Yesterday’s news about how grim the national unemployment situation has now become has me thinking about what happens to those who are unemployed. I don’t mean specifically about what happens to create jobs for this growing number of Americans—though that’s a challenge that definitely does concern me.What I’m thinking about in particular is the meantime—the mean time in which people are out of work. Humane societies, civil ones, make some provision for the humanity of those who have no work.
Being out of work cuts to the quick of a person’s self-esteem. Social psychologists find that this is even more the case with men than with women, since men are socialized to identify their personhood and self-worth with their jobs. People out of work feel useless, thrown away, unable to contribute and as if their contributions (and they themselves) are not valued.
In such situations, the temptation is for the person with no job to collude with the process that erodes self-worth. People with no jobs and no prospect of a job can give up, give in to addictive behavior—eating too much, exercising too little, abusing substances (if they are so inclined), venting rage that destroys their ties to those around them. Unemployment has a pooling effect that reaches well beyond the individual who has lost his/her job: it affects entire families, who have to watch (and who are often drawn into) the decline of the family member with no income.
Thoughts of suicide are common among the unemployed, especially when financial hurdles become insuperable and a person must watch all she or he has worked for vanish, as banks repossess houses, cars, furniture, or as savings put aside for retirement evaporate with the struggle to keep financially solvent here and now. Actual suicides skyrocket in times of high unemployment, such as the ones we’re facing now.
I’ve been thinking about these issues since before Christmas, when I read an article in a Port Orange, Florida, newspaper about a father who was out of work. His business had failed, and he couldn’t buy Christmas presents for his children.
As I have mentioned previously on this blog, Steve and I have a house in that community—well, more precisely, we’re trying to pay for a house in that community—and I follow the news there closely because of our foothold in Port Orange. As I’ve also noted, we assumed the debt of that house, which we did not want or need, solely because a friend invited us to work for her, and made promises to us that enabled us to assume the obligation of a second residence—that required us to assume that obligation, if we were to fulfill our promises to her, to work for her.
When that friend broke those promises and made no provision at all for the debts she had caused us to assume or for the disruption of our entire lives, we began our own cycle of unemployment a few years before the current national one began. That is, I began to be unemployed, since Steve found a job eventually, though not one whose salary can cover our two monthly house payments or provide health coverage for me.
So I have had several years to think about what being out of work does to a human being, a human heart and a human psyche. I’ve had a number of years now to monitor the effect of unemployment on a person’s sense of self-esteem.
Oprah Winfrey’s dialogue about spirituality with Rev. Michael Bernard Beckwith, Elizabeth Lesser, and Rev. Ed Bacon last week has drawn attention because of Rev. Bacon’s bold assertion (seconded by Rev. Beckwith) that being gay is a gift from God. However, as I listened to the interview, something else struck me.
The young African-American gay man, Sedrick, whom Rev. Bacon was addressing when he made that observation, had called into Oprah’s show because he was having both financial and self-esteem problems. From what he shared, it’s clear that the two issues were intertwined: his difficulty accepting himself as a gay man in a homophobic culture affected his ability to work; his financial struggles then translated into further questions about his self-worth.
What Rev. Bacon, and following him Rev. Beckwith, told this young man went beyond their bold affirmation that being gay is God’s gift to him. They also noted that nothing is more inhumane, more cruel, than to expel people from human communion. Nothing harms a human being more than being told he or she has no worth, nothing of significance to offer the community—no gifts the community needs.
As the Social Principles of the United Methodist Church state, "The rights and privileges a society bestows upon or withholds from those who comprise it indicate the relative esteem in which that society holds particular persons and groups of persons" (#162). When we place people outside the workforce and make no provision for their future employment, we tell them in no uncertain terms that we regard them as insignificant, as people whose humanity we do not esteem.
The educational philosophy of that powerful African-American leader of the 20th century, Mary McLeod Bethune, builds on this insight that human self-worth is achieved in a social context. In a 1934 essay "The Educational Values of the College-Bred," Dr. Bethune asks why we struggle to educate. Her answer: "Nature has stored up in individuals native powers, possibilities, potentialities, and it is the problem, the work of education to release these powers—to make actual and real these possibilities and potentialities in order that the individual himself may live life to the fullest and make a contribution to the sum total of human happiness." * Bethune founded Bethune-Cookman University because she was convinced that no one is without talent or ability to contribute, and that everyone needs to have a chance to develop and use her or his talents
These are powerful (and deeply theological) statements which have important significance for how we understand the exclusion human communities practice against those who are gay and lesbian. But they are also powerful faith-based statements about what we do to other human beings when we take away their jobs and make no provision for their futures. These are statements, really, about the obligation of communities of faith to do more than pray for those who are unemployed: they are statements about the obligation of churches to reach out to those living through the mean time of unemployment, before a new job can be created or found.
And so I have been thinking: in this nation with the soul of a church, a nation rich with churches on every corner, in this new day of the Obama presidency when the new president says he will continue the faith-based programs of the Bush administration, our churches have a singular opportunity. They have an opportunity to do more than preach about love and inclusion. They are facing a graced moment in which their preaching can enflesh itself in acts of solidarity with and support for the unemployed and their families.
Churches have an opportunity now to make what they preach really believable, since we are called to preach first with our deeds and only as a last resort wit our words . . . .
Churches could do a tremendous amount to cushion the blow of unemployment at both a personal and a social level these days, by sponsoring programs that help people deal with the psychological ravages of unemployment. Churches could offer programs that teach us how to care for our health in the absence of health insurance, how to negotiate the complex, daunting system of health care without health insurance.
In manifold ways, churches can create spaces within which those with no jobs do not feel discarded, useless, and self-hating. These spaces can help the unemployed find their gifts, hone those talents, and share them with various groups. These healing spaces can reinforce the family life of those experiencing unemployment—to help families deal creatively with the tensions caused by unemployment, to find safety valves when the tension threatens to explode and damage family life.
Who knows, maybe churches will respond to such a vision by recognizing that they have an important responsibility to form such support networks for the unemployed precisely because so many churches played a role in getting us into this mess in the first place, by telling us that God wanted us to vote for the leaders who created the mess . . . .
Of course I know that I am dreaming. But if hard times are not times for dreams, then when are dreams ever warranted? And if I am going to dream, why not dream wildly? I even dare to imagine that churches might develop therapy groups for those at the top of the workplace, those who continue to draw obscene salaries while they assault the dignity of employees by firing them.
I know. It often seems as if one of the key requirements of getting to the top is to have no conscience at all.
But I'm a die-hard dreamer. Even in the hardest heart, I dare to believe, shreds of conscience remain alive. Even the big woman or big man on top may occasionally be tormented by pangs of conscience twinging out from those tiny slivers inside her or his heart.
If that's the case (and I believe it is), the harsh period of national unemployment we're headed into now may turn out to be a crisis time not only for the unemployed, but also for those who decree and sign the pink slips while their own fat checks continue to roll in. A guilty conscience can do nasty things to anyone, even those whose conscience has been whittled away to pinhead size by years of cruelty, ruthless ambition, and egotism. And for those poor sinners as for the rest of us, surely the church has balm to soothe the sin-sick soul?
*This 1934 essay is in the Bethune Papers at both Bethune-Cookman University and the Amistad Collection; it was also published in Southern Workman 63 (July 1934), pp. 200-204. The essay is reproduced in Audrey Thomas McCluskey and Elaine M. Smith, ed., Mary McLeod Bethune: Building a Better World (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1999), pp. 109.
