Download a digital copy (1.5 MB) - Open Door Community

312 ˜ A Work of Hospitality, 1982–2002
a white American male. Thus Billy Graham and the revivalism movement to
Christianize America could threaten with the fires of hell on one hand and, on
the other hand, promise that one’s actions did not matter. There is no call to justice
in Billy Graham’s life or thought. He is, however, worth millions.
Heaven and hell died as motives for behavior modification at about the
same time that Christmas and ethics became separated. As late as the 1960s,
children believed: “You better watch out / You better not cry / You better not
pout.../ Santa Claus is coming to town. .../ So be good for goodness’ sake.”
In the second half of the twentieth century, Santa Claus replaced God for awhile
as, at least, an enforcer of obedience to parents and teachers (Exod. 20:12). Now
even that is gone. Unruly or gun-toting kids need their gifts to keep the economy
rolling. Many companies win or lose based on Christmas sales. Santa Claus
has joined the happy chorus, with a Coke in his hand. It does not matter what
we do.
The demands of development and economic expansion keep moving rapidly,
with consumption as the single most important economic act. The church
keeps shrinking in its encounter with social life and its call for justice. It does
not matter what you buy; faith in Yahweh-Elohim’s grace alone is what registers.
One of the primary reasons for the sixteenth-century Reformation was the
need to charge interest on loans to church members. Usury was a sin in Catholic
lands (hence the importance of Jewish bankers). John Calvin, parent of the Presbyterians,
was one of the first to say that the Bible and its teaching on interest
payments does not matter. We can charge interest within the household of faith
(even the poor have to pay), and be justified by faith alone. Dorothy Day, a
Catholic practitioner, believed that the Sermon on the Mount is a way of life
and not a set of ideas or principles. (A beautiful but irrelevant sermon, Reinhold
Niebuhr would say.) Dorothy Day, following the teachings of the Sermon on the
Mount, taught that monetary interest is the primary cause of war. She wrote that
it does matter how one uses money. That is one reason that thousands of us
march and face arrest each November at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning,
Georgia.
We Christians, for the economy to grow, had to do something about Judgment
and the possibility of hell. We had to proclaim the gospel so we could still
feel at home among politicians who call for bombs on Iraq, the death penalty,
and prisons for social control of the African American male population. And
we did!
Theologians of justification by God’s grace alone—good works do not
count—came up with an idea: universalism. God’s love is so undemanding and
unconditional that it does not matter what any person or society does. Everybody
is going to heaven! As Peter Maurin said around the time of the Catholic
Worker’s founding, “A newspaper for everybody is a newspaper for nobody.” The