Churches Weekly Newsletter - No.148, 19 February 2023
To mark Church Action on Poverty’s 40th anniversary in 2022, Dignity, Agency, Power, an anthology of stories, prayers, reflections and liturgy, was published by Wild Goose Publications (Click here for details of the book). Here is the Foreword to that book, by Kathy Galloway, former head of Christian Aid Scotland.
"'Dignity', by the Scottish band Deacon Blue, is one of Scotland's most popular songs, sung at the closing ceremony of the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow. Wherever the band perform it, audiences join in fervently. As well as being a great song with a great chorus, it expresses the human yearning to be treated with dignity, to live dignified lives, and most people can relate to that.
"The glory of God is a human being fully alive. So said St Irenaeus, and made explicit the link between human dignity and God's creativity. Dignity is non-negotiable and unconditional. It does not depend on the criteria the world uses. The word 'dignity' itself derives from the Latin dignus, meaning 'worth.' Market forces do not set our value.We do not require value addition in God's economy. We have intrinsic worth.
"It has always seemed to me that an unshakeable commitment to human dignity, and challenging the poverty that is a violation of that dignity, has been at the heart of Church Action on Poverty's vision, values and practice for its 40 years. And agency, an act of trust in the right or capacity of each person to act and give, is an expression of human dignity. When it comes to confronting poverty, people who struggle against it day by day, who really know what it feels like, have insights and understanding that no one else does. It gives them the right to speak and act. Their ideas for action are a gift that no one else has. 'Nothing about us, without us, is for us.'
"Church Action on Poverty has enabled people to come together, often crossing social, economic and political boundaries, to share, to listen, to learn. It has done this in imaginative and fruitful ways. Building solidarity in this way can be slow and painful and frustrating, but it builds confidence in the possibility of change and transformation, in the belief that 'yes we can!' When it seems that everything is against you - hostile public discourse, uncaring and uninformed policy decisions, remote and unaccountable institutions (and there are plenty of all of these in the current climate) believing in the possibility of resisting injustice and making effective and practical change is essential. This is power; not power over but power with and power to, the power to live fully human lives.
"A religious community which does not hunger and thirst for justice to be done bears false witness."
In the UK, poverty is strongly associated with public attitudes of stigma and blaming individuals for their own poverty. Professor Ruth Lister describes this in terms of the 'othering' of people living in poverty. Over many decades, this attitude has been embedded not just in the welfare system, but in the way many professional agencies exercise moral judgements and highly intrusive methods of controlling the behaviour of people living in poverty (for example, the energy companies' enforcement of prepayment meters onto vulnerable customers). These attitudes have also been internalised by people in poverty themselves, to the extent that they describe a sense of shame, or in the words of Wayne Green, who spoke at CAP's first National Poverty Hearing in 1996 (which I attended): "What is poverty? Poverty is a battle of invisibility, a lack of resources, exclusion, powerlessness; being blamed for society's problems.’
The Churches have not been immune from these attitudes, too often treating poverty as a problem to be addressed through individual behaviour change, or in more theological language 'saving' people from their self-inflicted poverty. Meanwhile pioneering new research from CAP draws attention to the structural causes of poverty within church institutions, showing that church closures in recent years are disproportionately high in low-income neighbourhoods.
This is the context in which poverty - and even many conventional attempts to tackle it - rob people of their dignity, agency or power over their lives.
In spite of this, Church Action on Poverty affirms the belief in the transformational possibilities of people coming together to reclaim their dignity, agency and power.
Comments