Our Moral Compass: A Social Justice Model for Operating in the World
Based on the work of Dr. Paul Farmer
Something that is so cool about this church is that our Sunday Service topics often relate to each other and layer upon one another to provide for a richer and deeper exploration of important issues. A few weeks ago, Thom Botsford spoke with us here about the works of Paul Tillich, the influential theologian, existentialist philosopher, and Christian socialist. As a reminder, Tillich’s sermon “You Are Accepted” explored the concepts of Sin and Grace. These concepts of Sin and Grace and the way that Tillich explained them have relevance to today’s consideration of Our Moral Compass.
Tillich identifies Sin as a state of Separation – our separation from others, our separation from ourselves, and our separation from God or our Higher Power, which Tillich referred to as the Ground of Being.
About separation, Tillich observes that “life is estranged from life.” He writes, “The most irrevocable expression of the separation of life from life today is the attitude of social groups within nations towards each other, and the attitude of nations themselves towards other nations. The walls of distance, in time and space, have been removed by technical progress; but the walls of estrangement between heart and heart have been incredibly strengthened.”
Keep in mind that Tillich is delivering this sermon 1948, in the wake of World War II, the circumstances of which led so many people around the world to deeply question humanity and the meaning of life. Yet about 75 years later, here we are, and these words seem even more true today.
Tillich continues: “Let us just consider ourselves and what we feel, when we read, this morning and tonight, that in some sections of Europe all children under the age of three are sick and dying, or that in some sections of Asia millions without homes are freezing and starving to death. The strangeness of life to life is evident in the strange fact that we can know all this, and yet can live today, this morning, tonight, as though we were completely ignorant. … In both mankind and nature, life is separated from life. Estrangement prevails among all things that live.”
On the other hand, Tillich identified Grace as a process of Reunion, which is something we can experience only when we have truly felt “the separation of life.” Speaking of the disciple Paul in the Christian Bible, Tillich writes: “The moment in which grace struck him and overwhelmed him, he was reunited with that to which he belonged, and from which he was estranged in utter strangeness.”
You may recall that the Bible depicts the disciple Paul, originally called Saul, as a hateful man who “intensely persecuted the followers of Jesus.” Saul had a life-altering experience, underwent a conversion, ceased his hateful persecution, and then spent his life building up the Christian church and doing lots of writing.
When we, like Paul, experience the light of Grace, Tillich says, “We perceive the power of grace in our relation to others and to ourselves. We experience the grace of being able to look frankly into the eyes of another, the miraculous grace of reunion of life with life. Sometimes grace appears in all these separations to reunite us with those to whom we belong. For life belongs to life.”
Tillich continues: “And in the light of this grace we perceive the power of grace in our relation to ourselves. We experience moments in which we accept ourselves, because we feel that we have been accepted by that which is greater than we.”
‘Blessed and Made Whole’
Tillich describes Grace – Reunion – as a process of being reconciled with others, with ourselves, and with the Ground of Being. We sang the UU anthem “Answering the Call of Love” for our Opening Hymn today. The lyrics tell us that the promise of the Spirit is that faith, hope, and love abide — that faith, hope, and love endure without yielding. If this happens, “every soul is blessed and made whole.”
We are whole, able to live holistically, united with the Ground of Being, with others, and with ourselves. We are not estranged from ourselves. We are in a position to listen to and follow our deepest values. Jason Shelton, the composer of “Answering the Call of Love,” asserts that “the truth in our hearts is our guide” when we answer the call of love. But how do we find the truth in our hearts?
‘The Truth in Our Hearts’
One might say that we follow our truth when our behavior is in alignment with our values, when we live with integrity. Integrity requires that we know what our values and beliefs are and that we use them to make decisions and take action. Our values and beliefs then become like a compass, a moral compass.
The Rev. Mary Deal, minister of the UU church in Olympia, puts it this way: “Integrity [means] that we have a moral compass, and we use it. A compass is a tool that helps us find our direction when we are on a journey. A moral compass is an internalized set of values that guide us with regard to ethical behavior and decision-making. A moral compass helps us find our direction on the journey of life.”
“Knowing our moral compass requires reflection and contemplation; thinking and observing, listening to our heart and spirit.” In terms of becoming acquainted with our personal moral compass, Deal suggests that we tune in to the values that are reflected in our actions, such as the issues that we pay attention to, the way that we spend our money and our time, and how we feel about these choices. The way that we budget our time and money says a lot about what we value. Those of us here today or watching later, those of us who are drawn to UUCP and who invest our time, talent, and treasures here most likely value love, diversity, and justice, the mission of this church.
