Rev. KP Hong, Beloved Community Staff Team

A story is told about a monk, St. Ignatius of Sardinia, who walked the streets with a simple sack, begging alms to support his monastery and the poor. But he avoided soliciting a certain wealthy merchant, knowing the man had built his fortune by exploiting and defrauding the poor. The merchant, concerned that this reflected poorly on him in the eyes of neighbors, complained to the head of the monastery. Bound by a vow of obedience, St. Ignatius was ordered by his superior to solicit the merchant. Ignatius complied, and as expected, the merchant received him with fanfare, gave generously, and insisted that he come again. Yet as he left the merchant's house, a dark stain spread across his sack and heavy drops of blood began to fall onto the street, leaving a trail back to the friary. “What is this?” gasped the monastery’s superior, demanding an explanation. Ignatius replied, “This is the blood of the poor.” 

Versions of this story unfold every day in our globalized economy, with long supply chains that both reveal and conceal our complicity in late capitalism — a system of globalized extraction, racialized inequality, ecological devastation, commodified life, and finance dominated markets where hedge funds, derivatives, securities, private equity, and global banks concentrate wealth at staggering scales. From our morning coffee to fruits and vegetables in the grocery aisle, to shirts and garments that cover our bodies and silicon circuitry that powers our lives, the question remains the same: What is this stain, this path of grinding poverty and absurd inequality, left in the wake of capitalism? Are our hands clean?

Given our congregational focus on dismantling racial capitalism, rejection of capitalism may simply be assumed. Yet attitudes toward capitalism —outright affirmation or rejection — are often assumed long before they are examined. Protest movements from Seattle’s WTO demonstrations to Occupy Wall Street have cast capitalism as an obvious villain, but such moments do not constitute a moral or theological evaluation of capitalism’s deeper work: its anthropology, its formation of desire, its shaping of community, its spiritual consequences. 

All too often, debate about the morality of capitalism invariably revolves around a single question: Does capitalism work? Does it reduce poverty and elevate standards of living, or does it deepen and perpetuate suffering? The argument quickly pivots to empirical evidence — statistics, growth rates, welfare data, mortality charts, with a few anecdotes added for good measure. Such evidence matters, but it rarely persuades, because the deeper problem is the question itself. “Does capitalism work?” is the wrong question. On many fronts, capitalism clearly does work — its productive capacity remains unmatched. 

Instead of asking “Does capitalism work?”, the real question is “What work does capitalism do?” For capitalism’s moral problems do not lie merely in its failure to function, but in the kind of work it performs when it succeeds. This is what the theologian and moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre observed: “Although indictments of capitalism have justly focused attention upon the wrongs done to the poor and the exploited, [we must] view any social and economic order that treats being or becoming rich as highly desirable as doing wrong to those who must not only accept its goals, but succeed in achieving them... Capitalism is bad for those who succeed by its standards as well as for those who fail by them.”1 The problem is not merely whether capitalism works (which it demonstrably does not for the proverbial 99%), but what kind of people it forms and what kind of world it creates. In an economy where everything is commodified and subject to cost benefit logic, persons inevitably come to be valued by the same criteria as commodities — marketability, profitability, and consumability. The stingy god of scarcity warps desire into grasping after what is rationed just enough to feed the market’s relentless demand for expansion. Even when capitalism delivers the goods, it renders human sociality competitive and antagonistic, forcing autonomous, self-made individuals into rivalry for resources, wages, time, worth, safety, recognition, and belonging. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” — that first question hurled at God — may be capitalism’s first breath, the refusal of responsibility, the attempt to wash one’s hands of another’s blood in the rationalized pursuit of “self-interest,” the idolatrous faith that some invisible hand will accomplish what love of neighbor no longer commands.

Capitalism’s deepest work is not economic but anthropological and spiritual, structures of desire that shape how we perceive ourselves, the other, and the world. These are formations of the soul that reach deeper than markets or money, crafting a particular kind of human being trained in scarcity, competition, individualism, possession, exchange value, instrumental reason, and a racialized imagination trained to misrecognize the other’s distress as danger, the other’s need as threat, and the other’s vulnerability as volatility to be policed, incarcerated, deported, and disposed. 

The monastery’s superior looked at the spreading stain and asked, “What is this?” The question lingers, asking us to see and wrestle with its truth. What exactly is this stain that marks our streets, our communities, our world, our very lives?
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 1Alasdair MacIntyre, Marxism and Christianity. 2d ed. (London: Duckworth, 1995).

Rev. Ruth MacKenzie, Minister Emerita of First Universalist Church of Minneapolis and member of Unity Church–Unitarian

I’ve had two truly transformative experiences in my life. One was my learning and work with my family of origin and how the traumas of my upbringing had shaped my life in surprising ways. In my late twenties, my family and I began a process of listening and truth telling. It wasn’t easy but it transformed me and my family into something more whole. We all grew up. The other seismic experience has been my learning and work with racial justice beginning at First Universalist Church of Minneapolis in 2011 and continuing today. I guess I might describe it as “growing up as a white person.”

Early in my ministry at First Universalist, Revs. Justin Schroeder and Jen Crow worked with Heather Hackman and Black members of our congregation to train one tenth of the congregation in basic understandings of racism, white supremacy, and integrating racial justice into the very fabric of our congregation. We wanted to create a sea change in who we were and how we did things.

