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You Can't Buy Your Way to Social Justice

You Can't Buy Your Way to Social Justice

Why the activism of some fellow Americans scares me.

I'm afraid of some American Christians.

I am an American, but I haven't lived in the United States in a while. I live in Djibouti, a country in the Horn of Africa, and when you pick me up at the Minneapolis airport, I might invite you to coffee and suggest the wrong place—you know, one that doesn't serve fair-trade coffee. I will arrive wearing the wrong jeans—ones sold by companies that don't offer fair wages. And I won't use the right vocabulary—the language used by Western bloggers to talk about social justice.

I've spent more than a decade living among the wealthy and the poor and the uneducated and the doctoral students and Christians and Muslims. I'm trying to figure out how to love radically like Jesus and how to be radically in love with Jesus in a place with 60 percent unemployment, where the oldest university recently turned 13, and where 99.99 percent of nationals don't look like me, talk like me, think like me, or worship like me.

But I haven't read up on fair-trade coffee or researched human trafficking statistics or purchased fair-wage clothing. Partly, I haven't had time. Partly, I haven't had opportunity. My green coffee beans come from an Ethiopian woman on the side of the street. My beef was roaming Main Street yesterday. My clothes are whatever I could fit in a suitcase. I don't know the right way to talk about gender injustice, even though I talk with friends about female genital cutting in everyday conversations.

It used to be that people returned from humanitarian or faith-based work overseas with dowdy haircuts and last decade's fashion. Now, I'm afraid I will come back and not know foundational things like what or where to eat. I won't know where to shop to update my outdated wardrobe. I may very well be judged as wasteful for taking a long, hot shower (for the first time in two years).

And so some American Christians scare me. Passionate blog posts about offensive words like "the voiceless" and beautiful photos of homemade clothing and inspiring essays about living off the land inspire me to make more informed choices. But they also make me nervous about my ignorance after years of being outside this milieu and evolving language. They leave me with a pressing question and, at the same time, provide part of the answer.

Remembering Risk

If my generation cares so deeply about global issues of justice and poverty that they are willing to change eating, clothing, and living habits, where are they? A significant challenge for nonprofits and ministries remains recruiting people who will commit to serve long-term outside the United States.

I know there are a plethora of good reasons that concerned American Christians can't just uproot and leave the States, from family to health to finances. I know I simplify. But I have a theory about what is partly contributing to the dearth of young Americans willing to spend their lives on behalf of others.

They think they already are.

They think that with their pocketbooks and food choices alone, by sewing their own clothes and purchasing fair-trade coffee, by boycotting Wal-Mart and preaching that as gospel, they have already done their part to address global injustices.

In Nicholas Kristof's documentary Half the Sky, actress Meg Ryan also thought she was doing her part to highlight child trafficking in Cambodia, but then declines to go on a brothel raid. She says she doesn't have the "adventure" gene. I appreciate her honesty. I have less appreciation for her ignorance. What did she think fighting sex trafficking would be like, if not going to brothels themselves? Her reticence is symbolic of goodhearted people who have forgotten about risk.

Buying fair-trade coffee, boycotting Gap jeans, and eating only organic vegetarian foods can be important and valuable decisions. They cost time, money, comfort, and an established worldview. But they cannot be the end of our response to the deeply systemic and complex issues that allow human suffering to persist the world over. They don't require risk.

But these things do: Moving your family across the nation, to the inner city, or to the other side of the globe. Letting juvenile delinquents play basketball in your church gym. Inviting pot-smokers and pregnant teenagers to Thanksgiving dinner. Letting a homeless man get in your car.

The Good Samaritan wasn't good because of the origins of his food or because he sewed his own tunic or because he moved to Canaan. Instead, he looked around him, around where he lived and worked and traveled, saw a human in need, and got involved. He gave up time, money, and most likely status and respect in doing so. As he went about his day, perhaps commuting on the dusty roads between two meetings for a high-powered job, he loved someone.

This kind of direct, relational service is risky because it involves people made in the image of God. People about whom Jesus says, "Whatever you did for one of the least of these, you did for me." The Jesus who says, "Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends."

Consumer activism comes with the inherent danger of separating us from the very people we want to serve. To buy fair trade coffee, for example, we might need to drive across town instead of sitting in the corner café where people in our neighborhood mingle. We can buy that fair trade coffee and never know the family in Burundi who grew, harvested, washed, and roasted the beans. And still we can feel that have done our part.

Whether in a rural, urban, suburban neighborhood or among coffee farmers in Burundi or among university students in Djibouti, we must not forget that the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating or drinking—or ultimately of moving from one place to another—but of righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit. We must remember that

"The purpose of eating more healthfully is not because it will change global food systems or politics or social structure, but because it allows us the health and energy to live life to the full, i.e., be co-creators with God in a beloved and merciful community that includes all humanity- regardless of where they shop for food or what they eat." So says Shoshon Tama-Sweet, who is featured in Christianity Today for his work fighting child sex trafficking in Portland, Oregon (and who, for full disclosure, is my brother-in-law).

