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| Eric Atcheson |
Rev. Eric Atcheson is an ordained pastor in the Christian
Church (Disciples of Christ) and the author of two books: Oregon Trail
Theology: The Frontier Millennial Christians Face; and On Earth as It Is In Heaven:
A Faith-Based Toolkit for Economic Justice (Church Publishing, 2018). Eric is a
parish minister by training who has dedicated himself through his preaching,
speaking and writing to his calling as a prophetic and pastoral voice rooted in
Scriptures. He is a descendant of Armenian Genocide survivors. Eric’s identity
is woven into his passion for social justice and human rights.
Fairly early on in your book ON EARTH AS IT IS INHEAVEN, A Faith-Based Toolkit for Economic Justice, you write about the issue
of homelessness in America. “It was heartbreaking to watch many of the local
politicians talk about the lack of compassion even as they attempted to rezone
the area to functionally eliminate homeless shelters… It was also heartbreaking
to see much of that viciousness emanate from within the wider church. We
worship an itinerant Messiah who once said, ‘Foxes have dens, and the birds in
the sky have nests, but the Human One has no place to lay his head.’ That
should call into question any of our manufactured moral objections to
homelessness. Such attitudes are a testament to the extent to which we are
willing to revise Christianity to justify our comfort with injustice. Our
willingness to reshape our faith for comfort’s sake lies at the heart of what
needs to change within the church… We no longer worship God as revealed through
the scriptures so much as we worship the scriptures.”
That’s quite a statement! I’m wondering if you
could talk a little more about the whole idea of bending scripture to suit our
viewpoint, and especially about worshipping scriptures instead of God?
Forgive me the tangent, but I recently finished a two-year
stint ministering with a Presbyterian congregation, so a lot of Reformed
theology is still fresh in my mind. I think we (the historically white
Protestant denominations) are guilty of taking the notion of sola scriptura,
the idea that the Bible itself is the authority rather than our interpretations
of it, and made it into one of those interpretations that has supplanted the
Scriptures. Maybe that sounds a bit circular. What I mean is that instead of
treating the Bible for what it is—a holy and sacred text, inspired by God and
our relationship with God—we have interpreted the Bible into something that it
isn’t, and I don’t think was ever meant to be: an object to be venerated,
sometimes seemingly on a par with God, Christ, or the Holy Spirit.
And that was never meant to be the Bible’s purpose! The Bible
does not even have a singular purpose—it was composed and compiled over the
course of hundreds of years by people who, though guided by God, sometimes
disagreed with each other, and you see those disagreements throughout the
Bible! I have found it much easier to respect and honor the Bible as an eternal
conversation rather than as an object for me to venerate.
You bring up the same subject a few chapters
later, where you write “In my experience, though, Christians who say they
believe that the Bible is either without error or the literal Word of God are
just as eager to do hermeneutical somersaults to get out of Jesus’s command to
the rich man to sell all he owns and give the proceeds to the poor.” Is It fair to say that believing the Bible is
literally the Word of God is itself an interpretation?
Yes. Biblical inerrancy is an interpretation like any other,
but paradoxically, it is an interpretation that is mutually exclusive with the
fundamental tenet behind sola scriptura: that the Bible is a superior authority
to the interpretations of it. The Bible itself never, ever claims inerrancy.
Ever. So, we can treat it as the final word on the matter and jettison
inerrancy, or we can choose to prefer the interpretation of inerrancy over the
Bible’s lack of claim. We cannot do both.
Writing about economic justice, you note that “The
United States possesses an abundance of both pride and food, even after
accounting for the crops left to rot in the fields. Prosperity for the
wealthiest among us abounds. But where we consistently come up short is in our
solidarity with the poor, in no small part because we have manufactured a great
many myths about the work ethic of the poor that brand them undeserving of our
help.” I wonder how much of these myths come from human nature itself, or from
our own society/culture? And to what extent is the American church complicit in
propagating such myths?
All of the above, I suppose, because we have been very good at
evolving our justifications for exorbitant wealth as those means for generating
and obtaining exorbitant wealth have evolved. To give one example, consider the
decoupling of wealth from land. This is something that began in the transition
from feudalism to mercantilism and has continued to impact our economy as vast
sums of wealth get generated for men like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Mark
Zuckerberg on the basis of technological, rather than agricultural, pursuits. A
claim to land—and the wealth it provided—might have been taken historically as
a sign of God’s favor (and in some contexts still is); now it is the amount of
one’s stock. That doesn’t mean that land suddenly isn’t prominent in
conversations of wealth and identity—it undeniably is. But it does mean that
our acceptance—if not celebration—of what that level of wealth looks like has
proven adaptable and enduring over the centuries. And the church has certainly
been a willing participant in that.
I really appreciate the point you make that
“[W]hile we Protestants especially might look toward scripture at the expense
of historical and/or contemporary experience, it is critical not to force
scripture to exist in a vacuum. The writers of scripture penned what they did
in direct response to the events and divine experiences around them, and as
timeless as many of their lessons may be, we must not ignore that our biblical
authors are also products of their time.” What do you see as the chief benefit
of combining scripture with an understanding of current events?
