Christian activists promote anti-poverty message

from USA Today

By Peter Smith, The (Louisville) Courier-Journal
A century ago, Protestant churches across the country united in an effort to close sweatshops and slums in the United States, end child labor and unsafe factory conditions, and shrink the huge divisions between wealth and poverty.

It was "the duty of all Christian people," they said in a 1908 Social Creed that inspired a generation of church leaders and lay people to help heal the ravages of urban poverty in the United States.

Today a new group of church activists is reviving the spirit of that reform movement to battle many of the same problems — this time on a global scale.

"It's time for a revival" of the movement, said Chris Iosso, a Louisville-based Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) official who's helping prepare an updated version of the creed. "As we look about, we can't help noticing the similarities between 1908 and 2008."

Pastors, scholars and others are writing a draft of the Presbyterian document that they will present for approval at the denomination's General Assembly next year.
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It also will be voted on for adoption by the National Council of Churches, which includes 35 Protestant and Orthodox denominations, in hopes of inspiring wider social activism among congregations.

The new version seeks an end to sweatshops, human trafficking and the death penalty. It calls for equal rights for men and women and for the right of workers to organize and have safer working conditions.

"We churches of the United States have a message of hope for a fearful time," it states. "We offer a vision of a society that shares more and consumes less, seeks compassion over suspicion and equality over domination, and finds security in joined hands rather than massed arms."

When adopted in 1908, the Social Creed was one of the seminal documents of a movement called the Social Gospel, which some criticized as too timid and others as too radical for focusing on social issues instead of saving souls.

Gene TeSelle, consultant to the Presbyterian task force drafting the 2008 creed, said the 1908 version avoided some of the controversial issues of its day, such as racism and women's suffrage, just as the modern one avoids controversies over abortion and homosexuality. Both coalesce around economic issues.

The writers of the 1908 creed drew their inspiration from another major document published a year earlier — "Christianity and the Social Crisis" by Walter Rauschenbusch, who did some of his ministry in the New York City slums.

The Social Gospel had its critics. Religious conservatives have maintained that Rauschenbusch compromised the Gospel with his depiction of the kingdom of God as not a matter of getting individuals to heaven, but of transforming the life on Earth into the harmony of heaven.

But Russell Moore, a dean at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, said Rauschenbusch "never doubted the important role of personal salvation. ... In fact, I think this is one of the major reasons for his staying power today compared to other liberals who lacked his spiritual discernment."

At a recent discussion of the new document, members of the Witherspoon Society, a group of Presbyterian social activists, had different reactions.

The Rev. Elizabeth Hinson-Hasty, a Presbyterian minister who teaches theology at Bellarmine University in Louisville, said she hopes congregations will find small ways to make the creed a reality.

"My hope is that the way it's going to be implemented is through local communities, by really engaging it, talking about the issues it raises, and beginning to envision where their local community can get involved," said Hinson-Hasty, a member of the committee drafting the 2008 Social Creed.

The Rev. Fairfax Fair of Highland Presbyterian Church in Louisville said her church already is trying to work on such issues, noting that it organizes Christmas gift sales of "fair trade" coffee, tea and crafts, which aim to return more money to the foreign laborers.