Week 24 Sunday
Week 24 Sunday
Other Causes of Sin: Low Wages and Unemployment
Deuteronomy 14–15; Matthew 20:7
If bad housing sets the stage for sin, so do low wages. The temptation to dishonesty is very great when wages are very small. As I sit here writing, a letter comes to my desk from one of the ablest missionaries in India telling how when she was a little girl, reared in a poor home, she went to a wealthier home where there were dolls in abundance, and she had none. She felt she had a right to one, so stole one, and for many years suffered untold tortures from a sensitive conscience. Her poverty made it easier for her to take that doll and suffer those years of torture. This happens on a larger scale when wages are low.
But if low wages cause sin, unemployment is worse still. It causes deterioration. To be unwanted and unneeded in human society is enough to take the light out of any eye and make any set of strong shoulders droop. The amazing thing to me is that so often the light still shines in the eye and the shoulders are still square after years of fruitless knocking at doors. I salute unconquered human nature!
But I cannot salute the system that causes these unemployed. It is all so unnecessary. In a competitive order, it seems necessary and inevitable, but in a cooperative order it would not be. I therefore stand for a cooperative order, and will give what strength and influence I have to bring it into being; these hot tears that unbidden fall upon the paper as I write being witness. For an unemployed person breaks my heart. Did it not strike home to me very early when I saw my own father unemployed, and I had to watch the deterioration set in day by day?
Unemployment causes sin in the victims, and in those who allow it to continue, because they selfishly refuse to cooperate in ending it. We are all guilty.
O God, our Lord, forgive us that we have tolerated so long this inhumanity, and give us, we pray you, the strength and wisdom and courage to end it. Amen.
Week 24 Monday
The Existence of Class
Matthew 3:28; Acts 10:20; Philemon 8-17
Another cause of sin in society is the existence of class. As long as society is based on class, causes of sin are in the social structure.
The consciousness of class produces the consciousness of those who are not of that class. That produces a cleavage. Across that cleavage, misunderstandings arise. On board ship I looked at a film that made me boil with indignation. Everyone interested in bettering labor conditions was a rotter; every labor leader was a demagogue. It was class speaking to class. I boil again when I hear every capitalist made out to be a bloated exploiter of the poor. It just isn’t so. There are capitalists who are the salt of the earth. Class speaks to class and calls names.
Moreover, these class cleavages cause us to feel class-pain and class-disabilities, but not human pain and human disabilities. It thus causes us to commit the sin of callousness to people of another class. It tends to dry up our sympathy in certain directions. These class distinctions turn the situation in an unchristian direction and make it easy for people to sin against their brothers and sisters of another class.
We must get rid of the notion that these class cleavages are rooted either in nature or in the will of God. They are rooted in the will of man. They are nothing less than artificial barriers placed by the wrong organization of human society between person and person. The seventeenth-century English politician Sir Algernon Sydney is right when he says, “The mass of mankind have not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred ready to ride them legitimately by the grace of God.”* That attitude must die.
This conception of class on both sides is a cause of sin, and its roots must be cut if we are to live victoriously in the fullest sense.
O Christ, whose heart went out across these barriers and gathered people of all classes into a new living community where there was no class, give us, we pray you, that same spirit. Amen.
* Also attributed to Thomas Jefferson.
Week 24 Tuesday
Another Cause of Sin: Attitudes toward Women
Matthew 19:3-10; Galatians 3:28
The economic and political order is largely the result of male organizing. And in the organizing, woman has been fitted into it largely on the basis of a sex-being, and she is supposed to be treated and to act as such. Woman has, in general, accepted this false mentality and has given herself to the petty business of being attractive to the male. This has been the cause of much sin in human society.
The position of women is changing throughout the world. Some years ago, when about to speak to the ladies of a palace in India, I wondered where my audience was as I came into a large room with a screen across it. I soon saw the bejeweled feet of my audience under the screen and talked to those lotus feet!
However, this changed rapidly. A young woman of that very palace group was later killed driving her own motor car. Alas, there will be many casualties in the transition from woman as a sex-being to woman as a person with equal rights and duties. The fact is, we are now rather appalled at the number of those casualties. Woman, in driving this new force called freedom, is making a wreck of many a fine reticence, many a strong trait. But we cannot stop until woman arrives at the place where Jesus placed her as a human personality and not a mere sex-being. She must be given an equal place and an equal task in the reconstruction of the world.
As I crossed the borderland into Russia, a uniformed young woman with men soldiers at her back with fixed bayonets came into the train to inspect it. When I saw her, I knew I was in a new civilization. But I do not want women to step into our systems and take over our guns and with them our spirit. I want this new freedom to lead women to do what one woman did when she suggested that the cannon of both Chile and Argentina be melted and cast into the “Christ of the Andes” sculpture—a symbol of perpetual peace between these two nations.
O Christ, help us to treat women as equal persons and help women to set up a Christ of peace on every dividing line in human life. Amen.
Week 24 Wednesday
Economic Insecurity
Isaiah 33:15-16; Ezekiel 3:5-6; 12:18-20; Philippians 4:19
I mention this cause of sin last, for in many ways it is the most prolific cause of sin in human society. Under the doctrine of laissez faire, or unrestricted competition, economic security is at the lowest ebb both for the employer and the employee. For both of them, economic security has almost reached the vanishing point. Under unrestricted competition, three-quarters of all business ventures fail. How can business owners be sure to belong to the fortunate one-quarter? And if sure of it, then are they quite sure of their inner moral position? In a competitive order, has their success caused the failure of others? If they get more than they need, somebody will have less than is needed. Success makes business owners morally uncomfortable, or should do so. Moreover, because of the fear of insecurity in old age and disability, they are driven to pile up far beyond their actual needs in hope of meeting that insecurity. This creates an enlightened greed that is appalling.
