by Isaac Sanborn
(original article source: https://isaacsanborn.wordpress.com)
“Boy did we screw up.” Charles Koch, owner and CEO of Koch Industries, wants to turn a new leaf. At least that’s what he told an interviewer from the Wall Street Journal. His new book, “Believe in People: Bottom-Up Solutions for a Top-Down World,” was published this week. After decades of bankrolling right-wing ventures such as the Tea Party, Americans for Prosperity, and the American Legislative Exchange Council (not to mention Koch Industries’ PAC, which has donated millions to conservative campaigns as well as climate science denial), the 15th richest man in the country believes he has a unique platform to teach others how to “bridge the political divide” vexing our country.
To the ear of a vaguely spiritual reader, this may sound like a real redemption arc in the making. Oil tycoon sees the error of his ways, apologizes to national media outlet.
No, I’m just kidding. Nobody believes this guy.
But I found the story interesting enough to meditate a bit on repentance and salvation from a Christian perspective.
In Luke 18, we hear a story of a ruler (who is called the “rich young ruler” in the other synoptic gospels) who approaches Jesus, possibly desiring a chance at salvation:
A certain ruler asked him, ‘Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ Jesus said to him, ‘Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. You know the commandments: “You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; Honor your father and mother.” ’ He replied, ‘I have kept all these since my youth.’ When Jesus heard this, he said to him, ‘There is still one thing lacking. Sell all that you own and distribute the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.’ But when he heard this, he became sad; for he was very rich.
There is an ancient Palestinian proverb that Jesus would have been familiar with, although he never mentions it directly in the scriptures: A rich man is either a thief, or the son of a thief. To anyone growing up in the communal agrarian villages of the Ancient Near East, it was patently obvious that there is no way to amass a fortune without gouging your neighbors and abusing your power. There were only a few ways to get rich quick: tax collecting, highway robbery, and land speculation (see Naboth’s response to the ethical merits of that route in 1 Kings 12).
So when Jesus rehearses the Law of Moses with the rich young ruler, the Law that Yahweh gave the people of Israel to ensure that they would extricate the exploitation and violence of empire from their bodies, and the man has the audacity to say, “I have kept all these since my youth,” can we really imagine that Jesus is satisfied?
A parent: Did you brush your teeth?
A child: … Yeeeeah.
A parent: Go brush them again.
But Jesus humors the man and passes over the embarrassing duplicity. He instead says, “Okay. Given that you have kept all the laws that would have prevented you from amassing such an enormous fortune in the first place… there is one thing more that the Lord requires of you. Sell all that you own and distribute the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.”
Jesus teaches that the way out of the painful shame of harming your community is simply to stop harming your community. For the rich, there is no forgiveness without reparations. There is no treasure in heaven without purging the treasure you’ve been hoarding. There is no way to follow Jesus without first divesting yourself of the ill-gotten gains of exploitation and thievery.
As Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian and member of the Confessing Church resistance movement, wrote: “Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”
Grace is for beggars, not for self-righteous hypocrites. And Charles Koch is about as hypocritical as they come. He has attempted to make a name for himself as an ethical profiteer. He said a number of years ago that: “The role of business is to produce products and services in a way that makes people’s lives better. It cannot do so if it is injuring people and harming the environment in the process.”
But the Koch Industries conglomerate of oil processing plants is one of the most egregious polluters of the earth, air, and waters God created, generating more than 24 million metric tons of greenhouse gases each year. And Charles Koch is one of the primary architects of the intrusion of “dark money” into American politics, undermining the very fabric of democracy and American society in the process. The Kochs have committed fraud, price-fixing, and worker safety violations, all while pumping millions of dollars into a political and legislative juggernaut that furthers their own radical libertarian vision of society: the government should leave corporations alone to make money how they see fit. I can think of few corporate entities that has done more to injure people and harm the environment than Koch Industries.
A simple “Boy did we screw up” is a request for cheap grace. I believe that nobody is beyond redemption, and that God’s saving power is truly on another level. But we must be able to recognize when the rich are unwilling to distribute their money to the poor, and let them walk away sad. Unless they are willing to make concrete reparations and demonstrate their repentance by ending their exploitative ways, all their bluster about the moral high ground and healing the divisions in society rings hollow.
Isaac Sanborn is part of the Church of All Nations in Columbia Heights, MN. He is a baker who makes artisan sourdough and other delicious baked goods at the Uprising Bread Co. in Minneapolis, MN. Isaac is part of the steering committee for the Nurturing Communities Network.