Countless acts of moral courage during the anti-apartheid movement helped to end racial segregation. It was a hopeful era. Meaningful social change was underway. Today, barriers to social change are stronger. Wealth and power are increasingly concentrated within a tiny fraction of the population. Too many people, especially youth, suffer from a crisis of despair over problems like climate change, permanent wars and worsening poverty.
But hope is rising. In recent years, a movement for justice has spread across the world — even to sunny South Africa. Many of our people are confronting the destructive practices of big banks and corporations and the corrupt government policies that enable them. Since the harmful effects of these practices and policies have been devastating for some of our community, I had expected a corresponding level of moral outrage and activism among local churches. I was wrong.
It isn’t that local churches are indifferent to suffering and injustice. I commend some of their charitable and community organizing activities. My argument is that local churches are missing in action when it comes to publicly resisting the unjust power of big banks and corporations. Instead of moral courage, there is an immoral silence.
Why local churches remained silent when hundreds of our people are being foreclosed on by big banks – many illegally? (The nation’s largest banks have recently admitted to foreclosing on homes.) Why have they remained silent at the forcible eviction of our most vulnerable people? Why have they remained silent when the government shreds the Constitution while granting person-hood status to corporations?
When churches remain silent before systemic injustice, people lose hope and fall into despair. If their silence is an expression of privilege – being too comfortable to rock the boat – it becomes integral to the injustice. Silence is consent. It shatters the bonds of community. It kills the soul. Like those church members who resisted racial integration, privilege can be twisted into a rationalization for building walls. The god of privilege encourages us to remain indifferent to injustice when it does not personally affect us. The god of privilege encourages us to retreat to a separate world where the brutal sounds of injustice are unable to disturb our pious rituals. The god of privilege encourages us to believe that an unjust social order is eternally blessed by God when it is collapsing under the weight of its own immorality.
Alternatively, having the moral courage to confront unjust power creates a space for the emergence of hope in the possibilities for social change. It inspires us to do what is right despite the consequences. It inspires us to take risks even when the outcome is uncertain. It inspires us to recognize the inter-connectedness of all life and our mutual responsibility to care for one another with compassion and justice. I pray that one day local churches will learn to express moral courage alongside our people who are confronting the destructive and unjust power of big banks and corporations with enduring faith, love and hope for a better future.