"Cities are the way they are because somebody wants them to be."
Sittings around a conference table in the CitySquare offices in downtown Dallas, John's words made me begin to reassess how I view cities. I used to think that cities and communities are only products of their own past—for example, many southern cities that once upheld slavery and later Jim Crow laws still have extreme geographical segregation of races and socioeconomic classes.
As it turns out, this is true—but the remnants and wounds left by old systems are perpetuated because actual people use them for their own gain.
As time goes by, wounds left on a communal scale by first explicit then hidden forms of racism have not healed wholly. Reconciliation remains absent. Subsequently, in the areas left poor from that abhorrent legacy, often an individual rises to such social power that they become functional mob bosses, expecting a payoff for any business or any social project trying to move into their neighborhood. Without their approval, nothing happens.
This is the reality of working in a non-profit, John tells us.
And I think that is true: Christians forming an organization with the targeted purpose of a non-profit are committing themselves to work within a particular system to bring not only services for the immediate needs of the disempowered but also to change the culture, to change the power structures, within the city for the benefit of those who cannot defend themselves.
Bartolomé de las Casas, a 16th-century Dominican Catholic cleric in South America, provides an excellent example here. He was complicit for a good portion of his early life in the buying, selling, and exploiting of Native American slaves, even as a member of the clergy. After a while, however, he came to see the system as one completely without God.
"I have seen with my own eyes, not read in accounts that could be unreliable, I have felt, as if with my own hands, the cruelties committed there against those gentle, peaceful people, cruelties of a kind so great, so beastly, nothing like them was ever done in the past by harsh men or mindless barbarians. These cruelties had no rhyme or reason other than greed, the insatiable hunger and thirst for gold in our people."
And later, "Unclean is the offering sacrificed by an oppressor." He told his own king that the entire people were oppressing the Indians—and therefore their offerings to God were unclean.
Giving up his slaves, he used every ounce of social and political power within the Catholic world to fight for the freeing of all Native American slaves, using the argument that Christ "fashioned a way of attracting people to Himself, to a moral life, by attachment to Him, compliance with his laws. The was was respectful, attractive, altruistic, germane to human kind."
I, for one, have no real belief that political structures, at least in the U.S., can be redeemed in such a way that government will actually operate on behalf of those who cannot defend themselves. I especially do not trust Evangelical Christians here to be able to operate within that system in a way that advocates for anyone but themselves.
Yet Bartolomé gives me a bit of hope. He did not propose to deconstruct the government perpetuating the evil, but he did spend all his time trying to change that government and to destroy a particular social project—the "encomiendas." He further shows that the Christian tradition has the resources for turning its own evil systems upon their head (if and when they exist), plus he explains that if we imitate Jesus, then the nations will flock to the "mountain of God"—whether we use words or arguments or not.
"Many peoples shall come and say, 'Come let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob, that he may teach us his ways..." - Isaiah 2.3
No comments:
Post a Comment