Recently, I was having dinner with a young Christian lawyer and his wife in Australia. Tim had served for a while as the mayor of a small inner-city community that is part of the city of Melbourne. Now working as a pastor again, for a large downtown church, he has responsibilities for articulating the moral dimensions of many public issues as they impact the lives of people in that city.
Because of his success as a mayor and a pastor, and his high profile on a number of political issues, Tim is being approached about a possible run for the parliament of Australia. He's been asked before and, with his wife, Meredie, declined for family reasons-including the need of young children for their father's presence. Now the questions are coming up again, and I was privileged to be included in the family discussion.
The issues being discussed were all the right ones-impact on the family, personal motivations, the temptations of political power, and whether a "prophetic" role from a church base or a more "political" role in the legislature is the more effective or faithful role for Tim.
The issue of money came up only briefly and tangentially. Tim explained that all candidates receive a reimbursement of 30 cents for every vote they get, and he was assured to get enough support to cover his campaign expenses even if he lost. He also predicted the cost of his election campaign to be only in the tens of thousands of dollars.
When I told them what a comparable campaign now costs in the United States, they were both incredulous. "We could never raise that kind of money," Tim exclaimed, "unless we could get the support of the very rich and powerful." Exactly.
While campaign finance reform is a critical issue in most democracies around the world today, nowhere is the situation so extreme as in the United States. In no other country do electoral campaigns cost so much money and a small, wealthy elite exert such influence and power over who runs and who wins. While the "wealth primary" is still quite hidden in American politics, its control over the political process is unquestionable.
The dominant influence of wealth and power not only limits who runs and who wins, it also serves to exclude all but a narrow range of political options and visions. New political directions-especially those generated from grassroots communities-have little chance of being heard or tried on a national level in an environment so controlled by the top of the society.
NOT SURPRISINGLY, both the Republican and Democratic Parties have resisted serious efforts at campaign finance reform. Both have too much vested interest in the existing system-and both have become trapped by it. Large donors and political action committees (PACs) virtually control the political landscape and conversation because they control the two major political parties. As Washington Post
writer E.J. Dionne recently commented on the lack of alternative political vision in American politics today, "It's not so much that we need a third political party, but a second one."
Yet, at the same time, the hunger for political alternatives is steadily growing among the American people. Most Americans believe that politics simply is not working, especially at the federal level. Many do not sense that their government is responding either to the moral or economic crises that they feel. Politics doesn't seem to be speaking either to people's values or to their anxieties. We are facing both social disintegration and political dysfunction at the same time-a dangerous combination.
Today, many people are looking for new political approaches that are community-based, value-centered, and solution-oriented. They want answers more than ideology. The old solutions of the Left and the Right, and the polarized and bitter conflict between liberals and conservatives, seem increasingly irrelevant and distasteful to many people. They care about both the "moral values" that have concerned many conservatives and
the issues of justice and equity that have preoccupied the progressive agenda. We are seeing a new concern for reweaving the fabric of family and community life in reaction to the steady deterioration of both in recent decades.
In regard to welfare reform, for example, many are unhappy with long lines of people waiting for a social worker, but aren't any more satisfied with the social Darwinism of the new Republican Congress. New solutions, preferably at the local level, that involve new public-private partnerships to solve problems of poverty, youth violence, family breakdown, drug addiction, unemployment, housing, homelessness, education, and crime are not only possible, but are being seriously discussed and experimented with around the country.
For example, the anti-violence and gang truce efforts we have profiled in Sojourners
are becoming, in some places, much more than that. Barrios Unidos, based in Northern California, is becoming a national network of locally based organizations that involve young people in the transformation of their communities. Boston's Ten Point Coalition has significantly engaged the religious community along with young people in new approaches that combine spiritual renewal and community development. Their ideas are now spreading to other cities in the Northeast.
Kansas City's Break and Build program has set up "tables" where former gang youth sit down together with religious, civic, and business leaders to construct new strategies and find new resources. The evangelical-minded Christian Community Development Association is operating in more than 100 cities to rebuild both lives and neighborhoods. These are more than examples of creative "spiritual ministry" and "community development." They are signs of the renewal of democracy itself. Ordinary people, especially those who have been trapped at the bottom of society with feelings of both powerlessness and rage, are finding avenues for effective involvement.
This fall a number of Barrios Unidos organizers stayed with me while helping to support the development of local chapters in the Washington, D.C. area. Homer Leija is the 21-year-old leader of Fresno's Barrios Unidos chapter. From midnight until 3 in the morning, Homer hosted from my living room his regular call-in radio show, which is broadcast into poor barrios and even prisons throughout Northern California. His message was about more than ending violence; it was about young people turning their lives around and taking a leadership role in the transformation of their communities. "We've got ideas, man," says Homer.
Many Americans are indeed looking for new ideas. A recent Newsweek
cover story proclaimed a new "radical middle" in the American electorate. The widespread public interest in potential third party candidates from Ross Perot to Bill Bradley to Colin Powell suggests the desire for political change, apart from the merits of the candidates themselves.
But new political solutions, leaders, and candidates find it very hard to emerge in a tightly closed political system-a winner-take-all electoral process financed by the people and institutions who are already in control. Both new ideas and leaders are kept outside the process by the very nature of its political and financial structure.
