Often overlooked, the sabbath Fourth Commandment has rich exegetical potential as anti-capitalism one day out of seven, laborers' rights, intervention into and disruption of reifications of libertarian mutual-agreement contract ideology in which poor laborers freely agree (sic) to exchange present and future productive energies for sustenance. The sabbath can be read as guaranteed laborers' rights, guaranteed paid vacations, limits on workweeks and work hours, limits on neo-liberal ideologies of contractual agreement as the moral basis for large-scale neo-feudalism economic arrangements in which inherited-wealth owners are born into lifelong streams of unearned passive income from sharecroppers. It is as if exegetically the Fourth Commandment--which broadens to include ancient stories of seventh-year and jubilee redistributions of land and inherited wealth and periodic large-scale zeroings of personal debt--was markets six days, socialism the seventh, in a rhythm and cycle. Social-conscience evangelicals understand this, earlier evangelicals of the social gospel and Salvation Army understood this. But social-conscience evangelicals in America today are vastly outnumbered by a toxic marriage of conservative political ideology to a bastardized form of evangelical gospel focused on ending control of women over the insides of their bodies, this last always promised but never delivered by the major powers of the Republican Party in exchange for evangelical voter support for imperial and neoliberal economic agendas benefitting rapacious concentrations of wealth. These biblical texts--stories and ancient legal codes, literatures of ancient peoples under superpower conquest, read and exegeted and translated into modern meanings over two thousand years later in our worlds today far removed--are like Rorschach Inkblot diagnoses of primal soul, and what is read out of such texts, whether legitimization of slavery in earlier days, neo-feudalist economic ideology today, or conscience on behalf of oppressed children of God wherever they may be in our world, is telling. I agree with your essay.
Often overlooked, the sabbath Fourth Commandment has rich exegetical potential as anti-capitalism one day out of seven, laborers' rights, intervention into and disruption of reifications of libertarian mutual-agreement contract ideology in which poor laborers freely agree (sic) to exchange present and future productive energies for sustenance. The sabbath can be read as guaranteed laborers' rights, guaranteed paid vacations, limits on workweeks and work hours, limits on neo-liberal ideologies of contractual agreement as the moral basis for large-scale neo-feudalism economic arrangements in which inherited-wealth owners are born into lifelong streams of unearned passive income from sharecroppers. It is as if exegetically the Fourth Commandment--which broadens to include ancient stories of seventh-year and jubilee redistributions of land and inherited wealth and periodic large-scale zeroings of personal debt--was markets six days, socialism the seventh, in a rhythm and cycle. Social-conscience evangelicals understand this, earlier evangelicals of the social gospel and Salvation Army understood this. But social-conscience evangelicals in America today are vastly outnumbered by a toxic marriage of conservative political ideology to a bastardized form of evangelical gospel focused on ending control of women over the insides of their bodies, this last always promised but never delivered by the major powers of the Republican Party in exchange for evangelical voter support for imperial and neoliberal economic agendas benefitting rapacious concentrations of wealth. These biblical texts--stories and ancient legal codes, literatures of ancient peoples under superpower conquest, read and exegeted and translated into modern meanings over two thousand years later in our worlds today far removed--are like Rorschach Inkblot diagnoses of primal soul, and what is read out of such texts, whether legitimization of slavery in earlier days, neo-feudalist economic ideology today, or conscience on behalf of oppressed children of God wherever they may be in our world, is telling. I agree with your essay.