The Gospel Coalition contains a lot of posts that target the general public. It also provides a link to a website that contains more in depth articles that are published periodically in an evangelical, peer reviewed journal called, Themelios.
The most recent publication of Themelios contained an article that discussed whether corporations have social responsibilities. The article was written by Gary Gundill (click here for the article, a very brief bio is at the end of the article). What Gundill wanted to discover is whether there is any Biblical support for insisting that corporations have social responsibilities.
Before going any farther, we should note that during the last few centuries, a given nation's predominant branch of the Church has all too often supported those with wealth and power. That happened in the pre-revolutionary times in France, Russia, and Spain with disastrous results for both the people and the reputation of the Gospel. We see the same kind of favoritism here in the US in the guise of the overwhelming evangelical support for the Republican Party. Of the two major political parties in the US, the Republican Party provides the most legislative breaks and advantages for businesses.
Gundill makes the claim that the Bible does not support the notion that today's corporations have social responsibilities. For the most part, what Gundill means by social responsibility is a corporation's responsibility to help people in society and this would especially include the underprivileged. It seems that a corporation's social responsibilities also includes how a corporation treats its stakeholders. The definition of a stakeholder is that of any party that is affected by the operations of a given business. So stakeholders would include shareholders, workers, customers, suppliers, vendors, the environment, and communities.
Does the Bible support the notion that corporations have social responsibilities to all but especially to those who are not stakeholders? Gundill attempts to answer this question by first defining what a corporation is and noting that there was no such entity during the times of the writing of the Scriptures. Therefore it is difficult to find Biblical passages that address the question.
Next, many of the passages that some would list as social responsibilities for all including corporations are, according to Gundill, addressed to Christians only. Seeing that corporations can have as owners at least some unbelievers, Gundill concludes those passages do not apply to those corporations that are not owned by Christians.
Gundill notes that what some passages, which could speak to corporations, about the ethicality of its business practices could be addressed solely by departments within a corporation such as treatment of workers, their work schedule, and pay. And because those practices are internal matters, the corporation should use its own resources to address most of those issues.
Gundill admits that there are some Biblical passages that directly address those who did not belong to God's people. The passage that Gundill cites in is Obadiah where God judges a nation for how it was mistreating people. But then Gundill points out that Obadiah was speaking to a nation, not a corporation and that nations are known by their people while corporations are known as legal entities. Plus, it would the job of a given nation's political leaders to define the social responsibilities of its people through the laws they create.
Gundill concludes that the Bible does not assign social responsibilities to corporations. But if people want corporations to have such responsibilities, then they should attempt to persuade their political leaders to legislate those responsibilities that they want corporations to meet.
But Gundill's analysis is deficient in several ways. First, his take on the subject is opportunistically literal. That produces a legalistic protection for corporations from potential social responsibilities. That can be seen in how some of the Biblical passages are seen as applying to Christians only because, as he concluded, the Bible was addressing Gods people in those passages. But if none of those passages do apply to corporations, read the article for those passages, because they are owned by some unbelievers and those passages are applications of the summation of the 2nd table of the law, then are individual unbelievers also not responsible for following the commands and prohibitions that corporations are excused from obeying? If so, how will unbelievers be judged by God's Word?
Another example of opportunistic literalism in Gundill's article is found in his definition of a corporation. While Gundill rightfully says that corporations were unknown to the Biblical writers, businesses were not. And, after all, regardless of its legal definition, a corporation is a kind of business and not the other way around. In fact, Gundill sometimes uses the word 'business' synonymously with corporation. But he does not do so when considering whether the Bible says anything to its social responsibilities.
As Gundill emphasizes that a corporation is a legal entity, one has to wonder how those who are victims of a corporation's actions can classify those actions. Certainly those actions cannot be called acts of God. And depending on the laws where one lives, a victim cannot blame any unjust actions on people because a corporation is first thought of as a legal entity, an impersonal object, rather than a group of people.
