Fooling Americans is Becoming More Difficult: COVID-19, Black Lives Matter, and What Is and Isn’t Essential
Joerg Rieger is the Distinguished Professor of Theology, Cal Turner Chancellor’s Chair in Wesleyan Studies, and Director of the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice
Over the first several months of the COVID-19 Pandemic, Wendland-Cook brought together 10 academic and activist voices to address the economic, theological, international, racial and labor intersections of this global crisis. To see the entire forum, click here. This is Joerg Rieger’s final contribution to the forum.
Fooling Americans is Becoming More Difficult: COVID-19, Black Lives Matter, and What Is and Isn’t Essential
Joerg Rieger
July 2, 2020
“You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time” (attributed to Abraham Lincoln).
It is hard to deny that the majority of Americans, at some point or another, have been fooled in regard to what determines our lives. One example is the nature of inequality. Another is the question about what really matters in our day-to-day lives. And a third is the role and function of religion (make sure you read to the end, as this is where it all comes together). As we sort through these issues, it will become clear how we can stop being fooled and begin to take back power and influence over our lives, our work, and our religion. Meanwhile, much of the world is watching in disbelief about what is happening in the US, closing borders to Americans, with moods shifting from irritation about the US to pity for it.
For many people, the foundations were shaken in the spring and summer 2020 by the traumatizing experience of COVID-19 and by ongoing deadly displays of police brutality manifest in the murders of young African American and Latinx persons. These experiences will be with us for a long time, and chances are that in some respects things will get worse before they get better. At time of this writing end of June 2020, the United States has not even cleared the first stage of COVID-19 yet, and new infections are on the rise.
Others have chosen to ignore both COVID-19 and police brutality. Following the lead of president Trump and the conventions of white supremacy, blind faith in capitalism, and scorn for basic evidence (medical, scientific, economic, and social), they got a short break when stock markets recovered for a while, and conservative America made efforts to regroup. But COVID-19 and the stark realities of racism and inequality cannot be ignored much longer. A reckoning awaits. This is when fooling the majority of people will get even more difficult.
Inequality is one of the key issues about which Americans have been fooled. Among the G7 nations, the United States is by far the most unequal, virtually at the level of some developing nations. In the wake of the coronavirus, one in four Americans is projected to be struggling with hunger. The legacies of racism and sexism are major contributors to this legacy, as racial minorities and women are experiencing economic inequality in greater numbers. But—and this may come as a surprise—racism in the US also hurts many white people. Believing that white supremacy benefits all white people, too many white Americans side with white corporate power and a mostly white politics that rejects universal health care and basic support for the working majority. Nevertheless, reaping the astronomical benefits from all of this is not the white majority but the elites. American billionaires, mostly white, gained more than $400 billion during the crisis, while unemployment rates keep rising across the board and the Trump administration continues to undermine the 99 percent that have to work for a living. This is not some strange aberration, this is how racial capitalism works.
If economic inequality is indeed a key problem of the US—and many inside and outside of the US would agree that it is—it needs to be addressed as we seek solutions. Building on a new appreciation for essential workers, as developed in previous blogs, we are discovering that they are not just victims, they are also the often-overlooked agents that might bring about another world. The concerns of race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, all come together in the lives of essential workers, and there is ample evidence that the roots of these oppressions are effectively addressed when working people organize. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., observed in 1957, “organized labor has proved to be one of the most powerful forces in removing the blight of segregation and discrimination from our nation.” If working people fail to organize, there may be gains in civil rights, but inequality will continue to grow and power will be even more concentrated at the top. Note that the Black Lives Matter Platform on economic justice resonates with such assessments, clearly stating the essential role of economic empowerment in the struggle against racism.
These observations can open our eyes to what really matters in our day-to-day lives. While many things matter, here I want to emphasize the importance of work and economics, which are strangely undervalued in today’s United States, despite the fact that Americans are often blamed as being too “materialistic.” Even among the growing number of Americans who worry about economic inequality, less than half feel that this is a top priority. Add to that the commonplace that people have more stuff than ever before in history, and the confusion is complete. People are being fooled into thinking that work and economics are merely about money, and decisions in this realm are best left to experts. The truth is that work and economics are fundamental building blocks of life: this is where some of our most formative relationships are located (for better or worse, we spend the bulk of our waking hours with people at work), and work is where much of our energy and creativity are invested. In other words, labor and economic relationships shape us to the core. This is why we have to reclaim these areas of life if we want to reclaim other areas like politics and religion.
So, what about religion? In the United States, religion—and Christianity in particular—has become one of the essential tools for fooling people. Such religion comes to function as a sort of “blind” faith that accepts things at face value without probing or questioning. We see this blind faith not only in many churches that blindly follow leaders like the forty-fifth president of the United States, who refuses to deal with the perils of a pandemic or with racism and who does not embody basic religious values like compassion, decency, or morality. We also see this blind faith in the world of finance where performance indicators do not seem to matter anymore, and in a culture that fails to deal with its racism because it refuses to see.
Unfortunately, even scholars seem to think that faith that refuses to see is all there is to religion, with some assuming that to be a good thing. Nevertheless, different forms of religion are emerging and reasserting themselves in the midst of COVID-19 and growing inequalities, overt and covert racism, and sexism. Among them are valiant efforts to reclaim relations of faith and labor that once won Americans the eight-hour work day, weekends off work, protections for women at work, and the end of child labor. Such efforts include the incubation of worker-owned cooperative businesses, as economic democracy helps build stronger foundations for political and even religious democracy. Imagine if working people rather than big money had a say in politics and religion. Participants in these developments in the United States include Jews, Muslims, Engaged Buddhists, Christians, and many others. In the process, God-talk is reoriented from sky-talk (too often fooling people) to talk about what is actually happening in the lives of people, beginning with those places where the pressure is greatest. In solidarity with essential workers of all races and genders, religion may have a chance of participating in what is essential in surprising ways.