And the wage earners? Their economic destiny is not in their own hands, nor in the hands of fellow laborers, but in the hands of the ones who own the capital. They, therefore, live in constant dread of joining the ragged ranks of the unemployed. That haunting fear is one of the most desperate things in human life at the present time, and it may disrupt society in an awful explosion. If it does not cause an explosion, it will drive people to sycophancy, subservience, and denial of their own personhood that will be just as disruptive of society as an explosion.
Thus economic insecurity causes the sin of fear. The employer is afraid to give better wages, be undercut by competitors, and go on the rocks; the laborers are afraid of losing their jobs.
O Christ, you who came to take all fear from our hearts, help us to produce an order in which fear will have no place. We could do it if we knew how to love. Then help us to love. Amen.
Week 24 Thursday
What Is to Be Done About It?
Matthew 14:15-16; Luke 3:15; 1 John 3:17
We have seen that certain things in the social structure set the stage for sin, cause sin: selfish competition, the wage system under competition, war, race prejudice, economic inequality, the existence of classes, unemployment, subjection of one race by another, nationalism, wrong attitudes toward women, and economic insecurity. These things deeply rooted in the structure of society block victorious living at every turn. They do not render victorious living impossible, but certainly make it very difficult. Often, under the pressure of these things, victorious life in the individual is crushed out.
If religion has no message at this point, if it undertakes to live victoriously without facing these issues, then the method used is one of evasion, and this violates two fundamental principles of victorious living, namely, mental honesty and courage to face the facts. To attempt to win by strategic retreat is to run into the pitfall of mental insincerity. Without mental sincerity no victorious living is possible. The process of evasion is therefore self-defeating.
Obviously, the first thing to be done is to look at these things as causes of sin and therefore an evil in human society, something to be eradicated and not tolerated. At this point our greatest difficulty lies. Many think these things are an ineradicable part of society’s structure, accepted fatalistically. This defeatist mentality is our greatest problem. It must be broken. Just as the individual, in order to have personal victory over personal sins, must have the faith that it can be done, so we must gain the attitude of faith that these social sins are disease, and as such are no normal part of human living and can be eradicated. The health of society demands it.
O Christ, we need to be reborn mentally and spiritually at this place. We need to come into a faith that believes that anything is possible with you. Give us this faith, for our society is very, very sick. Amen.
Week 24 Friday
Facing Some Half-truths
Matthew 27:39-42; Acts 24:5-6
We said yesterday that one of the first things to be done is to get the faith that these social evils can be overcome. In order to get this faith we must rid our minds of certain half-truths, for if we get caught in these half-truths, we shall not go on to full faith.
Professor John C. Bennett, in Social Salvation, writes of three half-truths: (1) That individuals can rise above any combination of social circumstances. (2) That, since individuals control institutions and systems, it is enough to change individuals. (3) That you can change society without changed individuals.
To these we would add three more: (4) That society is relatively immoral and humanity is relatively moral. (5) That the method of the coming of the kingdom is only gradual. (6) That the coming of the kingdom is only apocalyptic and catastrophic.
Half-truths can become more dangerous than whole lies. For there is nothing in the whole lie to hold good people to its allegiance, but a half-truth often gains the allegiance of good people, and with their eyes fastened on that half-truth, they are oblivious of the lurking evil. Jesus was crucified on half-truths. Religious people, seeing those half-truths, were blind to the other side and allowed themselves to commit the worst deed in human history. They did it clinging to half-truths as justification. Jesus did say that he was a king. He did say if they destroyed this temple, he would rebuild it. He said almost everything they accused him of, minus their twists. Half-truths.
Today Jesus and his kingdom are being crucified on half-truths. Wrong ideas are causing as much damage as wrong wills. And the wrong ideas are usually half-right ideas. Again it is the fatal twist that sends the whole thing in a wrong direction.
O Christ, you suffered and are suffering from half-truths; open our eyes, that we might see whether we hold any half-truth that keeps us from seeing things as they are. Amen.
Week 24 Saturday
Individuals and Their Circumstances
2 Kings 17:6-11; Proverbs 22:6
The first half-truth we must notice is this: That individuals can rise above any combination of social circumstances.
Sometimes they do, and this book is stressing that possibility. The possibility of using one’s very adverse circumstances and sufferings for the furtherance of the spiritual life must not be dimmed. This has been my contention in Christ and Human Suffering.* But I was struck by a criticism made by a class of Indian college girls using that book as a study resource: “This is all right for the spiritually developed, for the exceptional person, but for the rank and file of ordinary Christians it is too high. And if it is difficult for ordinary Christians, what about the great masses who have no Christian faith? Can they use pain and sorrow?”
In spite of this criticism I still maintain that the use of suffering is the privilege of the ordinary Christian. Nevertheless, there is a real point to this criticism. We cannot blink at the fact that the majority of people do not change their circumstances, but are changed by them. Somebody has said that if a letter were sent to that most influential person called “Circumstances,’’ most of us could end it by saying, “I am, Sir, your most obedient servant.” For most of us are the obedient servants of our circumstances. We must think in terms of the weaker members and produce a society in which it will be easier for them to grow. All of us are weak during the first fifteen years of life, and it is at that weakest period of life that we are most conditioned by environment and influenced by it.
For the sake of each succeeding generation, we must produce a society that will work with and not against the total growth of youth. For in those years, most of us are not self-contained, but environment-conditioned.
O Christ, you who did pronounce woes on those who become causes of stumbling, especially to little ones, forgive us that we have produced a society in which this is literally a fact. And help us to right it, for their sakes and ours. Amen.
* New York: Abingdon Press, 1933.