Claiming a Right to Love and Respect Ourselves

My mind keeps drifting back to something David Brooks told PBS’s Jim Lehrer early in the 2008 election cycle. Looking ahead to the key issues facing the nation, Brooks listed “failure of the leadership class” at the top. I wonder now if Brooks understands the full import of his words. He is among those applauding as president-elect Obama fills his cabinet and other top posts with the same Ivy League cabal that sat by fiddling as America burned.

It seems fair to ask whether one can bathe in this wellspring of American elitism without taking on an elitist view. When the media paints the public face of current or recent leaders — from Bill Clinton to Michelle Obama to Barney Frank — the features of note have nothing to do with what makes them unique, like being raised on the south side of Chicago or in a poor family in Arkansas, or sensitivity to a certain disparaged group. Those are challenges to overcome. The words that matter are Harvard, Yale, Princeton. For the news media elite, that’s all that matters.

But then, amazingly, along comes William Kristol, conservative editor of The Weekly Standard. Before the election, I would never have bothered to read anything he wrote. In fact, if I saw him on a TV news panel, I’d change the station. But he, among almost all the commentators, seems to have grasped the implications not only of the election but of America’s economic troubles. While the old William Kristol was a doctrinaire conservative, the new model comes across as a common sense populist. As a Republican, Kristol may be showing his party a path back to relevance. It’s ground that Democrats Kristol calls “limousine liberals” shouldn’t cede.

In Monday’s OP-Ed column in the New York Times, titled Right and Left, Piling On, Kristol uses the words “disdain” and “contempt” to describe the way media and political elites have ganged up on the American automakers: “… I say this as someone who grew up in non-car-driving family in New York, and who is the furthest thing from an auto aficionado — there is a kind of undeserved disdain, even casual contempt, that seems to characterize the attitude of the political and media elites toward the American auto industry.”

He’s right of course. How many times have we heard political or media elitists totally ignore quality and mileage improvements while asserting Detroit is building cars “no one wants to buy.” Apparently, the millions of Americans who buy cars each year from domestic auto makers are a bunch of nobodies — certainly not graduates of Harvard or Yale or Princeton.

Kristol goes on: “As Warren Brown, who writes about cars for The Washington Post, recently put it, ‘There is a feeling in this country — apparent in the often condescending, dismissive way Detroit’s automobile companies have been treated on Capitol Hill — that people who work with their hands and the companies that employ them are inferior to those who work with their minds and plow profit from information. How else to explain the clearly disparate treatment given to companies such as Citigroup and General Motors?’”

Let's be clear: America's war against its workers didn't just begin, but finally — and thankfully — the carnage is spilling into public view.

I recently heard my own pastor, whose credentials as a pacifist are beyond dispute, use the phrase “spiritual warfare.” She even preached a sermon around Paul’s admonition to “put on the armor” of faith. I’m not saying she agrees with all my opinions, but I think we agree on one point: Being a believer clearly means operating out of love, but it doesn’t mean being soft. In fact, it means having the courage to stand up for justice.

On a recent show, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews brazenly raised the specter of “class warfare” to contrast the treatment of manufacturers and bankers. Surprisingly, no one chastised him. Discussing class warfare has been as taboo in the media as in our churches. Sometimes it takes a crisis to allow people to speak the truth.

Discussing class warfare from the pulpit makes some angry and others uncomfortable, but it’s central to the salvation history recorded in Jewish and Christian literature. Class oppression was the main fault God found in the people who occupied Canaan before the Israelites; it was at the heart of why the kingdoms of Israel and Judah failed; and it was the backdrop against which Jesus’ ministry played out. We shouldn’t forget that fact if we are going to borrow his name. So let’s say it out loud: The ministry of the prophet called Christ was to the lost, the last and the least. That means more than throwing a few old clothes to the homeless. It means claiming a right to love and respect ourselves.