However, there are Biblical passages that address businesses people and two of those passages can be found in Leviticus 19:9-10 and in James 5:1-6. The passage in Leviticus talks about how farmers are suppose to harvest their fields. Farmers are told to leave a certain part of their fields unharvested so that the poor can have access to food. Here we should note that part of being a farmer is being a business person because farmers must operate the farm, buy materials needed to farm, and they sell their goods.
The passage in James warns the wealthy about underpaying their employees. James says the following (click here for the source):
Come now, you rich people, weep and howl for your miseries which are coming upon you. Your riches have rotted and your garments have become moth-eaten. Your gold and your silver have corroded, and their corrosion will serve as a testimony against you and will consume your flesh like fire. It is in the last days that you have stored up your treasure! Behold, the pay of the laborers who mowed your fields, and which has been withheld by you, cries out against you; and the outcry of those who did the harvesting has reached the ears of the Lord of armies. You have lived for pleasure on the earth and lived luxuriously; you have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter. You have condemned and put to death the righteous person; he offers you no resistance.
Now as we read that passage, does James's warning seem to apply to Christian business people only? Are Christians the only ones who will be held accountable to such warnings? If so, then, again, how will unbelievers be judged? If Biblical passages such as the ones just mentioned are both part of loving one's neighbor and only apply to believers, what is there for unbelievers to confess and repent from besides idolatry? It isn't that there are no Biblical injunctions meant only for the ears of God's people. But if we acknowledge that all people are held responsible for loving one's neighbor by the Scriptures, we need to be able to properly distinguish what all people are held accountable to from what only God's people are held accountable to. Gundill fails to adequately make those distinctions.
Gundill's literalness prevents him from seeing what the Scriptures tell us in the abstract. Consider the following quote from Martin Luther King's Jr. speech against the Vietnam War (click here for the source):
I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered...
A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: "This is not just."
We should note from the above quote that the relationship between the investors and the society where their investments are located is one that is a consumer relationship only. That the investors mentioned are looking to solely to gain wealth from those societies. With the command to love one's neighbor, is that the kind of relationship that anyone should have toward the society let alone the relationship that investors should have?
In fact, outside of the Scriptures, don't all members of a society, including businesses, have a give-take relationship with the society in which they are located? Or are we all just consumers of society who are only looking to get the most from society without being concerned for its people? We should note here that there is a symbiotic relationship be each member of a society and society itself. That not only do we reap the benefits of the society in which we live, we also have responsibilities. Yes, politicians can define some of those responsibilities by writing laws. But when laws don't adequately hold us accountable for how we should live in society and its members don't pick up the slack, society comes in danger of collapsing. And in a consumer society where too many of its members, including corporations, believe that their only role in society is to consume, that society will suffer much inner turmoil until it implodes.
If the quote from King abstractly deals with general Biblical principles of how members of a society should relate to a society, then the question becomes this: does each member of society have social responsibilities in addition to obeying the laws of that society? Is it biblical for a society to be a thing-oriented? Is it biblical when we, as members of society, count the things King mentioned to be more important than people who are made in the image of God?
The question that Gundill attempted to answer is not whether it is realistic to expect corporations to seek to meet social responsibilities. The question is whether the Bible says, either literally or abstractly, that corporations have social responsibilities.
Gundill attempts to reduce a corporation's social responsibilities to that which is required by law. That is because Gundill believes that only politicians have social responsibilities according to the Scriptures. And the social responsibilities of the general public would be specified by the laws where a person lives.
And so are politicians the only ones who have social responsibilities? And would all the above mean that corporations don't have any social responsibilities outside of what is specified by the laws of the land? According to Gundill, the Bible assigns no moral basis for corporations to have social responsibilities. And if that is true, then isn't it unfair for politicians to pass laws that assign social responsibilities to a corporation which the Scriptures do not? In too many cases, that is what the evangelical supported Republican Party lives by. And thus Gundill's basic claim that the Bible does not require corporations to have social responsibilities is merely a repeat of the history mentioned earlier in the article.
No comments:
Post a Comment