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Star Magazine UK – 02 April 2018 English | 68 pages | True PDF | 67.6 MB
There are 39 pages in the Labor Department’s February report on
the employment situation in the United States, but they can be summed
up in four words: The economy is humming.
The 313,000 jobs that the nation added
in February are far more than are needed to keep up with population
growth and continue a surprising burst of job creation to start the
year. In the first two months of 2018, the economy has added an average
of 276,000 jobs a month, a big step up from 182,000 on average in 2017.
This
is not the kind of data you expect in an expansion that is nine years
old, or out of a labor market that is already at full employment. It
suggests that employers are filling jobs not merely from people they’ve
poached from competitors, but also from more people who have entered the
work force. And other data in the latest report matches that idea.
The
number of adults not in the labor force fell by a whopping 653,000
people, as the participation rate — the proportion of adults who either
have a job or are looking for one — rose a healthy 0.3 percent to 63
percent. The proportion of people in their prime working years (25 to
54) who are working is at its highest level since 2008.
For a
couple of years now, there has been a vigorous debate over just how
close the American economy is to full capacity, a discussion that has
particularly big implications for how the Fed manages the economy. On
one side are those who worry about overheating: Given the 4.1 percent
jobless rate (that number was unchanged in February), if the economy is
allowed to boom, it will create inflation rather than improvement in
real living standards.
The other side of this debate might be
called the “let it run” camp, who argue that a lot of good things might
happen if the Fed and other policymakers move patiently and see whether
some of the damage done by the 2008 recession might repair itself in a
sufficiently hot economy.
Friday was a good day for the “let it
run” folks. The huge gain in the number of people working is a prime
example of the kind of good thing that they’ve been predicting might
happen if the economy had more room to improve than that 4.1 percent
jobless number might suggest.
Wall Street has been particularly
focused on wage growth as an indicator of which story is more compelling
— and more to the point, which story the Fed chairman Jerome Powell and
his colleagues at the Fed will find more persuasive. And here, too, the
February numbers are in a sweet spot.
In January, when the
year-over-year rate of growth in average hourly earnings rose to 2.9
percent, it even set off a mini-panic in the stock market, contributing
to a broad reassessment of inflation risks in the economy.
Never
mind. Average hourly earnings growth fell back to 2.6 percent in
February. The data on wages is a little better than that number would
suggest despite the softness in the year-over-year data. Since October,
average hourly earnings are up more than 1 percent, which if annualized
comes to 3.2 percent, meaning that despite a soft February number this
winter has been a time of acceleration in wage growth.
For those
who want a robust recovery, it’s a delicate balance on wages. On one
hand, now that most people who want a job have one, higher pay is the
way most Americans would hope to see a reward from a hot economy. But as
stock investors correctly concluded last month, if wages start rising
too fast given weak gains in worker productivity, it would probably
prompt Mr. Powell and his colleagues to tap the brakes on the economy a
little harder (that is, raise interest rates more than they would
otherwise).
But the February numbers are a delicious sweet spot
for the economy. Many more people are working, including people who
hadn’t even been in the labor force. If that trend continues — and it’s
worth adding the usual caveat that each month’s jobs numbers are subject
to revision and statistical error — there’s no reason to think this
expansion is reaching its natural end.
Yes, it would be nice to
see paychecks rise faster, but the saving grace of the fact that they
aren’t is that it allows the Fed a little more room for patience,
strengthening the arguments of the “let it run” faction inside the
central bank.
FORT WORTH — Charmaine
Pruitt wrote the names of 12 churches on a sheet of paper, tore the
paper into 12 strips, and dropped them into a Ziploc bag. It was Sunday
morning and time to pick which church to attend.
This time of the
week two years earlier, there would have been no question. Ms. Pruitt,
46, would have been getting ready for her regular Saturday afternoon
worship service, at a former grocery store overhauled into a
state-of-the-art, 760-seat sanctuary. In the darkened hall, where it
would have been hard to tell she was one of the few black people in the
room, she would have listened to the soaring anthems of the praise
bands. She would have watched, on three giant screens, a sermon that
over the course of a weekend would reach one of the largest
congregations in the country.
But Ms. Pruitt has not been to that
church since the fall of 2016. That was when she concluded that it was
not, ultimately, meant for people like her. She has not been to any
church regularly since.
