Mobilizing for the Common Good: The Lived Theology of John M. Perkins

The Church as Family and the Politics of Food Distribution

16 The Church as Family and the Politics of Food Distribution Lauren F. Winner I. in 1983 john m. perkins was appointed to president ronald Reagan’s Task Force on Food Assistance. This task force, which also included neoconservative author Midge Decter and former Massachusetts governor Edward King, was convened during an upsurge in interest in, and controversy about, hunger in the United States. Specifically, the administration ’s proposed cuts to food stamps had stoked the ire of hunger activists and Democrats on Capitol Hill. More generally, in part due to the 1981–1982 recession, the early 1980s saw growth in food stamp expenditures; 1983 had seen growth in food banks; and reporters were newly turning their attention to stories about hungry Americans. The White House appeared more concerned with slashing the budget than feeding the hungry. Presidential adviser Edwin Meese III dismissed stories of hunger as “anecdotal,” and Reagan was coming under attack for seeming to be insensitive to the problem . The task force was to travel the country and determine whether, indeed , there was a serious hunger problem, and, if so, to suggest measures Congress might take to address it. If Reagan thought appointing a task force to investigate hunger would placate his critics, he was wrong: the August announcement of the task force’s membership only increased public furor because the task force was said to be stacked. Critics charged that too few members of the commission had any expertise in dealing with hunger, and those who did had a bias against programs like food stamps. Governor King was singled out as one who had publicly opposed food assistance programs in the past, as was pastor and activist John Perkins, the only African American member of the task force. National newspapers implied that Perkins’s mind was already church as family, politics of food distribution 17 made up, and they quoted Perkins’s own words to make the case: Perkins, the Washington Post warned,“wrote in a 1976 book that ‘the welfare system is one of the most wasteful and destructive institutions created in recent history.’”1 Perkins’s service on this task force provides an interesting context for exploring the complexities of his political sensibilities. About Perkins’s politics, one might ask: how did a man who regularly declared things like “Communism is God’s chastening rod to capitalism”2 end up a Reagan appointee ? Or, from a different vantage point, one might ask how one with such a strong commitment to a radical renewal of poor black communities could have written the words cited above about“the welfare system.” Indeed, Perkins’s political views in the 1970s and 1980s defy easy summary (as, perhaps, does all African American politics in the years after the civil rights movement):3 he was a critic of the Black Power movement who worked tirelessly for black economic self-determination; a critic of the welfare state and a proponent of individual responsibility, yet also a prophet who warned that “God is going to move in judgment on our own nation” because of the many ways that big business has exploited the poor.4 Readers of his column “Walk Your Talk,” which first ran in the Jackson Advocate in 1979, regularly encountered gimlet-eyed analyses of the ways that racism and poverty continued to afflict African Americans—the ways that “Black people in this country are victimized by the powers that be.” Readers were also frequently reminded that “real change can only come about through deep changes in individuals.” For example, black-on-black crime, an issue that energized Perkins in the 1980s, may be explained in part through unemployment and other systemic problems in “the inner city.” Yet “even more fundamental is the breakdown of individual spiritual life . . . [the] problem of individual selfishness and total lack of commitment to anyone but ourselves.”5 In Perkins’s view, the solution to poverty and social problems did not lie solely in the realm of political economy. Perkins famously propounds a holistic gospel that aims to help people “spiritually, socially, and economically.”6 In part because social ills are at root spiritual ills, government programs“cannot bring significant change to the lives of people in the Black community.”7 Perkins’s participation on Reagan’s task force—and the controversy surrounding his appointment to it—hint at the extent to which Perkins thwarts our shorthand of “left” and “right.” Throughout Perkins’s political analysis in the early 1980s...