The trainings were intense, uncomfortable to say the least, absolutely necessary, and life changing. At the same time, a number of killings of Black men by police officers took place in Minneapolis and Saint Paul: Jamar Clark, Philando Castille, Daunte Wright, and George Floyd. The Black Lives Matter movement was building power, and many of us were compelled to leave the church pew and move into the streets.

I found myself doing things I’d never done before. I sat with young Black men outside the fourth precinct police station and listened to their stories as night descended at the BLM occupation. I lay down on the asphalt of 35W in protest. We gathered musicians, and faith leaders in several vigils to mourn the dead of the Black community. Our church doors were flung open to all kinds of groups working for racial justice, providing meeting space, sanctuary housing, and more. Unity Church was in the thick of it as well, and many collaborations and partnerships emerged and still do. I started to understand at a base level that faith and racial justice were essential to one another. Faith keeps my racial justice work tender, humble and courageous. Racial justice keeps my faith relevant, true and tethered to the real world.

There were plenty of times I was scared, plenty of times I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, plenty of times I made hurtful mistakes, plenty of times I felt overwhelmed and still do. There is no way to do this work and not feel off balance, jostled, unsettled. I cannot do the work of racial justice without prayer, without listening circles, without a faith community that lifts up the compelling truth of our interconnection with all people, that our liberation is bound up together. I cannot live a life tethered to God and Gai of many names, the worthiness and dignity of every human being without a powerful connection to racial justice. I can’t divorce my spiritual life from the real world reality of how race, racism and white supremacy deeply shapes all our lives with profound detriment to Black and brown folk. Just as in my family, I ache for a world that is more whole.

I’ve rejoined the Unity faith community having retired from full time ministry and I’ve been privileged to join the Racial Justice Team of Unity Church, continuing to grow and learn and transform. Last spring I attended the Interconnected Roots of Oppression series created by the Beloved Community Staff Team and was so moved and awakened once again. The Racial Justice Team will build on that series this coming October with a series called From Guilt to Activation: Owning Our Racism. I hope you’ll join us in this transformative work of spirit and antiracist multicultural practice.

Moving from Guilt to Activation: Owning Our Racism
Four Wednesdays: October 14, 21, 28 and November 11 
7:10-8:30 p.m. | Ames Chapel
Topics include: The Masks We Wear, The Necessity of Discomfort, Expanding Our Heart Center
Unity’s Racial Justice Team will follow last year’s Beloved Community Staff Team exploration of The Interconnected Roots of Oppression and expand on Unity’s Double Helix model with a series of Wellspring Wednesday experiences. Interconnected Roots taught us how racial capitalism informs political, economic and social systems. Moving from Guilt to Activation: Owning Our Racism will help us recognize and reckon with somatic dimensions of our white racist heritage. Circle conversations will be used to share insights that potentially “break us open and allow us to be transformed.” Follow-up programming on activation will be offered in early 2027. Please attend two fall sessions in preparation for spring sessions. 

Over six weeks this winter, Unity’s Executive Team and Beloved Community Staff Team, with assistance from the Racial Justice Team, hosted a series of evenings during which the congregation was invited to learn more about the meanings of Foundations of Racial Capitalism; Land, Ownership, and Housing Justice; Borders, Policing, and the Politics of Belonging; Finance, Debt, and the Cost of Inequality; Universal Care and the Struggle for Collective Well Being; and Fossil Capitalism and Imagining New Futures. All of this was set in the context of racial capitalism, illustrated with real-life stories presented by members of our extended community. Attendees were asked to reflect on their own experiences or their observations of these relationships in the community, to more clearly understand how oppression is interconnected and deeply rooted in our society. The series was very well and consistently attended. People saw the necessity for action beyond discussion. The context of the winter ICE surge more dramatically highlighted the urgency.

Meanwhile, the Indigenous Justice Community Outreach Team, along with the Act for the Earth and Racial Justice Community Outreach Teams, were moving along a different, but interconnected path, exploring the possibility of bringing Indigenous scholar and speaker Mark Charles to present for a day at Unity Church. Writing in his blog on Memorial Day 2019, Charles named Memorial Day as the most difficult National Holiday for him as a Native person. According to the U.S. Army Center of Military History website, he pointed out, “[o]ver 12% of the total 3,515 Medals of Honor awarded were given to soldiers who fought against the indigenous peoples of this land!”

Charles continues, “George Erasmus, a wise leader from the Dene Nation, in a press release titled ‘From Truth to Reconciliation Transforming the Legacy of Residential Schools’ wrote ‘Where common memory is lacking, where people do not share in the same past, there can be no real community. Where community is to be formed, common memory must be created.’”

Mark Charles concludes that, because white people and people of color, including but not limited to Indigenous people and African Americans, do not share a common memory, this country has a very limited sense of community. That is why it is so urgent that we learn, we understand, where our Indigenous neighbors come from, so we can begin to have a glimpse of their common memories. The memories of our African American neighbors, the descendants of people who were enslaved, are different from those who are Indigenous and whose forbears were here before white people arrived. 
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The Indigenous Justice Team has walked a different path to bring teachings to us because they have different, but equally important lessons for us. The image I see is the trails leading to the convergence of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers, the B’dote, the sacred place from which all life springs, according to many of the Indigenous people who made this place their home long before colonization. The strands of stories come together at that point, and the interconnection of histories, of oppressions, of memories, helps to build a larger, Beloved Community. We hope to see you at the Mark Charles event on June 27.

Mark R. Charles at Unity Church
Saturday, June 27 | 9:30 a.m.-4:00 p.m. | Parish Hall and Zoom 
Please register by June 20.