You can watch tonight's event at Le Poisson Rouge via
livestream at
the Rolling Jubilee website. The
telethon features Neutral Milk Hotel's Jeff Mangum, members from Sonic Youth,
Fugazi, and TV on the Radio, Lee Ranaldo, Tunde Adebimpe, David Rees, Lizz
Winstead, and Janeane Garofalo.
How does a ‘Jubilee’ roll? Jesus explains.
Occupy DC demonstrators protest as they try to block the guest entrance to the Alfalfa Dinner at the Capitol Hilton in Washington on Jan. 28, 2012. An Occupy DC organizer says they have hundreds of protesters lined up outside a prestigious Washington hotel where President Barack Obama, other political leaders and business moguls are meeting. (AP)“Jesus had an economic plan,” as I write in “#OccupytheBible: What Jesus Really Said (and Did) About Money and Power,” my new book on how what Jesus really said about money, and on the power dynamics of what he did about economic issues in his own time.
Jesus’ economic plan is called the
“jubilee.” Jesus starts his ministry (Luke 4:
16-19) by
standing up in the synagogue in his hometown and reading from one of the key
texts of his Hebrew scriptures that announces a jubilee, a time of debt
forgiveness.
What Jesus thought needed to be done
about debt in the first century is also what needs to happen for indebted
Americans in the 21st century, at least that’s the view of some of the folks who
brought us Occupy Wall Street.
Rolling Jubilee has just been launched, another brilliant “let’s
not do business as usual” kind of
idea from the Occupy movement.
By donating at Rolling Jubilee, individuals can give money to buy up distressed
consumer debt that is normally sold to debt collectors for pennies on the
dollar. But instead of acting like debt collectors, hounding folks for the full
payment, you are giving to cancel the debt, that is, forgive
it.
I believe what we do (or do not do)
about money is the most pressing moral issue of our time. Our economic system is
still only working for a few people in this country, and the rest are
flat-lining or falling behind as the famous Congressional Budget Office chart shows. Income of the top 1 percent
spiked 275 percent from 1979-2007.
Surely Christians who read the
Gospels would be protesting that inequality, right?
Well, for several decades the
Christian Right in this country has tried to make Jesus into a “free-market
capitalist” who believes you just ‘let the market take care of it’ and there’s
no need to worry about gross economic inequality and people falling into
excessive debt. As Tony Perkins of
the Family Research Council opined,
“Jesus was a free marketer, not an Occupier.”
Nothing could be farther from the
biblical truth.
One of the Jubilee texts in the Bible
about the cancellation of debt and gets very, very specific. “Every seventh year
you shall grant a remission of debts.” (Deuteronomy 15:1-6) It’s a pretty
radical plan for how to get to economic equality in a community, not only in the
early Hebrew history, but also in Jesus’ time, and even today.
But what Rolling Jubilee has done is
take that biblical plan and help us realize we need a “reboot” of 21st century
debt-ridden American economy.
Occupy “won” the debate on the
economy in 2011 and into 2012 by changing the American idea of our economy. The
contribution of the language of the 1 percent and the 99 percent simply entered
American political discourse as a given. Suddenly, the huge accumulation of
wealth by a very few in the last three decades became a scandal not an
achievement in the United States.
We have built an economy on selling
debt (and hamburgers). There is the 1 percent, the “megarich” who benefit from
this debtor economy, and then there is the rest, the 99
percent.
That was a huge shift in American
ideas on wealth and poverty in 2011-2012.
Rolling Jubilee works the same way,
that is, to change our ideas of how economies should work. Rolling Jubilee turns
the morality of “debt” upside down.
It used to be that it was considered
“immoral” not to pay your debts. Now, Occupy has exposed the illegitimacy of
debt production as an economic strategy. It also begins to shine a light on the
institutionalized violence of debt collection including the harassing tactics of
those who are usually the ones who buy up bad debt, and the related tactics of
seizing assets, garnishing wages, denying employment or housing or even the
revival of imprisonment.
Rolling Jubilee does
both.
This “Jubilee” rolls because those
who are now freed from debt are liberated to contribute to forgiving the debt of
others, making this Jubilee roll on.
This is truly in the prophetic
tradition, as “Justice shall roll down like water, and righteousness like an
ever-flowing stream.” (Amos 5:24)
On Thursday, there is a telethon that
you can watch live on streaming video on the Web site, to raise funds. Rolling Jubilee has already raised
nearly $200,000 in donations, at last count on the website, and thus has
“forgiven” nearly $4,000,000 in debt.
It is a testimony to the deep
religious meaning of Rolling Jubilee thatneighbors are
coming together at
places like Hope Central Church in the Boston area to watch, give and Strike
Debt out.
Roll, Jubilee,
roll.
But there’s a lot more in Jesus’
teachings on money and power in addition to the moral crisis of debt. There’s
women and power, why greed leads people into temptation, and on the practical
values of treating each other decently. I hope you will want to #OccupytheBibleand check it out.
Former president of Chicago Theological Seminary
(1998-2008), the Rev. Susan
Brooks Thistlethwaite is professor of theology at
Chicago Theological Seminary and a senior fellow at the Center for
American Progress
