Western countries are often melting pots of religion and spirituality. With all the different religions and spirituality movements, do you think that there lies hypocrisy that eats at the facade of those who work and engage in apathetic, indifferent professions?
Is homelessness a sad, glaring example of the modern western worlds religious hypocrisy?
Well, simply put, yes. However, it isn´t quite that simple I´m happy to be clear about. The long rise of Christian Western Civilization took place with a dynamic tension between two main groups, the Church and its higher degrees of hypocrisy and lower of integrity, and the monasteries with their relatively higher levels of integrity. The monastic/cathedral schools developed the first Universities. Rousseau wrote about the origins of inequality in the 1700s, whereas George Fox, founder of the Quaker Christians in the 1600s, has to be one of the more advanced thinkers of social justice in the world outside of any reformist Franciscan order, in a general sense anyway.
Modern society reflects the rise of business using the profiteering business model like the British East India Co. and the rise of Arkwright´s factory model. Robert Owen asserted his consciousness of worker welfare, and inspired efforts to form co-opeative (co-ownership) enterprises until the first successful modern one by 28 workers led by C Howarth in Rochdale in the 1840s including several types of Christians. The Working Man´s College was founded by Christian Socialist Minister FD Maurice in the 1850s. All that made Marx and Engels´ critiques amenable to practical action and the better balance of Christianity. William Greider wrote about Emil Brunner as part of the Social Gospel movement in the 1800-1900s in the US with Walter Rauschenbusch and others. However, the Cold War and anti-communist militarist propaganda combined with economic propaganda to make life difficult for critics of Big Business.
The UN conferences have stimulated Global People´s Fora for NGOs, and then the independent World Social Forum and Solidarity Economics. Liberation Theology is associated with the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement MST that was a leader in founding the WSF.
By the 1980s, the election of Reagan and Michael Milken´s hijinks lead to a "greed is good" ideology in the US, with right-wing think tanks inspired by M Friedman´s free market economics and statement, "Profit is the Social Responsibility of Business." Unbelievable. So much for FD Roosevelt´s New Deal and L Johnson´s War on Poverty. Nevertheless, it is socially responsible business that has its high integrity leaders that represents the best driving force in the US. Meanwhile Denmark started off on the right foot with a benevolent monarch and a national poet N Grundvig, along with a Reverend who brought the co-op model over from the UK workers. Germany´s Frankfurt School and Walter Eucken developed ordoliberal social markets after WWII, while Emiglia Romana Italy´s right and left wing co-ops hammered out their own alliance to repel the CIA´s machinations, and Mondragon industrial co-op rose in Franco´s Spain.
With the WSF and Solidarity Economics, along with Fair Trade certification, options exist for waking up Christians to their Fundamentalist hostile or passive progressive hypocrisies. The Evangelical Environmental Network is a move on that side, while Equal Exchange´s co-op organic and Fair Trade Interfaith Network is a move on the progressive side.