You ask a little later about what the introduction of moral
and spiritual language to economic matters might look like, and I think that it
represents the chief benefit you ask about here. Employees seeking just and
fair compensation or working conditions who are in the pews on Sundays would
feel supported by their churches and ministers. Workers stressed about how
their contract negotiations are going may see a church engaging with them and
believe that they are not alone in their worries. My thesis data overwhelmingly
told me that the experience of striking was a deeply stressful one for
employees, and not only financially—it was emotionally, mentally, spiritually
stressful as well. It is in crisis points like that where the church can do
some genuinely life-changing work. That is the benefit—peoples’ lives will be
changed for the better precisely because of the church’s engagement. That is
how the kingdom of God gets built.
You write about European and American colonialism
and state “The expansion of slavery and the extermination of the indigenous
people were economic actions as well as militaristic and supremacist ones, and
the Christian theologies formed to justify them left profoundly harmful
economic legacies. To take a peoples’ land or freedom is deeply sinful. But
such theft of home and liberty was not an end in itself; it also served as a
means of vast economic enrichment for a select few.” In your view, where did
the Church go wrong?
It is hard to point to one landmark event and say, “this is
it.” The Treaty of Tordesillas represented the church’s approval of all those
sins in the name of Christian expansionism, but the treaty was led up to by a
series of papal bulls by the pope who preceded the one responsible for the
treaty. You can even go back further—the Crusades represented, if not colonialism
in the sense we understand it now, certainly a violent expression of religious
hegemony. And those began over 900 years ago. So, at a minimum, we have close
to a millennium of this to deprogram from ourselves. That takes time and work.
I do not think I initially set out for On Earth as it is in Heaven to be a part
of that work, but it eventually did, and I tried to embrace where the Holy
Spirit led it.
A few pages later in ON EARTH AS IT IS IN HEAVEN, you make a solid point that, for your doctoral thesis, you interviewed people
in a community that was dealing with two major strikes. You asked them what
they thought the role of the church should be.
You found that “people want the church to be active in tackling points
of contention, facilitating constructive discussions, and spiritually preparing
people. However, most of the Bible studies and faith formation tools I have
seen in my decade of parish ministry offer little of the sort to the church.
The data tells me that there is a definite need, and we should be paying
attention to – and trying to meet- that need.” You go on to mention within the
framework of labor troubles, “introducing the language of morality is a vital
aspect of tis work that is fundamentally economic, but cannot be framed only in
economics.” What would introducing the language of morality, of spirituality,
to economics, look like?
I think it could look all sorts of ways in all sorts of
communities, depending on their history and demographics. One lesson of some of
organized labor’s failures to unionize in some communities is that there is no
one-size-fits-all faith language when it comes to economic matters that
religious allies can simply reach for and use. I think what this introduction
of moral and spiritual language to economics could look like is almost a
polyglot culture, in which various dialects are spoken, but they revolve around
the common human concern of financial security.
Underlying this call to infuse economics with
morality, is a call to honesty. “Being honest about our history teaches us to
defer to the narratives of those who have been harmed, repair credibility and
relationships both inside and outside the church, learn from our past to help
shape our future, and, most of all, uphold the innate value taught by Jesus
that the truth can set us free.” From you point of view what would this
infusion of morality/spirituality into the American economic system look like?
This is a great and especially timely question, because I
think the bill for white Christianity’s adherence to partisan identity over all
else is starting to come due. Our most visible “leaders” increasingly look
hypocritical or worse as they aid and abet peoples’ disconnections from reality
through conspiracy theories, End Times babble, and more. Part of this
disconnection from reality is a fundamental denial of the nature of American
history, including American economics. Much of the white American church has,
in so many ways, doubled down on a sort of Christian nationalism that minimizes
or dismisses the economic dimension of racism, as well as sexism and
xenophobia. We cannot have an honest reckoning of our history because we have
chosen to be dishonest about that history. Which is simultaneously painful and
ironic to me—I was raised in a mostly conservative Christian area, and the
vital importance of capital-T Truth was impressed upon me at a young age. Yet
the full scope and truth of American history is continually and repeatedly
denied by much of white Christianity, and that we have a theological word for
that: sin. And as sin, it needs to be repented for.
I think you hit the proverbial nail-on-the-head
when, a few pages later, you write: “To dismantle racism is to dismantle the
primary justification for centuries of economic exploitation. Would you like to
add a bit more to that observation?
I think it is impossible to understate the impact that chattel
slavery had on the economy of the United States. And I think it is impossible
to understate the impact it continues to have on the current economic
disparities between Black and white Americans. Even after the Emancipation
Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment, all sorts of means were devised
almost immediately to ensure that as many newly-liberated Black Americans as
possible remained economically destitute. All of that has not been undone in
just a few decades—especially when almost every attempt at undoing any of
racism’s economic effects (public school integration, affirmative action, and
incentivizing home ownership, just to name a few) has been met with profound
resistance and white backlash. As long as that pattern endures, racism will
endure and because of that reality alone, the problem of economic hardship will
never be fully fixable or solvable.