Deal goes on to discuss “spiritually grounded justice work,” which means working for justice based on our core values. Deal stresses that justice work that is grounded in our core values is more sustainable. “It is those values that we return to when the work is hard and when we are tired,” Deal says. “Without those core values to remind us of the ‘why,’ we burnout and have no energy for the ‘what.’ A moral compass is a touchstone we return to when we need it for the long haul.”
Dr. Paul Farmer
Dr. Paul Farmer is a figure with an extremely refined moral compass, someone in touch with his own values, and someone who had the strength to continue justice work over the long haul. Farmer was a physician, anthropologist, and a humanitarian who became internationally renowned for his work providing health care to some of the world’s poorest residents, mostly in Haiti. He came from humble beginnings – living part of his childhood in a bus his father had converted for the family – and went on to attend Duke University and Harvard Medical School. Living and working in Haiti, he was appalled to see that poor patients could not get the healthcare they needed if they could not pay for it up front. In 1987, he founded Partners in Health, which operates a network of community health centers, run and led by the local people. Dr. Farmer died in Rwanda in 2022 at the age of 62 following a cardiac event while he was asleep. The director of the CDC remarked that there are untold numbers of people alive today because of the work of Paul Farmer.
It should come as no surprise that Dr. Farmer witnessed immense injustice in his years assessing and treating the medical needs of the global poor. In his book “Pathologies of Power,” published in 2003, Farmer articulated the injustices that arise from economic inequality. He writes, “By almost every measure, social inequalities – both within affluent societies and across borders – have risen sharply over the past two or three decades. The social pathologies associated with rising inequality give pause to even the cheerleaders of neoliberal economics.” These social pathologies include inequalities in the control of land and systems of production and inequalities baked into our political and legal structures. Wealth and control have become increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few.
Farmer quotes an economics scholar as saying that “the social consequences of economic inequality are sometimes negative, sometimes neutral, but seldom – as far as I can discover – positive.” A leader of the liberation theology movement, Leonardo Boff of Brazil, notes that the poor “are those who suffer injustice. Their poverty is produced by mechanisms of impoverishment and exploitation. Their poverty is therefore an evil and an injustice.” Likewise, Abby Maxman, President and CEO of Oxfam America, asserts, “We must stop normalizing extreme inequality. This is not by accident, but by design.”
Remember: “life is estranged from life,” “heart estranged from heart.”
In terms of working for social justice, Farmer believed that the poor are the ones most deserving of our efforts. In Haiti, the poor are the descendants of a people enslaved in order to provide our ancestors with cheap sugar, coffee, and cotton – or, in the U.S., tobacco and cotton.
Dr. Farmer saw that the poor were the most likely to fall sick and be denied access to care. The most likely to be victims of human rights abuses. The most likely to “suffer the insults of structural violence.” The poor are the ones whose children die of measles, gastroenteritis, and malnutrition. In Pensacola, the poor are the people who sleep on the streets, or in a car or tent, the people who go hungry or without access to proper nutrition, even the people who serve us in restaurants or teach our kids. The poor are the people who die in childbirth or whose babies die before their second birthday due to inadequate health care and living conditions, or the ones who die at an early age from homicide or heart disease.
Preferential Option for the Poor
Paul Farmer was a practitioner of liberation theology, which is a religious movement concerned with political liberation for oppressed people, with social justice and social responsibility. You are probably familiar with liberation theology at least to the extent that it is discussed periodically here in the UUCP pulpit.
Farmer writes: “For decades now, proponents of liberation theology have argued that people of faith must make a ‘preferential option for the poor’ [against their poverty].” A preferential option for the poor means that we put the needs of the most vulnerable first. You might say this option reunites us with the poor.
Farmer says: “It is my belief that the liberation theologians, in advocating preferential treatment for the poor, offer those concerned with human rights a moral compass for future action.” That moral compass, in Farmer’s view, points toward social justice for the poor. He writes: “Making an option for the poor inevitably implies working for social justice, working with poor people as they struggle to change their situations.”
Farmer continues: “In my experience, people who work for social justice, regardless of their own station in life, tend to see the world as deeply flawed. They see the conditions of the poor not only as unacceptable but as the result of structural violence that is human-made. … Unless we agree that the world should not be the way it is … there is no point of contact, because the world that is satisfying to us is the same world that is utterly devastating to them.”
