Change the mind’s moral furniture

I was very glad to read in The Southern Cross’ Christmas edition that some parishes have decided to make 2009 a year to promote social justice in our country. The truth of the matter is that South Africa does have progressive laws, but we’re failing to implement them effectively.

Laws alone will afford us very little, especially when our politicians in the Tripartite Alliance, as they have lately, reveal tendencies of manipulating and framing laws for their own ends. What we need now is to change the basic moral furniture of our politicians’ minds. We all need to go beyond abstract laws to, in Gandhi’s words, be the change we want to see in the world.

Our country is at the crossroads, where things can easily go one way or the other. We need to show that we are serious about our laws, and engender unqualified respect for the Constitution of the Republic. That’s what necessitated the formation of the Congress of the People (COPE).

As part of COPE’s policy research, religious institutions of our country were recently invited to give input in the process. Almost all of them responded positively, except for the Catholics. I am dumbfounded and embarrassed, since I was under the impression that our Church had recently taken a stand of being visible and better communicated to the South African public.

There can never be a coherent expression and practice of the conception of justice and fairness without religious institutions. Religious institutions, among other things, have always been the champions of protecting the vulnerable from oppression by the powerful. If they abrogate this responsibility to politicians, the moral voice will be delegated to the caprices of opportunism.

Religious institutions always should be at the forefront to remind the politicians that justice and peace are concomitant with bias towards the powerless. And that every society is judged according to the way it treats the defenceless.

God says, in Deuteronomy: “I will draw near to you for the judgment, and I will be a swift witness…against those who exhort the wage of the worker, the widow and the orphan; against those who wrong the stranger and do not fear me, says the Lord of Hosts” (16:3).

This does not mean the Church should be partisan. When the stranger is wronged, as in last year’s xenophobic attacks, the voice of the church was unequivocally heard. Why is it not heard more prominently when the orphans are robbed of their rightful grants; when the present leader of the ruling party obviously fails his moral obligation in sexual indiscretions; when his cartels seek political solutions against his corruption allegations?

This is not taking sides, but standing for the moral imperatives the Christian church teaches. Does not the human spirit, which is the Godly soul of our lives, hurt because of this? We must make no mistake; the development of culture (including African) is the necessary condition for human development.

We all need to stand and be counted for what we believe—the respect for law, democracy, supremacy of the Consti-tution. We must not be complacent. These precepts might appear self-evident and secured, but it takes little neglect by people of goodwill for them to slip away.

More so, as the book of Deuteronomy demonstrates, they have divine origins that must be guarded as our religious conviction also. It was not always clear, especially when kings were the supreme law of their land, that all must be equal before the law, the sanctity of life and dignity of every human person, and love of neighbour as foundation for peace and justice.

The Church must defend the human spirit without fear; help it develop to its potential, and in this crossroad time of our history help us choose life.