The Supreme Court has declared corporations to be people, according to its Citizens United decision. And, likewise, in its Hobby Lobby decision, it decided that a company can be exempted from obeying laws that contradict his/her personal religious beliefs.

This opens up an exciting opportunity for Christian evangelism! If we are serious about spreading the gospel to everyone, we should invite corporations to church.

To this end, let October 19, 2014, be INVITE-A-CORPORATION-TO-CHURCH SUNDAY.

Let’s invite BP to church. Let’s set aside a wide spot in the pew for him/her. (If corporations are people, are they male or female? It’s a good thing I belong to a church that strives to use gender-neutral hymns and liturgies!) I’d like to watch BP come forward for anointing with oil. Wouldn’t that be fitting, after what it did to the Gulf of Mexico? How will it feel as it recites the Confession? Any remorse for the way it bright-sides America on television with sun-shiny ads about how many wonderful things it’s doing for Gulf coast communities since its massive oil spill?

Let’s invite McDonald’s to church. Instead of a Happy Meal full of empty calories, let’s offer Ronald some soulful communion.

Let’s invite Duke Energy, which burns mostly so-called “clean coal” in its power plants, to church. Let’s hear it sing, with feeling: “Nothing but the blood of Jesus, oh! precious is the flow, that makes me white as snow…”

Let’s invite CapitalOne to church. I’d like to hear it sit in the pew and say the Lord’s Prayer. Especially, I’d like to hear CapitalOne say “forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors”. It’s the post-financial collapse successor company to Green Point Mortgage Funding, which issued mortgages without checking the validity of the borrowers’ incomes. Instead of prosecuting the bankers, who knew full well that their borrowers were lying on their loan applications and made money by selling these bad mortgages to other financial institutions, the US government took a few of the borrowers to court in Sacramento. The government lost the case because it was revealed that the bank’s business model effectively encouraged the borrowers’ fraud. Why would bankers ruin their own institutions? “Despite what the Supreme Court says,” Black (an expert witness in the case) told the jury in Sacramento, “corporations aren’t really people. The reality is corporations have no soul, they have no mind…they have no ability to protect themselves from their senior officers.”

Let’s invite JPMorgan and Bank of America to church. They can sit together! I’d love to see what they put in the offering plate, after the hand-slap they got for their part in bringing about the global financial collapse. In an article in the LA Times yesterday about the Sacramento case, columnist Michael Hiltzik wrote “ In the Department of Justice’s ‘historic’ (DOJ’s word) $16.5-billion settlement with Bank of America this summer or its ‘historic’ (again, prosecutors’ word) $13-billion settlement with JPMorgan last fall, how many executives were made to lose their jobs or face criminal prosecution or even civil lawsuits as a condition of the deal? Not a one. “ Instead of prosecuting the flesh-and-blood humans who brought the economy of much of the planet to near-ruin with willfully negligent banking practices, our government is blaming their victims. So let’s go with this brave new world where banks are people, and invite them to church. Let’s invite them to get baptized and have their many sins washed away. Let’s hear them sing “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me….”

Let the churches, temples, synagogues, and mosques of America invite corporations to sit in the pews with everyone else on the weekend of October 19. And if they don’t show up, let the people of faith in this country rise up and demand that corporations and companies be treated for what they are: legal fictions that all too often cover for the sins of the actual human beings who run them.

JIM BURKLO
Website: JIMBURKLO.COM Weblog: MUSINGS Follow me on twitter: @jtburklo
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Associate Dean of Religious Life, University of Southern California