The See-Judge-Act Model
The social justice model that Farmer proposes for addressing these conditions is one with deep roots in Catholic social teaching. It is known as the See-Judge-Act model, created by Cardinal Joseph Cardijn, who was born in 1862 in Belgium and focused his ministry on the working class, whom he believed were being neglected.
The organization Catholic Charities outlines the methodical practice of See-Judge-Act in this way:
- Review (“see”) the best available information, including scientific research;
- Consider (“judge”) the information in light of a chosen value system;
- Advance proposals for dialogue and action (“act”) at an individual and a global level.
This three-step process is described as “a praxis-oriented methodology that prioritizes a critical assessment of reality (See) in order to change reality (Act) through critical reflection as a mediatory step (Judge).”
By way of example, let us apply the See-Judge-Act model to an issue that is directly tied to poverty: food insecurity.
What do we See when we study food insecurity? The USDA reports that about 13% of U.S. households were food insecure at least some time during 2022, meaning they had difficulty providing enough food for all their members because of a lack of resources. More households experienced food insecurity in 2022 than in 2021 or 2020. In fact, after declining pretty consistently over the last decade, food insecurity shot up in 2022.
So while a rising number of households in the U.S. are going hungry, “The world’s five richest men have more than doubled their fortunes from $405 billion to $869 billion since 2020 —at a rate of $14 million per hour— while nearly five billion people have been made poorer.”
In terms of the first step in the See-Judge-Act model, then, Farmer says it clearly: “We look at the lives of the poor and are sure, just as they are, that something is terribly wrong.”
Given these terrible conditions, how do we Judge the situation related to food insecurity? The Global Solidarity Alliance for Food, Health and Social Justice declares: “People are hungry because they are poor. They are poor because they have been systematically and chronically marginalized.”
Under the slogan Rights Not Charity, the Global Solidarity Alliance advocates for adequate food and nutrition as a basic human right, guaranteed in the UN Declaration of Human Rights. The group points to the destruction wrought by the proliferation of institutionalized corporate food banking, private philanthropy, and other “emergency measures.” These approaches allow us to estrange ourselves from one another, from the hungry. Global Solidarity Alliance says that these institutionalized, emergency-based, shallow approaches allow governments to consider the problems of hunger and poverty solved, to ignore the actual causes of food insecurity, and to evade their responsibility for setting economic policies. In terms of food insecurity, we have resorted to a charity model to address the problem rather than a social justice model.
Janet Poppendieck is a U.S. scholar and activist in poverty, hunger, and food assistance. Paul Farmer quotes Poppendieck in his book “Pathologies of Power”: “The resurgence of charity is at once a symptom and a cause of our society’s failure to face up to and deal with the erosion of equality. It is a symptom in that it stems, in part at least, from an abandonment of our hopes for the elimination of poverty. … It is symptomatic of a pervasive despair about actually solving problems that have turned us toward ways of managing them: damage control, rather than prevention. More significantly, and more controversially, the proliferation of charity contributes to our society’s failure to grapple in meaningful ways with poverty.”
In terms of the second step in the See-Judge-Act model, we might recall the words of theologian, philosopher, and writer St. Augustine from more than 1,500 years ago: “Charity is no substitute for justice withheld.”
Having observed and judged the food insecurity situation, how do we Act in this matter? Dr. Farmer urged proponents of social justice to engage in “pragmatic interventions.” He chose to provide medical care to the poor, which is not an option for all of us. But we could support the work of Farmer’s organization, Partners in Health, which carries on his vision — or we could support the work of similar organizations like the Global Solidarity Alliance that I discussed earlier. Or The Bail Project, which raises funds and pays bail for people in need in order to limit the inequitable impact of cash bail that falls disproportionately on people without cash. Or our own JUST Pensacola, working to increase access to affordable housing in this community and increase the use of civil citations for young people and adults who are caught engaging in misdemeanor offenses. JUST Pensacola is planning a major summit on affordable housing, set for Tues, May 14, at 6pm, at First United Methodist Church downtown.
Closing
The Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire was a role model for Dr. Farmer. Freire spent his life educating working people and helping them to develop the awareness and skills they needed to fight their own oppression. Freire is considered one of the most significant educators of the 20th Century, influencing the fields of education, community development, and community health, among others.
In terms of the third step in the See-Judge-Act model, Freire urges us to show true generosity. He proclaims: “True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which nourish false charity.” False charity is about having power over another person. Freire continues: “True generosity lies in striving so that these hands — whether of individuals or entire peoples — need be extended less and less in supplication, so that more and more they become human hands which work and, working, transform the world.”
May it be so.
Text of a talk originally presented 04/28/24 at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Pensacola
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