Tama-Sweet is a man who loves as he goes, who doesn't mask the aftershocks of living and loving with risk. It affects his marriage and parenting, his faith. He shares how God meets him in the broken places of himself and his city because Jesus also said, "I will be with you."

While remaining passionate and continuing to gently educate the ignorant (like me!) about how our purchases affect the world, we also need to ask whether current trends are becoming a convenient excuse not to delve into the complexities of social justice. We need to ask whether our consumer choices distort the words of Jesus, and whether they help us enter relationships or separate us from others.

As Matthew Lee Anderson notes in his recent CT cover story, Christians begin to fulfill the command to love our neighbor as ourselves "not when we do something radical, extreme, over the top, not when we're really spiritual or really committed or really faithful, but when in the daily ebb and flow of life, in our corporate jobs, in our middle-class neighborhoods, on our trips to Yellowstone and Disney World . . . we stop to help those whom we meet in everyday life, reaching out in quiet, practical, and loving ways."

While it is practical and loving to use our purchasing power to make wise choices, let us also consider how to be actively involved with the people in our communities. By laying down more than our fashion and our tastes, laying down more than our judgment of those who eat and dress differently.

By laying down our lives.

Rachel Pieh Jones has written for The New York Times, FamilyFun, Literary Mama, Brain, Child, Running Times, Relevant, and EthnoTraveler. She is a regular contributor to SheLoves and A Life Overseas, and she blogs at Djiboutijones.com about being an expatriate, development work, faith, family, running, and writing.

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Comments Are Closed

Displaying 1–5 of 94 comments

KEVIN W ANDERSON

June 05, 2013  3:14pm

GO, Paul Schryba~! :)

yvette moore

May 25, 2013  8:46am

Welcome home, Rachel. The church is growing faster in Africa and Latin America than in the US, apparently without the presence of lots of U.S. mission workers. If longterm mission work is your calling, by all means go. But in the 21st century, it’s often more effective and respectful to support the efforts of Christians working in their own regions. If physically going to an impoverished country would bring just change, Haiti would be a world power. Moving your family across town or world may change you and those you meet, but these acts--risky and well meaning--will not create the SYSTEMIC change needed to improve the lives of coffee growers or impoverished youth. During the SA anti-apartheid struggle poet June Jordan likened the position of US citizens to US slavery when slaves working in the big house had access to power etc field hands didn't. Some helped field hands, some didn't. US is now the big house, she said. We can use our access amplify ignored voices for systemic change.

Paul Schryba

May 24, 2013  9:58pm

Roger: Scientific statements and results are supposed to be verifiable. You consistently fail to provide references and confirmations for your beliefs. You dismiss the Brookings Insitution study as 'socialist' by way of response: you could have stated that statisical analyses do not prove causality. You could have mentioned that the study itself does not advocate minimum wages. Here's there overall conclusion: "Although the recurrent result is that minimum wages and poverty are inversely related, one cannot conclude that a rise in the minimum wage is the most cost effective way to reduce poverty. We do not estimate the efficiency losses that may result from higher minimum wages. Also, this empirical exercise is subject to all the caveats associated with cross- section analysis. Even if minimum wages can reduce poverty, they may not be the most efficient way to achieve this objective.’ " Socialist, right?

Paul Schryba

May 24, 2013  2:28pm

Roger: Low productivity is not THE cause of low wages- it is A cause of it. "In any market transaction between a seller and a buyer, the price of the good or service is determined by supply and demand in a market." (http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/basics/suppdem.htm) Workers are the product- wages the price- employers the buyers. There is no DIRECT correlation between productivity and demand. The DEMAND for productive workers, will be determined by how much the buyer-employer- values increased productivity, and how much the seller-worker- charges for the increased productivity. Where supply far exceeds demand, wages will remain 'low'. I have already cited a study from Fordham, were greater supply correlates with lower wages. Further, the migration of the job to the 'poor person'- means the unemployment of the skilled, productive worker and their impoverishment.

Roger McKinney

May 24, 2013  9:38am

Yes, there is a correlation between minimum wages and poverty: if the minimum is above the market rate, unemployment and poverty increase. If the minimum is at or below the market rate for unskilled workers, which it is in many countries including the US, then poverty falls. Minimum wage increases tend to follow development, not lead it. See, Brookings refuses to tell you the rest of the story. Clearly you want to help the poor and that is admirable. But you need to know what really helps and what doesn't. Free trade doesn't and socialist policies severely hurt the poor more than the rich. There is abundant evidence in developmental economics if you're interested. But you won't find any of it at the socialist Brookings Institute.

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