🔗 The 5 Interlocking Evils

Dear Friends,

I hope that your week was good and that you remain safe and healthy. These are difficult times and with the election just a few days ahead, I know that there is plenty of anxiety and worry about the unknowns. I have been excited to write this issue for sometime. When I had the idea to write about the Freedom Church of the Poor and some of the pieces related to it, I knew I wanted to talk about the “5 Interlocking Evils” that the Poor People’s Campaign uses to talk about the key problems we face in our country. I wanted to share this not only because I thought you would find these helpful, but because I wanted to understand them better myself. My two main sources are “Our Demands” page from the PPC and the “Souls of Poor Folks: Auditing America 50 Years After the Poor People’s Campaign Challenged Racism, Poverty, the War Economy/Militarism and Our National Morality,” which I studied in preparation for this issue.

Thank you for reading,

C. Wess Daniels

Haw River Watershed (Greensboro, NC)

How do you name immorality? Do the words sin and evil find their way into your vocabulary or have they been shunned long ago because of the overuse of these words by some? How do you think and talk about what is wrong in the world? Where does it come from and how would you go about addressing it?

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When it comes to naming evil in today’s world, I have been helped by the thinking of those in the Freedom Church of the Poor who find their roots in what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. calls “the triplets of evil” - that is racism, militarism, and economic injustice. The Poor People’s Campaign and the Freedom Church of the Poor have expounded upon these three, adding two more: ecological devastation and the distorted moral narrative of Christian Nationalism.

In The Souls of Poor Folk: Auditing America, which I draw on for the rest of this newsletter, the data and stories reveal these five interlocking evils as the core to the problems within our American society and the key to changing America for the better.

To reiterate the five interlocking evils are (read a summary of the five here):

I wanted to share a summary of these five evils with you this week because I believe that you’ll find these helpful in your own work and my hope is that using these five interlocking injustices as a way to analyze where we are, we can focus our efforts on addressing the issues.

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From a legal system that restricts people of color from participating in democratic processes, to ongoing police brutality, to “tough on crime” politics, the carceral system, and so much more, racism is baked into the DNA of America. Indeed some have called it America’s “Original Sin,” and at the heart of all of our major challenges. Consider that, “Federal spending on immigration, deportation, and border policies increased from $2 billion to $17 billion and deportations increased tenfold between 1976 and 2015. These anti-immigrant measures affect not only deportees and detainees, but also their communities and family members, who face greater difficulty in affording basic expenses, meeting rent, and paying for utilities” (Souls of Poor Folks, 24ff).

We are told that poverty is simply due to people making bad choices, being lazy, or just trying to game the system. On the contrary, poverty in America is structural, meaning that it is due to policies and practices overtime leaving the vulnerable more and more economically unprotected in our country. In other words, poverty is a sign of the system working the way it was intended to work, not a sign that the system of broken.

The Souls of Poor Folks charts critical changes from the 1970s onward - especially in labor, housing, hourly compensation (which has barely increased in comparison to profits for those in power), higher education costs, and many other changes that have left, “Nearly 41 million Americans liv[ing] below the federal poverty line and 140 million people (43.5 percent) are either poor or low-income.” [That] four in ten children spend at least one year of their lives in poverty" in the US should be unacceptable to all of us. Considering just how much wealth in concentrated in the hands of a few, there is no need for poverty in this country.

As the report states:

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. challenged the basis of the Vietnam war not just on the principle of non-violence, but because the tremendous cost of war redirects money away from social services that aid the poor and working class towards funding wars in other parts of the world (that is often aimed against the poor of other countries). King called war “demonic, destructive suction tube” suctioning money away from the most vulnerable in our country.

Matters have only worsened. For instance, in America today, “The current annual military budget, at $668 billion, dwarfs the $190 billion allocated for education, jobs, housing, and other basic services and infrastructure. Out of every dollar in federal discretionary spending, 53 cents goes towards the military, with just 15 cents on anti-poverty programs” (Souls of Poor Folks, 11).

Furthermore, we are now seeing “perpetual war,” around the world in the name of national security and democracy, all the while our neighbors and cities - especially after Ferguson - are becoming increasingly militarized. We are becoming desensitized to violence, comfortable with state violence in our own street and with gun violence in our elementary schools.

The devastation of our natural world is an evil that we see and are experiencing in our country and world today. Devaluing of the gift of creation has not just been a failure of proper stewardship, it has become a “multiplier” of the other interlocking evils mentioned here. Hurricane Katrina devastated already poor communities, driving many deeper into Poverty. Hurricane Maria’s impact on Puerto Rico in 2017 has lasting impact today. Recent fires on the West Coast have impacted and destroyed communities. Even Covid19 is interrelated to ecological devastation.

Pollution of air, water, and land has led to sickness and death at alarming rates.

This multiplying effect will only continue in the years to come. We cannot unlink ecological devastation from the other interlocking sins of our society, but rather we must see it as a larger system that can be challenged and changed system-wide.

The fifth evil addressed in the work of the Poor People’s Campaign and the Freedom Church of the poor is referred to as “the distorted moral narrative” for shorthand. America has, since its beginning, used Christian language to justify all manner of evil from genocide of the Indigenous people who lived on this land, to slavery, Jim Crow, lynchings, homophobia, racism, militarism and more. The Moral Majority and Religious Right have built an entire political platform around Christian Nationalism.

I couldn’t explain Christian Nationalism any better than the good folks at Soulforce do when they define “Christian Supremacy” below.

If we are to address these evils, we must understand and confront the underlying ways that America operates religiously and how it has co-opted Christian language in order to do so. I believe that this can and must be undone by religious people, and by Christians or folks who understand how Christian language and practice is being abused for power.

I believe, along with many others, that one of the most potent ways to do this is to reveal the distorted moral narrative of Christian nationalism to be the lie that it is. This is why I have been so fascinated by the Radical Reformation & Quaker theology, Liberation Theology in its many forms, Howard Thurman’s work on Jesus, and re-reading books like Revelation in anti-imperial terms.

These five evils put together gives a very clear picture of what I mean by the Religion of Empire, a system that benefits the few at the expense of everyone and everything else, (mis)using the name of God to justify its actions.

I believe that any contextual theology meaning to make sense of American society today must address, and continue to address these five interlocking evils. It must give us ways of not only naming the sins of our society, but insights into how to make a society founded on “the ethic of love.” I would love to see more churches, meetings, and other faith communities of every tradition take as its starting point these five evils and continue to preach on them, teach on them, analyze them, and undo them in our own communities and institutions. Let us not settle for anything less than a complete “revolution of values” in our faith communities, schools, businesses and more. What we have is not good enough, but if we work together, we can create that which we want to see exist in the world.

As Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II says,

Join us live every Sunday evening 6pm EST - Facebook Live - where we address the 5 interlocking evils of issues of racism, poverty, militarism, climate devastation, the distorted moral narrative of Christian nationalism, and what the Bible has to say about it.

I’ll be speaking at the Fall Fellowship of Souther California Quarterly Meeting on the subject of Jesus Against Empire. It is open for others to join if that is of interest to you. My talk will be 9:30am PST November 7.

More information here: http://scqm.org/

“The prescription for the cure rests with an accurate diagnosis of the disease.” - Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1967)

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Thank you! -Wess 💚☕️