Ms. Pruitt pulled one of the slips out of the Ziploc bag. Mount Olive Fort Worth. O.K. That was where she would go that day.
In
the last couple of decades, there had been signs, however modest, that
eleven o’clock on Sunday morning might cease to be the most segregated
hour in America. “Racial reconciliation” was the talk of conferences and
the subject of formal resolutions. Large Christian ministries were
dedicated to the aim of integration, and many black Christians decided
to join white-majority congregations. Some went as missionaries, called
by God to integrate. Others were simply drawn to a different worship
style — short, conveniently timed services that emphasized a personal
connection to God.
The fruits could be seen if you looked in the
right places, particularly within the kind of nondenominational
megachurches that gleam from the roadsides here in the sprawl of
Dallas-Fort Worth. In 2012, according to a report from the National
Congregation Study, more than two-thirds of those attending
white-majority churches were worshiping alongside at least some black
congregants, a notable increase since a similar survey in 1998. This was
more likely to be the case in evangelical churches than in mainline
Protestant churches, and more likely in larger ones than in smaller
ones.
Then came the 2016 election.
Black
congregants — as recounted by people in Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta,
Fort Worth and elsewhere — had already grown uneasy in recent years as
they watched their white pastors fail to address police shootings of
African-Americans. They heard prayers for Paris, for Brussels, for law
enforcement; they heard that one should keep one’s eyes on the kingdom,
that the church was colorblind, and that talk of racial injustice was
divisive, not a matter of the gospel. There was still some hope that
this stemmed from an obliviousness rather than some deeper disconnect.
Then
white evangelicals voted for Mr. Trump by a larger margin than they had
voted for any presidential candidate. They cheered the outcome,
reassuring uneasy fellow worshipers with talk of abortion and religious
liberty, about how politics is the art of compromise rather than the
ideal. Christians of color, even those who shared these policy
preferences, looked at Mr. Trump’s comments about Mexican immigrants,
his open hostility to N.F.L. players protesting police brutality and his
earlier “birther” crusade against President Obama, claiming falsely he
was not a United States citizen. In this political deal, many concluded,
they were the compromised.
“It said, to me, that something is
profoundly wrong at the heart of the white church,” said Chanequa
Walker-Barnes, a professor of practical theology at the McAfee School of
Theology at Mercer University in Atlanta.
Early last year,
Professor Walker-Barnes left the white-majority church where she had
been on staff. Like an untold number of black Christians around the
country, many of whom had left behind black-majority churches, she is
not sure where she belongs anymore.
“We were willing to give up
our preferred worship style for the chance to really try to live this
vision of beloved community with a diverse group of people,” she said.
“That didn’t work.”
It has been a scattered exodus — a few here, a
few there — and mostly quiet, more in fatigue and heartbreak than
outrage. Plenty of multiracial churches continue to thrive, and at some
churches, tough conversations on race have begun. The issue has long
shadowed the evangelical movement. The Rev. Billy Graham, who died last month at 99,
bravely integrated the audience at his crusades and preached alongside
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., but kept silent at key moments.
But
for many black churchgoers, the current breach feels particularly
painful. Lecrae, a prominent black Christian hip-hop artist, has spoken openly of his “divorce” with white evangelicalism, Christian counselors have talked frankly of the psychological toll of trying to hang on in multiracial churches and others have declared it time to consider the serious downsides of worship integration.
“Everything
we tried is not working,” said Michael Emerson, the author of “Divided
by Faith,” a seminal work on race relations within the evangelical
church. “The election itself was the single most harmful event to the
whole movement of reconciliation in at least the past 30 years,” he
said. “It’s about to completely break apart.”
‘This Is What I Need’
Ms.
Pruitt had been a churchgoing Christian since the mid-1990s, first
joining a mostly black megachurch in Dallas, where she was on the dance
team. Inspiration began to flag after some years there, and one night
she was drawn to a pastor whom she saw on television. He was, she later
learned, Robert Morris of Gateway Church.
