The widespread Occupy Wall Street movement and its offshoots have posed a difficult question to churches and religious leaders about the proper way to critically engage broader cultural movements. All too often, church leaders offer open arms to such trends, which is how we find anachronistic assertions that such heroes of the Christian tradition as John Calvin, St. Francis, and John Wesley would in fact be active supporters of the Occupy movement. In other cases, as in London's St. Paul's Cathedral and New York's United Methodist Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew, churches have had to respond in some way as protestors show up on their doorsteps. New York's Union Theological Seminary is "in full solidarity with the protestors," according to seminary president Serene Jones. Union also recently welcomed back Cornel West to its faculty, "to a place where his scholarly commitments and his activism don't live in two different worlds," said Jones.
It is true of course that the Christian gospel has inherently social implications, and that in some cases direct political action and social activism are entailed, at least for individual Christians working out of their own convictions, if not always for the institutional church itself. It makes sense, then, that the consciences of some Christians are deeply pricked by the message emanating from the Occupy movement and have wholeheartedly thrown their lot in with the cause of the so-called "99 percent." This is in part why religious activists like Jim Wallis and Shane Claiborne have positively engaged the Occupy movement.
Read Full Article »