Talking the Talk, Walking the Walk
Morality is the talk of the town these days (whether it was the defining piece of the election puzzle is debatable, but it's nevertheless become the conventional wisdom). I'm all for morals, but much of the morality that's being discussed these days seems to be about personal morality. It's like the Me Decade of the 1970s has made a big comeback, but this time on the spiritual tip. True, morality does begin at home, but it shouldn't be exclusively applied to individual actions. Morality should encompass individual acts and how an individual interacts--and makes choices--within the broader society.

Now, I suppose many Evangelical Christians would say that they are, indeed, acting in this way. But are they really making the choices that fulfill the Christian ethos, or are they applying selective viewpoints and ideologies? (The answer to this would obviously vary depending upon one's world view.)

Sarah Posner over at the Gadflyer takes a look at the recent pulling of ads by the corporate conglomerate--YUM! Foods--that owns Pizza Hut, KFC, and Taco Bell due to pressure by the American Decency Association. And from my viewpoint, YUM! and its Evangelical CEO aren't putting their Christian values to the global test:

YUM!’s CEO, David Novak, is a member of the evangelical Southeast Christian Church in Louisville. With 18,000 members, Southeast is one of the largest churches in the country and the largest in Kentucky. In March, the church sent busloads of people to lobby the Kentucky legislature to pass an anti-gay marriage amendment and later spent $150,000 on advertising to support the anti-gay marriage referendum on the Kentucky ballot. Southeast has hosted former Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy "Ten Commandments" Moore at its church. Its head pastor, Bob Russell, said during the 2004 presidential campaign that "we [evangelicals] have more reasons to start a revolution than they did in 1776 . . . . I don’t see how you can be a dedicated Christian and remain neutral."

Novak and Russell are also speakers for Lead Like Jesus, a group that stages motivational seminars across the country to teach people how to, well, you get the idea.

So how, exactly, does Novak lead like Jesus? Let’s take a look.

Novak, as YUM!’s CEO, made $8.8 million last year in salary, bonuses, and stock gains (not including unexercised stock options), according to Forbes. By contrast, Pizza Hut drivers make about $6 an hour, and franchisees have actively discouraged their efforts to organize a union. Someone making $6 an hour (the equivalent of about $12,000 a year if the person worked a forty hour week every week of the year) would have to work for about 730 years to equal Novak’s 2003 compensation. And Pizza Hut drivers aren’t reimbursed for gas or mileage, either.

At Pizza Hut in China, a pizza, at $8, costs almost three times an average Chinese person’s daily $3 wage.

It took YUM! just a few weeks to relent to the pressure from the American Decency Association to withdraw its advertising from Desperate Housewives. Yet for the last three and a half years, YUM! and its subsidiary Taco Bell have ignored the boycott of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a group representing farmworkers who pick the tomatoes supplied to YUM! restaurants. The CIW boycott is supported by the Presbyterian Church USA, the United Methodist Church, the United Church of Christ, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), the American Friends Service Committee (Quakers), the National Council of Churches, and the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee. Yet YUM! has refused to give into CIW's demand in order to end the boycott. And what is the CIW’s demand? That farmworkers who pick the tomatoes that are supplied to Taco Bell and other YUM! subsidiaries be paid an additional penny – yes, that’s one additional penny – per pound of tomatoes they pick. To give you some perspective on that, these farmworkers are paid forty to fifty cents per 32 pound bucket of tomatoes they pick. That amounts to about $7,500 a year, well below the poverty level. Even John Ashcroft’s Justice Department has prosecuted cases against bosses who held these tomato pickers in slavery conditions. What has YUM’s response been? To send the CIW a check for $110,000 to end the boycott (which CIW returned). Meanwhile, conditions haven't changed for the farmworkers.

[...]

It’s obvious that all of this has a lot more to do with money than it does with Jesus. But, according to a recent "American Decency Update" from the American Decency Association, money was Jesus's favorite topic. The newsletter quotes Richard Halverson, the former chaplain of the United States Senate, at length on the topic: "'Jesus Christ said more about money than about any other single thing because, when it comes to a man’s real nature, money is of first importance. Money is an exact index to a man’s true character. All through Scripture there is an intimate correlation between the development of a man’s character and how he handles his money.'"

So if "money is an exact index to a man’s true character," I think we now all know a bit more about David Novak's true character.