Gateway
started nearly 20 years ago with a prayer group in Pastor Morris’s
living room, and has in the past two decades grown to become a $140
million ministry, drawing upward of 31,000 people a week to six campuses
in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
The scale and thoroughness of the
operation are extraordinary: the attractive ledgestone-and-wood arena —
with a coffee kiosk serving a Gateway blend — at the church’s
Southlake, Tex., headquarters; the worship music booming over a
first-class sound system; the robust programs for children, single
parents and a host of other groups.
Above all, for many members,
there are Pastor Morris’s weekly messages themselves: wry, often
self-deprecating, sprinkled with biblical scholarship and often
affectingly personal.
“This is what I need right now,” thought
Ms. Pruitt, moved to tears when she first went to orientation programs
at the church. Members who happened to sit near her at worship came to
ask about her when she missed a service, and some came to her
grandmother’s wake. One couple began to refer to her as a daughter.
The
congregation is mostly white, but not entirely; the pastors at two of
the six satellite campuses are black men. Church videos and promotional
materials are intentionally filled with people of color. The goal, says
Pastor Morris, who is white and has a black son-in-law, is to have a
church that looks like heaven as described in the book of Revelation:
“from every nation, tribe, people and language.”
The general
whiteness of the congregation is not something that every black
worshiper dwells on anyway. To grow up black, said Carla McKissic Smith,
who started going to Gateway in 2009, is to get used to being in the
minority.
As the headlines of the outside world turned to police
shootings and protest, little changed inside majority-white churches.
Black congregants said that beyond the occasional vague prayer for
healing a divided country, or a donation drive for law enforcement, they
heard nothing.
Tamice Namae Spencer, who used to attend a mostly
white church in Kansas City, said her fellow congregants did not seem
to even know the name Trayvon Martin, the black teenager killed in
Florida at the hands of George Zimmerman in 2012. And when Ms. Spencer
brought up his death, she said white church members asked why she was
being divisive.
“It’s not even on your radar and I can’t sleep
over it,” she remembered thinking. “And now that I’m being vocal, you
think I’ve changed.”
At Gateway, black worshipers would
discreetly ask one another if they were the only ones who noticed that
one could talk about seemingly anything but racism, a feeling one former
congregant described as an out-of-body experience.
Jeremiah
White, who is black, was so excited about Gateway when a friend brought
him there years earlier that he insisted his parents come. Now a
teenager, with his parents volunteering at the church for 12-hour days
on weekends, Jeremiah had also begun to notice “the little details”: an
associate pastor, trying to get the attention of a black man, jokingly
referring to him as the one God left in the oven a little long; a youth
leader suggesting Jeremiah must be new because he was black.
In
the summer of 2016, Jeremiah made a cartoon and sent it to church
leaders, depicting an elephant sitting on a man, squeezing out his
insides. The elephant was labeled “Racism”; the man’s insides were
labeled “Gateway Church.”
Politics From the Pulpit
Pastor
Morris had become aware of the disquiet himself, mainly from listening
to black pastors at other churches. Still, while they would meet and
talk and pray, not a lot would happen.
“We didn’t talk about it
much before because we didn’t know,” he said of whites generally, in a
recent interview at one of Gateway’s satellite campuses. “We just
thought, ‘O.K. there was a tremendous racial problem in America. The
civil rights movement came, laws have been passed now and we’re over
that now. We passed it.’ What has happened in the last few years is many
white pastors are beginning to realize we never dealt with this
scripturally. We never truly repented.”
In July 2016, days after a
black man enraged about police brutality shot and killed five Dallas
police officers, Jeremiah’s father had breakfast with one of the
church’s senior pastors. He spoke to him frankly about race and his
frustration with the church’s silence.
After that breakfast,
church staff began discussing how to face matters directly. In meetings
over the coming weeks, black staff members would talk of their own past
struggles with racism and the grim parts of American history that still
went unacknowledged. A pastor at Ms. Pruitt’s church campus pledged from
the pulpit to tear down racism, one conversation at a time.
Then,
the next month, Pastor Morris preached a message entitled “Still.” It
began with a series of qualifications. God is still in control. There is
no perfect political candidate. Voting is choosing the lesser of evils.
Yes, there is gender inequality. And yes, there is a race problem in
the country, though racism, implying hate, is not the right word. Pastor
Morris said it was a subtler problem of prejudice.
Then he focused attention on the upcoming presidential race.
“The election,” he said, “is extremely important.”