Many of the people whose ideas we need most are the kind of community and constituency leaders who have demonstrated both a vision and a following, but do not have access to the kind of resources that could make them serious political candidates. In a political system dominated by lawyers, businesspersons, and public relations experts, we need the infusion of teachers, farmers, community organizers, church elders, shop stewards, poets, young people, and PTA parents. But most of them don't have the necessary money or connections to get into the system.
THERE ARE EVEN DEEPER questions here. The government is frequently attacked these days-political power has become too concentrated, centralized, intrusive, and unaccountable, especially at the federal level. The large and distant bureaucracies that have come to represent the essence of government are met with disdain and fear by growing numbers of people. Government inefficiency, waste, corruption, and arrogance are all cited, often with good reason, in my opinion.
From a biblical point of view, there is great reason to suspect and scrutinize concentrations of power-not just politically but theologically. Human nature being what it is, the biblical prophets constantly warned against such concentrations of power and were especially hard on "the king," who embodied political power in biblical times. The powerful are always a threat to the powerless, according to the Bible. And the king and his court chaplains were always coming under the judgment of God, as spoken by the prophets of Yahweh, whose concern was the common good and the plight of the poor and oppressed in particular.
Power is not bad, in and of itself, but it must always be held accountable. The Christian writer C.S. Lewis used to say that he supported democracy not because people were so naturally good but because they usually were not! Hence, decentralized political arrangements with multiple levels of accountability and many countervailing institutions seem theologically preferable to large, centralized, and unaccountable political structures. Fair enough.
But one should get theologically nervous in Washington when the same people who perpetually cry against big government are almost totally silent about money's domination of the political process. What about the intense and growing concentration of power in the market economy? When our biggest corporations are bigger and more powerful than many national governments, isn't it fair to question their influence in the corridors of Congress?
The Democrats may indeed be too protective of big government bureaucracies that provide much of their support, but the Republicans refuse to challenge the entrenched economic elites who are their patrons. This is the great conservative double standard. The federal welfare payments-in the form of corporate subsidies and tax breaks-that are quietly given out each year to the rich and powerful far outstrip the amounts given to the poor. Yet it is the latter that are now the subject of controversy in the nation's capital. If we are seriously trying to reduce the deficit, why is corporate welfare to CEOs and their lawyers not on the chopping block along with the funds to poor single mothers and fatherless children?
The reasons are directly connected with the fact that welfare moms have little left over from their checks to make campaign contributions to those running for public office. If the families of the urban underclass had the clout possessed by PACs representing wealthy interests, does anyone really believe that corporate welfare would stay hidden from view while the public spotlight burns on our poorest citizens?
Our biblical tradition says that the poor should
have as much clout as those with money and power. In fact, the Hebrew prophets say that a nation's righteousness is best determined by how it treats the poorest and most vulnerable in its midst. If we take the Bible seriously, the growing gap between the haves and the have-nots in America is a massive moral and political issue. The inequitable distribution of the nation's resources, the steady decline of the middle class, the dramatic increases in wealth to the upper echelons of American society, and the swelling numbers of the nation's poor are issues critical to our political health and well-being. Yet they are almost never central topics of our public discourse.
The people who bankroll American politics don't want these topics to come up. Or as one commentator recently put it, the political silence about the growing economic divisions in American life is a "purchased silence." Whenever the topic threatens to emerge, some conservative politician will always accuse the critics of wealth of engaging in "class warfare." The real war is that declared on both the poor and the middle class by the changing character of the global economy. It is the "casino economy" of Wall Street that is destroying the real economy. It is the endless corporate mergers and relocations that concentrate power in fewer and fewer hands and downsize both opportunity and democracy for the rest of us.
To attack big government and blame only the welfare state for the problem of poverty, while virtually ignoring the enormous power of big corporations over the political process and the dislocation and insecurity of ordinary people, is inconsistent, dishonest, and theologically untenable. If the dysfunctions of the welfare system can be scrutinized, why not the changing structure of a global economy that continues to remove jobs from American communities? If the economic system is producing greater and greater inequality, how can that not affect the quality of our political democracy? And if the government bureaucrats are going to be challenged to open up the political process, why not challenge the lobbyists for every corporate and partisan PAC, who now virtually write legislation for the same members of Congress that their contributions put into office?
THE BIBLICAL WRITERS spoke often about the king, but they spoke just as often about the landlord, the employer, the judge, the owners of land and property, and those who live in luxury while others endure the heat of oppression. Let's remember that oppression is a biblical word, used by Amos, Isaiah, and Jeremiah long before the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, and it is clearly meant to describe the injustice of structures and institutions. Both political and economic institutions come under prophetic interrogation by the prophets of the Bible. It's time they came under our interrogation, too.
We devote this special issue to the critical question of money and politics. This is not just about the need for campaign finance reform, as important as that is. It is a question of values. What are our values? What kind of people and country do we want to be? What sort of political process can find solutions to the vexing problems of our common life? What kind of world are we leaving to our children? What do we really mean by democracy?
What we are calling for is nothing less than what Vincent Harding has called "the spiritual renewal of democracy." The writers and democratic practitioners we've assembled for this issue offer great wisdom and insights. They provide both critique and potential solutions. They ask how to make our democracy more real than imagined. They suggest how political candidates and ideas might be made more accountable to the whole public and not just to the elites. They describe healthy popular movements already under way that seek to renew the very idea of citizenship. It is time that we heed this wisdom.
Jim Wallis is editor-in-chief of Sojourners magazine.
Got something to say about what you're reading? We value your feedback!