 'Become agents of transformation,' ecumenical breakfast crowd told By Craig M. Kibler The Layman Online Saturday, June 17, 2006
Davies, who is a minister in the United Churches of Christ, a member of the executive committee of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches and vice moderator of the Covenanting for Justice Network, launched a long critique of capitalism and the economies of the West, particularly that of the United States. She said the purpose of her talk was "to help you understand some of the reasons behind the Accra Confession and its urgent importance to us as Christians." Davies said the paper, which was adopted two years ago during the meeting of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches in Accra, Ghana, urges Christians "to become agents of transformation even as we are entangled in, and complicit with, the very [economic] system we are called to change." "We in the United States' churches are called to be agents of transformation of a system that supports our churches, our nation and our families while it strangles the lives of millions of people all over the world," she said. The Accra Confession, Davies said, is a "theological paper on the economy and the earth. It talks about, and here's the jawbreaker, neo-liberal economic globalization. And it talks about empire and declares that economic issues are theological issues, that the integrity of our faith is at stake if we remain silent or refuse to act in the face of the current system of neo-liberal economic globalization." Referring again to the Accra Confession, she said, "Most of the objections to the language came from churches in the Global North -- those of us who also have been called the 'developed countries.' Economic issues are central to the understanding of churches as to what they are called to be." Davies said that concept scares some people. "Putting economic issues in the center of the church, between the Bible and the cross, is unsettling. In most of our churches, money has only to do with the budget and fixing the roof. It doesn't have anything to do with transnational corporations." "Those of us in the United States are caught up in the entrails of man or, perhaps more accurately, the beast described in Revelation. We live in the belly of the beast, and most of us sitting in this room benefit from neo-liberal economic globalization while millions in our own country and hundreds of millions around the world are devastated by the same system -- and most of us in the United States just don't get it. We here are protected from the worst results of this system, while everyone else around the world are directly affected by it." Davies criticized neo-liberal economic globalization, and its underlying capitalism and markets, as being a system efficiently regulated by government, but "not humanely." In denouncing free trade, she said that the only thing that is not included "the free flow of people between countries, so that when their economy is destroyed by this [economic globalization] process, where are the people to go? They are not allowed to cross borders. In Europe and the United States, there is a massive illegal influx of people. Their economies have been destroyed, so they're going to where the money went." She went on to criticize NAFTA and CAFTA, which she said were "unequal trade agreements," and that the people who benefited from them are those "who have the most power and who manage to get the best deal for the trade agreements." "Because we live in the belly of the beast," Davies said, "it is essential that we understand what is being done in our name." The underlying theology of the present global market is inequalities, she said. "Theologically," Davies said, "what has happened here is that all human beings have been commodified into economic actors in this system. The lives of human communities have been reduced from fullness and wholeness to 'markets.' The Accra Confession rightly describes capitalism as idolatry." |
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