The
country is in trouble financially; a critical Supreme Court appointment
awaits; one of the major parties advocates using “taxpayer dollars,
your dollars,” for abortion. Evangelical Christians sit at home on
Election Days, while “those who are trying to change our Constitution”
go to the polls, and look at what happens: Prayer is taken out of the
schools.
“We are going the wrong way,” he concluded. “We need to get involved, we need to pray and we need to vote.”
He
never said to vote for Mr. Trump. But the implication in the sermon,
and in the leaflets that were handed out at church, was lost on no one:
that one must vote to uphold Christian values, and that the Republican
Party platform reflected those values. And Mr. Trump was the Republican
candidate.
Ms. Pruitt sent messages to several white couples she
had befriended at the church, telling them she was going to take some
time off. She had become uneasy at a church, she told them, that speaks
of overcoming racism on one Sunday “and then turns around later and asks
me to support” Trump, who she believed was “a racist candidate.”
One
of the couples invited her to come to their house. Sitting in the
living room over a plate of brownies, Ms. Pruitt explained to the wife
how disturbed she had been by the clear inference from the pulpit that
she should support a candidate whose behavior and rhetoric were so
offensive that she could not bring herself even to say his name.
The
woman explained that a Trump victory had been prophesied and handed Ms.
Pruitt a two-page printout, which began: “The Spirit of God says, ‘I
have chosen this man, Donald Trump, for such a time as this.’” Barack
Obama, the woman continued, should never have been president, since he
was not born a United State citizen. The visit ended with the woman
suggesting that Ms. Pruitt’s discomfort at the church was God telling
her it was time to move on.
Ms. Pruitt never went back.
Jeremiah’s
family also left for good that summer, though he has heard that
pictures of them still show up in church videos. They have not found a
church since.
One young black woman who had been going to Gateway
for some years said she has begun exploring Ethiopian Christian
traditions. Another woman, a former church staff member who still goes
to Gateway, cut back her attendance from five days a week to once a
month, if that, and is now praying for guidance on whether to leave
altogether.
Carla McKissic Smith stayed until one Sunday in March
2017, when a guest speaker, a messianic rabbi from New Jersey, spoke of
the 2016 election from the pulpit, saying that it “threatened to seal
the acceleration of America’s apostasy,” but that Mr. Trump’s victory
was the fulfillment of God’s covenant with Israel. “It was not the
Russian intervention that determined it,” he said to a congregation that
frequently broke into applause and cheers. “The intervention was a bit
higher.”
Three months later, Ms. Smith’s father, the Rev. Dwight
McKissic of Cornerstone Baptist Church in Dallas, would introduce a
resolution condemning the alt-right at the annual Southern Baptist
Convention in Phoenix. Unlike the resolutions condemning gambling and
Planned Parenthood, his alt-right resolution didn’t make it out of
committee.
Pastor McKissic was told that racism had already been
adequately addressed by the Southern Baptists, that the resolution was
inflammatory and that sympathy for the alt-right was not an issue in the
church. Word leaked, embarrassing the convention, and a new version of
the resolution was reintroduced
and overwhelmingly passed, albeit with some language changed and with
an added tally of the Southern Baptists’ past efforts against racism.
“At that point,” Ms. Smith said, “I was no longer surprised.”
Mr.
Trump’s win, which one elder at Gateway described as a “supernatural
answer to prayer,” generated a frisson of excitement at the church.
Pastor Morris told the congregation that he was one of Mr. Trump’s faith
advisers. The church was a sponsor of an inaugural ball in January
2017.
Jelani Lewis, one of the two black campus pastors, knew
this was creating unease among many black members of Gateway. A black
deacon approached him at one point and asked how he should reconcile his
trust in Pastor Morris with “some of the things that I’m seeing from
the current president.” We trust in God, Pastor Lewis assured him, and
we can trust in the heart of our pastor.
‘A Lack of Understanding’
As a tumultuous 2017 unfolded, Pastor Morris understood that some wanted him to address race directly.
“As
I prayed about it as I talked with black pastor friends of mine, I
realized I don’t really understand the depth of the pain they feel,” he
said. “This is personal to them — it was history to me. I would talk to
my friend and it was personal to him because it was his
great-grandfather.”
