ineteconomics | LP: How does the neoliberal turn manifest in black
megachurches like those led by popular ministers like T.D. James and
Creflo Dollar?
LS: Even when Martin Luther King, Jr. was alive and running the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference, there were different
tendencies within black churches. Some, while not necessarily supporting
the Jim Crow regime, definitely kind of acquiesced to it and were not
interested in having their churchgoers be involved in anti-racist
politics. At the same time, you had people using the church to connect
to a really radical critique of capitalism and white supremacy.
In the 70s and into the 80s, this radical-to-left tendency is
becoming less and less important in black churches. What you see instead
is the growth of churches that use the Bible as a kind of self-help
guide and promote the prosperity gospel, which holds that if you follow
the Bible, you will become not only spiritually but materially wealthy.
The flip side is that if you don’t follow the Bible, you’ll become poor.
So somebody like Creflo Dollar [founder of the World Changers Church
International based in College Park, Georgia] argues that you’re poor
because you don’t have the right mindset. That’s naturalizing poverty.
Related is the growth of black megachurches with as many as 10,000 or
even 20,000 members. They have their own community development
corporations. Some of them actually look like corporations in their
design and require a significant outlay of capital in order to operate.
So even if they are not proposing the whole prosperity gospel, they have
to propose some aspect of it in order to exist.
LP: It seems burdensome that in addition to paying taxes, churchgoers end up funding social services through tithing.
LS: States and local governments are now outsourcing some of their
social service provisions to churches. This is problematic for several
reasons. One is because of the important distinction between church and
state. It’s all too likely that a church would use the resources to
proselytize instead of provide services. Also, churches provide a
function of spiritual guidance – they aren’t bureaucracies. People who
work in churches don’t know how to deal with poverty or public housing
provisions.
We wouldn’t expect a charity to fund NASA: the scale of the challenge
is something that no private entity could actually fulfill. Well, it’s
the same with social service provision. When people pay their tithe, the
resources might really go to social services instead of lining
somebody’s pocket, but those services are nowhere near what’s needed to
deal with inequality. In a way, it demobilizes people when you connect
this to the rhetoric that suggests that people are poor because of their
own choices, it makes it more difficult for people to organize not just
for more social services, but to get at structural dynamics.
LP: What does it take to challenge the neoliberal turn? What have we learned about what’s effective and what’s not?
LS: Martin Luther King, Jr. talked about a wrong-headed approach that
posits that the reason we have gains is because of leaders like him who
spoke to power and as a result were able to galvanize hundreds of
thousands of folks in the South and the North to overturn the Jim Crow
regime.
If you really look at the history, what you find instead is really
deep organizing. What that charismatic leadership cannot do is build
deep, enduring institutions to build the political capacity of regular
folks. These institutions tend to have at least some modicum of
democratic accountability. With the charismatic leadership model,
there’s the idea that everything the leader says is correct. There are
very few ways to hold them accountable or even create debate about
strategies or tactics. But in a robust model of organizing, people can
actually create conditions to lead themselves and engage in making
decisions, whether we’re talking about labor issues, racial inequality,
or #MeToo and gender inequality.
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