Occupy Wall Street: Discerning Not Dismissing

Occupation is the big new thing. The social motions and explosions are ever more frequent . While I believe it’s a misguided, unrealistic exercise overall, I want to caution myself and likeminded observers from dismissing the protesters, but for reasons that go beyond politics.
News coverage of city governments kicking hapless demonstrators out of municipal parks implies that the very oppression they so vaguely protest is being wielded against them. Meanwhile, conservatives (many Christians included) call out the movement as insular, selfish, self-defeating and pointless. One called protesters idiots. Many characterize them as rehashed hippies of the 1960s. Yet some look like average American middle-classers. It all raises some trite as well as some profound questions.

Should individual Christ-followers welcome or even join in the universal decrying of greed, corporate participation in (entanglement?) with government, perceived favoritism and lobbying? Perhaps this is a chance to join in calling for social justice. Or maybe it’s time to call out sloppy thinking and irresponsibility—or both.

That’s a judgment call for each believer. But whether we join in, give modified ascent, or critique, we’re called to biblical discernment. The Apostle Paul, wrote in Piilippians 1: 9 that he prayed that they would “grow yet more and more” in God-given super-knowledge and discriminating spiritual discernment so that they might remain pure and ultimately give God glory. Paul wanted his charges to grow up. I’m concerned that well-meaning people of biblical faith not be drawn into unthinking responses either way; that is, let’s be grown up even if we are sure the occupiers aren’t.