In October 2017, he preached a message
entitled “A Lack of Understanding.” Addressing “all the ignorant white
people,” and acknowledging his own past grappling with prejudice, the
pastor listed reasons that racism was evil — among them that it was an
affront to God’s creation, given that Adam and Eve were probably
brown-skinned. A video played of a black pastor talking of the racism he
experienced as a child in East St. Louis in the 1960s. Pastor Morris
concluded by urging people of color in the congregation to spread out
and pray with whites in small groups.
The
response, Pastor Morris said, was “overwhelmingly positive,” and indeed
the reaction on Facebook suggests as much. Pastor Lewis remembers a
black woman weeping in her seat, and was thankful that he finally had an
answer for black worshipers questioning how their church truly felt
about racism.
On Facebook some white congregants were angered at
the sermon, especially at the focus on white people as the root of the
problem.
“I believe Robert spoke from his flesh in this message,”
one of them, Steve Groebe, later recalled in a Facebook message. “I
gave him another week to correct the message and make it biblical. I
didn’t feel he did that so I left the church.”
The message was
not better received among the black worshipers who had already left the
church. It did not, several said, address the enduring structural legacy
of racism, instead adhering to the usual evangelical focus on
individual prejudice. Most significantly, they said, it gave no sense
that Pastor Morris had ever wrestled with his support of Donald Trump.
“I
wasn’t wrestling,” Pastor Morris said of his feelings in 2016, going on
to explain that he was not wrestling now, either. “We were electing
what we felt was the person who held the values that the church loves
dearly the most. That doesn’t mean that he’s perfect. But I do believe
after spending time with him that he really wants to learn, that he
really wants to do a good job for all Americans. I really do.”
There
are larger racial injustices in the country, he said, and those
injustices need to be fixed — though not in ways that would enable
dependence, he clarified, but rather to “give people a hand up, not a
handout.” He noted the low black unemployment rate under Mr. Trump. The
answer to racism lies primarily in the church, not the government, he
said, and now that white pastors are waking up to the pain that black
people have felt, it is in many ways a hopeful time.
“I think that there’s an anger and a hurt right now, and a fear,” he said, “and I think that people are going to get past that.”
There
is now a team at the church focused exclusively on making the church
more diverse. On the weekend before Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a
49-second video of excerpts from King’s “I Have a Dream” speech was
played at worship services — “a monumental moment in Gateway church
history,” one pastor said, the first time that the day had been
acknowledged.
The Inheritance
When
Ms. Pruitt arrived at Mount Olive, the service had already begun, with a
26-person choir singing a gospel hymn, accompanied by a drummer and a
man on a Hammond organ. This was one of the first churches she had
attended for worship in a year and a half. She had kept giving tithe
money to Gateway for some months after she stopped going, but after
learning about the inaugural ball, started donating to another church.
On most Sundays she had stayed at home, watching services online.
The
sanctuary at Mount Olive was brightly lit, and the one video screen
advertised an essay contest for Black History Month. The congregation
was older and more formally dressed than those of many megachurches. But
for two young white men, all the worshipers were African-American.
The
Rev. William Timothy Glynn, wearing a sharply knotted necktie and a
silk pocket square, began his message, on Elisha’s taking up the mantle
of the prophet Elijah. It was less a sermon, he acknowledged, and more a
collection of observations; among them was that we inherit things from
the past for a reason, and thus should not quickly discard them.
“We
live in this day where they want to throw what grandma had out the
window; that’s old and that’s fogy and we don’t have church like that no
more, and we don’t like that no more, amen?” Pastor Glynn half sang.
“Have you ever thought about what their religion got them through? It
got them through slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, from the back of the
bus to the front of the bus. It brought them through everything anybody
could throw and that’s all they had. It built churches and schools and
hospitals. Millions? They didn’t have thousands! They had nickels and
dimes!”
Service ended in just under two hours. Ms. Pruitt needed
to go pick up her mother, who was finishing her shift as a police
dispatcher. On the way she drove out of Fort Worth, past a little
community founded by a group of emancipated slaves, near the
headquarters of an international ministry run by a Gateway elder. Then,
with her mother, she went back to the house they share in a quiet
neighborhood named after a Confederate major.
The next week Ms. Pruitt considered the other 11 churches on the list, and on Sunday, she tried someplace new.