Southern states not to abolish slavery, but to preserve the union. After the War, during Reconstruction, Blacks started schools, farmed the land, and were elected to local, state, and national offices. This period of Black empowerment was cut short when Northern and Southern states compromised again to allow the establishment of the Jim Crow regime, the terrorism of lynching, and the re-establishment of the Ku Klux Klan. This compromise was disrupted with the 1960s civil rights movements, which has left us today without the unity necessary to create a climate of justice.

Introduction: Three Kinds of Engagement

To change the course of the unsustainable trends of American Prosperity, we must change the social climate of injustice that allows it to continue. This change entails three operations: create an interpretive framework that covers the key components of our living systems, tell coherent stories that include past injustices and places to repair them, and create a civic space that enables us to create a climate of justice. The four components of the interpretive framework are the Earth, our humanity, the social, and the civic. The historical narratives are stories guided by the principle of coherence, which reveal opportunities to change the current course of history. Making such changes involves civilians entering civic spaces where they can invite citizens to care for justice and for future generations.

Reinhold Niebuhr During the Time of the White Compromise

The story of how the theological ethicist, Reinhold Niebuhr, dealt with race during the “white compromise” (from after Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Movement) gives us a good picture of what will work and not work in re-directing American Prosperity toward a sustainable future. In his early years, Niebuhr argued against the Ku Klux Klan in Detroit, and supported sharecropper cooperatives in Arkansas. He guided his later ethical analysis of national and international groups by what he called “Christian realism,” which assumed that groups had limited capacity for doing good. At the height of his national status, he wrote books as though American history was the same as white history. He suggested caution in applying the Brown v. Board of Education decision to white families and after the civil rights movement had disrupted the “white compromise,” Niebuhr moved somewhat closer to Martin Luther King Jr.’s view of the “beloved community.”