Canada and the Social Gospel

by Bill Blaikie

The good news of the “social” gospel is that the God of the Bible is a God who wants to redeem the whole of human existence, our social as well as our individual lives. The bad news is that this involves Christians in the world of politics and political choices, taking the same side as God is reported to have taken in the biblical tradition-the side of the poor, the needy, the fatherless, the vulnerable, the oppressed. This bias on the part of God is stated most eloquently and clearly in the song of Mary (Luke 1:46–55). Mary praises and welcomes the birth of Jesus Christ as scattering the proud, putting down the mighty, exalting those of low degree, filling the hungry, and sending the rich away empty.

In reflecting on the role of the social gospel in Canada, it is instructive to begin with a quote from Walter Rauschenbusch’s A Theology for a Social Gospel, written in 1917 and still in print (Westminster John Knox Press, 1997). American theologian Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) sounds strangely acquainted with the current corporate model of globalization, particularly in the wake of the Enron Corp. and WorldCom Inc. scandals, when he writes, “Predatory profit, when once its sources are opened up and developed, constitutes an almost overwhelming temptation to combinations of men. Its pursuit gives them cohesion, . . . an outfit of moral and political principles which will justify their anti-social activities.”

Noting that the economically powerful have throughout history resisted political liberty and social justice, because “liberty and justice do away with unearned incomes,” Rauschenbusch called for the creation of “righteous institutions” to prevent temptation and to redeem the sinfulness of the social order. In the wake of the Great Depression, and in the post-World War II western economy, it is fair to say that many “righteous institutions” were established to prevent temptation, to inhibit exploitation, to promote equality, and to protect most people from predatory profiteering of the worst kind, at least in the so-called developed world.

So it was that in Canada, by the 1970s, we had achieved our own unique, but of course partial, version of the world that many social gospellers in the United Church and other churches dreamed of and worked for, alongside trade unionists, farmers, activists on the intellectual left, and Canadians from other religious traditions, such as those who took their inspiration from the Jewish Bund, a socialist and Jewish workers’ movement.

Labour laws regulated the relationship between owners and workers. A public education system provided opportunities previously unavailable to working people. Public ownership and control in a variety of sectors established the public interest, rather than private profits, as the benchmark of good public policy. Orderly marketing systems and a relatively progressive tax system, universal social programs like Medicare, regulation of foreign investment . . . the list is long of measures designed to create social outcomes that the market alone would not produce.

This world that had been created by the 1970s was the world I wanted to improve on when I first ran for Parliament in 1979. For all its achievements, it was still a very imperfect world. And on issues such as the environment, equality for women, justice for Aboriginal peoples, and the nuclear arms race, it cried out for redemption just as much as or more than the world that an earlier social gospel had challenged.

Unfortunately, I have spent most of the last 23 years in Parliament against what might be called, in the Canadian context, ideological genocide. The Canada that the social gospel helped build has been under assault from the combined effects of free trade, deregulation, privatization, and other forms of global market worship and reassertions of the rights of property over community.

This world without borders, or world without communities or obligations you might say, was enshrined and entrenched via the ideological coup d’etat that was accomplished first by the free trade agreements, the first of which took effect in 1989, and more recently by the evolution of the World Trade Organization. Former communities are being asked to redefine themselves as amoral “competitors” in a global Darwinian contest that will further polarize the world and its societies into rich and poor. The philosophy that the marketplace is supreme is now graven in international trade agreements that countermand and limit the role of government and of other institutions and policies that had been set up over the years to make money answerable to the common good.

In their book For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future (Beacon Press), Herman E. Daly and John B. Cobb, Jr. say it well:

“For a nation that has attained a high standard of living for most of its people to have its capitalists say to its working class, ‘You must now compete in the world labour market against the hungry of the other nations, and in the interest of efficiency your wages must fall to the world level,’ is the destruction of existing community in the interests not of a broader world community that does not yet exist, but in the interests of a smaller ‘community,’ a class of wealth and privilege, which does exist.”

Canada is an example of existing community that many would like to see wiped out. What we are experiencing is the Jurassic Park of political economy. A species long dormant appears on the scene once again, calls itself something else, and thrives in the new environment created by globalization-an environment where its ancient opponent and predator, justice, has lost its traditional weapon, the nation-state.

The world now needs to do globally what some countries were able to do nationally. It’s either that or have hundreds of millions of people declared surplus to the needs of the new capitalist world order, while both rich and poor, each in their own way, contribute to the ecological crisis in the absence of any order or purpose other than the marketplace.

It is time to build, globally, the “righteous institutions” that Walter Rauschenbusch called for, institutions that seek to overcome the temptation inherent in globalization, which is to see it only as an opportunity for making money. Ratifying and implementing the Kyoto Accord is a good example of what is needed. A global agreement to enforce core labour standards would also be a giant step forward.

It is from this hope for “righteous” global governance that all who value the social dimension in their religious tradition must live.

Bill Blaikie, a United Church minister, is the MP for Elmwood-Transcona, NDP House Leader, and a candidate for the leadership of the federal NDP.