Goodness—with or without God
I’ve never spent just a whole lot of time taking CT too seriously. A copy or two or three regularly circulates around our offices, which I mainly flip through for the ads, i.e., to catch up on the cutting edge in the megachurch–banking industry alliance (note that “Church Banking” is one of several industry-specific banking solutions along with Agribusiness, Healthcare, Real Estate, et al.), the most recent version of pop Islamo-xenophobia, or the latest flashy, full-color pleas from the halls of doomsday androcentrism.
An editorial in the September 2009 issue—”A Unifying Vocation: Why Development Work and Gospel Work Cannot Be Put Asunder” (p. 25)—managed to catch my eye, however. The basic idea of the editorial, that development work must be specifically Christian in order to claim to offer development of any lasting value, is not new, but that doesn’t make it any less troubling.
The authors quote Benedict, who quotes Pope Paul VI: “To regard development as a vocation is to recognize, on the one hand, that it derives from a transcendent call, and on the other hand that it is incapable, on its own, of supplying its ultimate meaning.” They follow with this summary: “So development work is not only about the relief of suffering (countering a negative); it is fundamentally about helping people respond to God’s transcendent call (empowering a positive).”
Don’t want to spend too much time on this, but questions abound. (1) Must development indeed derive from a “transcendent call”? (2) Cannot development be intrinsically, and not just instrumentally, good? (3) Must “empowering positives” take the form of “helping people respond to God’s transcendent call” (read: proselytizing)? Cannot “empowering positives” take more tangible forms such as, say, education?
I’ll confess I have some personal stake in this. On the one hand, it’s good that CT even cares about development work in the first place. A decade or more ago I attended a little conservative Baptist college (long story!) where my own interest in development work/social concerns was mostly met with blank stares and sanctimonious concern for my salvation—if not explicitly discouraged altogether. Among other things, this inspired me to write a paper on why a good portion of evangelicals in the revivalist tradition historically haven’t given a damn about social concerns. And I spent one very long summer on the Brazilian Amazon with an old crotchety missionary who, when asked what sort of development work they did in the area, responded with, “As Southern Baptists we’ve gotten away from all that social justice crap. We’re here to evangelize and plant churches.”
On the other hand, CT betrays the all-too-common assumption that Christianity has a monopoly on moral goodness. Maybe this is why I get such a kick when I tell folks of this persuasion about my brother, who spent the last two years doing development work in Quito, Ecuador. Invariably their immediate response is something like the following: “Oh, so he’s a missionary?” or “I know someone who did mission work down there too.” Then comes my favorite part, which is to inform them that, as a matter of fact, the organization he worked with has no religious affiliation whatsoever—at which point 95 percent of these folks have absolutely no idea how to process such a notion. “You mean it’s not … a Christian organization? So, like, what do they do then?”
Talk of “transcendent calls” has a nice ring to it, and I don’t dispute that such talk has inspired folks to good works (whether they advertise that orientation or whether they choose to keep it to themselves). But I do resist the notion that development work cannot be truly meaningful, right, and good without this explicit link to “transcendence”; there are too many examples to the contrary, and my brother’s work is case in point. In the words of one young woman I met many years ago at a Campus Outreach Opportunity League (which has since merged with Idealist.org) conference at Harvard, “I don’t think God cares what the work is called—as long as it gets done.”
