RELIGION’S ESSENCE IS SOCIAL JUSTICE

You likely know Frances Worthington from her astute articles on horticulture and gardening. Some of us who are even more privileged know Frances as a gentle, spiritually-centered soul. She is a leader of our Baha’i community whose unshakable commitment to peacemaking inspires, challenges, and occasionally even frustrates the more hot-headed and impatient among us. Frances’s calling card – literally (ask her for one!) and spiritually – is the blunt, undeniable observation that, however the specific rhetoric may vary, the Golden Rule is at the core of every world religion.

This is an issue that should not demand complex theological discourse. Open your Bible to Isaiah 58 or the Beatitudes or their counterparts in the sacred writ of the world’s religions, and it veritably jumps up and bites you on the nose: the essence of religion is the love of God as it is manifest through the love of neighbor.
Will religion always live up to that noble mandate? Obviously not. Oppression, poverty, and hatred are real. Too often, that reality is written in the indifference of people claiming righteousness or in the demagoguery of scoundrels who twist religion toward their own self-serving, malevolent goals.

None of this, though, should cause us to lose faith in the worthiness of the mandate for social justice nor in religion’s capacity for transforming noble platitudes into an agenda of dedicated action. The fact that religion can be so easily twisted toward evil should make the mandate to “do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8) all the more compelling.

Ironically, the word on the street here in Greenville – and likely elsewhere – is that religion is a prime source of divisiveness, not of unifying purpose. That perception, I dare say, will hold more than a grain of truth, even a self-fulfilling prophecy, so long as we of the various faith communities fail to coalesce around issues of social justice: poverty, hunger, homelessness, bigotry.

The agenda is right there in Isaiah 58 and reaffirmed in Matthew 5 and the holy texts of every other religion. We can avert our eyes from the mandate, or choose not to read those verses, but not without causing irreparable harm to the very fabric of our faith – immeasurably more harm than the theological differences that often cause us to head in a thousand different directions.

I am exceedingly cautious that I not infer that I am speaking “in the name of” our fledgling Faith Communities United coalition. But, I do dare to speak as a passionate individual observer and participant:

Anyone who sees Faith Communities United as a line in the sand between “good-guy liberals” and “bad-guy fundamentalists” has entirely missed the boat. Such posturing is not merely counterproductive; it is just plain wrong. Countless local fundamentalist congregations are deeply engaged in works of social justice while too many moderate-to-liberal faith communities have not yet lifted a finger.

If Faith Communities United proposes to be “an alternative voice” of our religious community, it is only to be an alternative to our heretofore failure to unite across theological, racial, and cultural lines as advocates and catalysts for social justice – honoring our diversity, never using it as an excuse to ignore the Golden Rule that crosses all bounds.

Time has come for any and every faith community that sees social justice at the essence of its calling to put differences aside, but not away, and coalesce with other God-enlivened people of goodwill to hunker down on God’s agenda for this Beloved Community.

“Rabbi,” the village simpleton once proudly announced, “I’ve solved half the problem of poverty!”

“Really?” the Rabbi responded, half amused, half eager to glean the simple wisdom that would follow.

“Really, Rabbi. I’ve found all the poor people!”

I guess our job is only half done.