COMMENTARY: The Real Millennial Challenge

c. 2000 Religion News Service (Judith Plaskow is professor of religious studies at Manhattan College and a Jewish feminist theologian.) UNDATED _ Now that the millennial moment has passed without the massive disruptions of public services predicted and feared by many, it is time to turn to the real breakdown confronting U.S. society: the breakdown […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

(Judith Plaskow is professor of religious studies at Manhattan College and a Jewish feminist theologian.)

UNDATED _ Now that the millennial moment has passed without the massive disruptions of public services predicted and feared by many, it is time to turn to the real breakdown confronting U.S. society: the breakdown of values signaled by growing economic inequality.


The wealth gap in this country, which has been increasing for 25 years, was especially vivid at holiday time, when the newspapers were filled with sharply contrasting images of excess and need.

Advertisements for extravagant gifts, stories about pets with their own limousines and people who surprised their grandchildren by spending thousands of dollars to have their backyards filled with artificial snow at Christmastime, competed for space with articles about those for whom new welfare regulations meant increasing misery.

Families approached the holidays in danger of being evicted from homeless shelters and separated from each other, because the mothers had not fulfilled new”workfare”rules. Other women had made the transition to work, but found themselves no less poor, no less worried about failing schools or the absence of day care, still facing a precarious future for themselves and their children.

That so many Americans live with these conflicting images without protest is a sign of a deep sense of disconnection, both from the processes that have led to a decline in real wages for a majority of the population, and from those on the margins of society who bear the symbolic weight of the increasing rift between the rich and everyone else.

Rather than pointing at the social policies that privilege the wealthy, we blame the poor for their own poverty in ways that justify their continuing neglect and marginalization. The”welfare mother,”especially, has become an icon of personal irresponsibility and dependence, over against which other citizens get to define themselves as independent, responsible and contributing members of society.

Feminist thinker and theologian Mary Daly, alluding to Adam’s blaming Eve for his eating from the tree of knowledge, once referred to the process of finding scapegoats for one’s personal or social ills as the true original sin: the failure to lay claim to parts of oneself that are then projected onto an”Other.”Because this sin is deeply embedded in U.S. society, moving beyond it is a complicated process. One dimension of that process is moral and spiritual: acknowledging the connectedness of all persons.

Feminist theologians and ethicists are taking this insight central to many religious traditions, and finding ways to talk about the relational nature of human life that are also mindful of personal autonomy.


Black feminist theologian Delores Williams names”relational forms of independence”as one of the lifeline strategies developed by black women in their struggle for survival. The concept attempts to capture the ways in which the capacity to shape one’s life in new directions is grounded in experiences of communal support and nurturance.

Ethicist Pamela Brubaker uses the term”interdependence”to point to the fact that claims to independence often obscure the ways in which all work is dependent on the often unacknowledged help of numerous others.

Recognizing our profound interrelatedness, while a spiritual task, is also a political one. It means recognizing and addressing the ways in which inequality is the product of social policies rather than the natural reward of laziness and effort. When our tax structures benefit the rich at the expense of the poor and the middle class, when we allocate more money for prisons while cutting funds for education, when we create welfare rules that prevent women from getting the education they need to truly move out of poverty, we are building a society in which some people are permanently excluded from the avenues of participation and rights to a decent life that define a democracy. As a consequence, democracy is less a reality for all of us.

The anxiety with which many anticipated the year 2000 revealed both our society’s increasing dependence on computers, and the ways in which, through their use, so many aspects of daily life are increasingly interconnected. Now we need to be equally anxious about and willing to repair the failures of human interconnection, which are ultimately far more fundamental to our quality of life in the 21st century.

DEA END PLASKOW

Donate to Support Independent Journalism!

Donate Now!