NONPROFITS AND THE ENDS OF THE WORLD

 

JON VAN TIL

 

It is commonly expected that nonprofits exist to do good in this world.  Many provide important services; most facilitate engagement; some build valued enterprise or organize on the basis of faith.

 

When a catastrophe strikes, like the recent tsunami, we look to nonprofits to respond heroically.  The hungry require food; the homeless need shelter; the social and economic bases of ravaged communities must be rebuilt; the spiritual needs of those who have lost kin and kind must be addressed.

 

But what if the nonprofit finds itself pressured by the beliefs of its leaders and members not to respond to crisis by taking a  helpful or ameliorative stance, but rather to celebrate, often in quiet, the tragedies that so often engulf the victims of natural or man-made calamities?

 

The nonprofit community has been warned of this possibility by one of its own, foundation president Bill Moyers, who recently noted the widespread acceptance among Americans of “a fantastical theology concocted in the 19th century by a couple of immigrant preachers who took disparate passages from the Bible and wove them into a narrative that has captivated the imagination of millions of Americans.”  

 

Moyers explains that this view, as popularized by contemporary best-selling authors like Tim La Haye, holds that  once Israel has occupied the rest of its 'biblical lands,' legions of the anti-Christ will attack it, triggering a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon. As the Jews who have not been converted are burned, the messiah will return for the rapture. True believers will be lifted out of their clothes and transported to heaven, where, seated next to the right hand of God, they will watch their political and religious opponents suffer plagues of boils, sores, locusts, and frogs during the several years of tribulation that follow.”

 

A favorite web site among those awaiting what the Bible calls the “ends of world” offers a current “rapture index” that is now set at the level of “fasten your seat belts” (http://www.raptureready.com/rap2.html  Read on January 15, 2005).   And, while secular pollsters do not regularly track opinion on these matters, writer LaHaye reports that pollster George Barna, under contract to LaHaye’s publisher, reports that “44 percent of the American people believe that the rapture will happen someday.”

 

This columnist will leave readers to their own theological constructions, but Moyers does raise an issue of concern:  How should those committed to the melioration of human suffering orient themselves toward others who may eagerly anticipate the coming of further suffering as a precursor of their own personal salvation?   Are those enamored by thoughts of “rapture” likely not only to stand by while others suffer, but also seek to speed up the process of the eventual “end of days”?

 

The writer Jared Diamond, in his new book, Collapse, and his New Years Day op-ed in The New York Times, “The Ends of the World as We Know Them”,  identifies two major ways in which previous societies have found themselves doomed to precipitous decline.  Such societies contain “a built-in blueprint for failure if the elite insulates itself from the consequences of its actions” and also show an unwillingness to  to re-examine long-held core values, when conditions change and those values no longer make sense.”

 

Diamond asks:  “Could this happen in the United States? It's a thought that often occurs to me here in Los Angeles, when I drive by gated communities, guarded by private

security patrols, and filled with people who drink bottled water, depend on private pensions, and send their children to private schools. By doing these things, they lose the motivation to support the police force, the municipal water supply, Social Security and public schools. If conditions deteriorate too much for poorer people, gates will not keep the rioters out. Rioters eventually burned the palaces of Maya kings and tore down the statues of Easter Island chiefs; they have also already threatened wealthy districts in Los Angeles twice in recent decades.”

 

Journalist Thomas Frank, in his probing exploration What’s Wrong With Kansas?, wrestles with the question of why low and moderate-income Kansans so strongly support  governmental leaders committed to elevating the power and income of the rich.   His explanation of this seemingly self-destructive behavior?:  Conservatives have convinced ordinary folk that they respect their values; Liberals, on the other hand, have forgotten to take seriously the realities of class in America, and have, indeed, joined Conservatives in celebrating the virtues of corporate power.   On top of that, Frank continues, Liberals appear to be apologists for a mass culture committed to satisfying the needs of an increasingly “decadent and sensate society”, as sociologist Pitirim Sorokin called it some 60 years ago.  Both Liberals and Conservatives may watch “Desperate Housewives”, but they laugh at different lines.

 

And so, in a time of cultural, political, social, and economic turbulence, where does that leave the nonprofit organization?  Writing half a century ago, the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm dissected what he would continue to see as the workings of the “insane society”. The role of the third sector in times like ours, riven with self-doubt, fear, and crisis, is three-fold, Fromm asserted.  Voluntary and nonprofit organizations should focus on:

1)    “Doing away with the harmful separation between theoretical and practical knowledge” in our educational system, which should involve significant possibilities for adult education as well as a thorough recasting of approach at the elementary and secondary levels;

2)    Supporting and extending the creation of “collective art,” the processes by which we “respond to the world with our senses in a meaningful, skilled, productive, active, shared way,”  and

 3)  Welcoming the emergence of a new and “universalistic” religion in the years ahead, a religion which “would embrace the humanistic teachings common to all great religions…(and whose) emphasis would be on the practice of life, rather than doctrinal beliefs”

The third sector’s  commitment  to the development of  universalistic values might begin with a recognition that service, advocacy, social entrepreneurship and faith are often linked, as illustrated by  the work of such successful nonprofits as Habitat for Humanity or Catholic Social Services, or such liberal arts colleges like Pennsylvania’s Swarthmore and Messiah.  In each of these organizations, a recognition of the importance of ultimate meaning is kept to the forefront.   Perhaps the greatest gift the third sector can give to society involves realizing vision and mission, by figuring out what life is all about and how to make things better on this one planet we know to sustain existence.

Religious belief, however, is always a two-edged sword.  The 19th century social philosopher Karl Marx famously observed that  religion, in the crisis times of  late capitalism, can become an “opiate of the people.”  Thomas Frank shows how, in contemporary Kansas, it plays precisely that role.  And Bill Moyers suggests that some forms of contemporary religion may actually lead millions of Americans to celebrate the destruction of the planet and the coming of war in the Middle East.  Armageddon, it should not be forgotten, was originally placed in the geographic space we now call “Iraq”.  

 

FURTHER READING

Jared Diamond, “The Ends of World as We Know Them.”  New York Times, January 1, 2005.

Thomas Frank.  What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America.  New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004.

Erich Fromm, The Sane Society.  New York: Rinehart, 1955.

Bill Moyers, “On Receiving Harvard Medical School's Global Environment Citizen Award.”  Cambridge, MA: Center for Health and the Global Environment, December 6, 2004  . http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1206-10.htm   Read on 1/15/05

Pitirim A. Sorokin, The Crisis of Our Age.  New York: Dutton, 1941.

Jon Van Til, Growing Civil Society.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.

 

 

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