08554
August 1, 2008
Speaker: Christians must resist economic injustice
Remaining silent to intolerable inequities puts integrity of faith at risk
ORANGE, CA — Christians must speak out in the face of intolerable injustice if the economy is to enhance the lives of all people not just a privileged few, according to the Rev. Roberto H. Jordan, president of the Reformed Church in Argentina.
Jordan, who is also a member of the executive committee of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches (WARC), was speaking at the recent 2008 Intergenerational Peacemaking Conference of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).
The Rev. Roberto H. Jordan He said that in a world bulging with raving injustices Christians everywhere are called to come together and share their vision of how things can be different.
“We should work together for the transformation of this world so that life in fullness for all creation is not a good idea but a reality,” Jordan told some 270 participants attending the four-day conference here at Chapman University, which concluded July 18.
He told the group, “We all live in this same threatened world, neither you nor I are strangers to God and we are faced with the challenge to live our faith in a relevant manner in the crisis of our times.”
Jordan helped draft the Accra Confession, a policy statement approved by WARC’s 24th General Council in Accra, Ghana, in 2004 that contains strong language about economic inequality and Christians’ call to do justice. WARC’s current president is the Rev. Clifton Kirkpatrick, recently retired General Assembly stated clerk of the PC(USA).
The confession is based on the theological conviction that the economic and environmental injustice of today’s global economy requires the Reformed family to respond as a matter of faith in the gospel of Jesus Christ.
It says the very integrity of Christian faith hangs in the balance if followers of Christ fail to resist systems of oppressive economic inequality and intolerable injustice.
In his address, Jordan read from the Accra Confession, which says WARC’s highest governing body “affirms that global economic justice is essential to the integrity of our faith in God and our discipleship as Christians. We believe that the integrity of our faith is at stake if we remain silent or refuse to act in the face of the current system of neoliberal economic globalization …”
Jordan said human rights should he placed at the heart of economic policies and be legally enforceable. Governments and international bodies must be held accountable and the prevailing culture of impunity must be resisted. The struggle for social justice and human rights, he said, involves bringing freedom from want and fear, and to respect human dignity.
The minister said the last 30 years in Argentina has seen socio-political life become a story of “resistance,” like in other Latin American countries, where decisions made by ruling powers for their own private gain have produced a range of people who are “excluded from life.” But with these deprived people, many churches have embarked on the process of “resisting the intolerable” to be able to “proclaim the fullness of life for all,” Jordan said.
He recalled Sept. 11, 1973, when military general Augusto Pinochet of Chile overthrew the elected government of Salvador Allende and instituted a military dictatorship like one put into place in Argentina three years later. By then there were already military dictatorships in Chile, Brazil and Uruguay.
Each of these dictatorships aligned themselves with the neoliberal economic policies — privatization, free trade and slashed social spending — of University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman. The results were disastrous, Jordan said, with depressions, mass poverty and private corporations looting public wealth, among other problems.
These regimes also turned to violence to sustain their power, developing Plan Cóndor to organize military intelligence to destroy all forms of resistance from any sector in each of the countries, while the CIA helped train Latin American military forces, he said.
“What should be clear to all is that it was not a military coup which installed a whole economic policy, rather it was an economic policy that needed the brutality of the military to impose and sustain it because in no other way could it have ever been possible,” Jordan said.
Jordan referred to Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, which makes the connection between neoliberal economic policies and the military coercion, and in some cases torture, to enforce these policies in Latin America and around the world.
He said the military coup installed in Argentina implemented a series of economic policies that transformed the country’s economy and triggered a human rights collapse unlike anything ever before seen there.
Jordan said the dictatorship was assisted by world economic powers and international financial organizations, such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, which continued to approve and guarantee loans to the military regime while increasing the foreign debt and the participation of a number of people, even from within the churches, who gained power and prestige.
“As markets have become global, so have the political and legal institutions which protect them,” Jordan said reading from the Accra Confession. “The government of the United States of America and its allies, together with international finance and trade institutions use political, economic or military alliances to protect and advance the interest of capital owners.”
Jordan said “neoliberal economics is the greatest threat to democracy” and that international free trade agreements have devastated Latin America.
They are “neither free, nor trade, nor an agreement,” he said, adding that no country involved in a free trade agreement has seen standards of living improve for its people.
“They have only privileged the stronger and reduced the weaker ones to an even worse situation,” Jordan said. “The final result has always been more poverty, less health, less education, less access to a better life, less possibility of developing ...”
He said jokingly that Latin Americans should be allowed to vote in the upcoming United States presidential election … the point being that whoever is elected, and the actions the U.S. government takes, has a far reaching impact on the lives of its southern neighbors.
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