The Church and the Chimney-Sweep’s Cry

chimney-sweeper-3

In his August 29 Washington Mall speech, rightwing television commentator Glenn Beck attacked (among other things) the notion that Christianity should be concerned with issues of social justice. He accused Barack Obama and liberation theology of distorting Jesus’s message. For the President, Beck said,

it’s all about victims and victimhood; oppressors and the oppressed; reparations, not repentance; collectivism, not individual salvation. I don’t know what that is, other than it’s not Muslim, it’s not Christian. It’s a perversion of the gospel of Jesus Christ as most Christians know it.

I thought of Beck’s words yesterday as I was reading a fine essay about two William Blake poems by former National Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky (in Slate magazine). In his two “Chimney Sweeper” poems, one from Songs of Innocence and one from Songs of Experience, Blake shows how the 18th century church called upon children to passively accept their lot and pray to God. In fact, it regarded murmuring against their plight as anti-Christian. (Think of Oliver Twist.)  Particularly awful, in Blake’s eyes, is the way the church gets the children to accede to their victimization.

A quick word on chimney sweepers. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, children were used to clean out London chimneys that had become clogged with soot. It was a deadly business, and these young boys regularly died before reaching adolescence. There was a tacit acknowledgement of this fact in the practice of paying parents for “apprenticing” out the boys.  All other apprenticeships were unpaid since the boys were learning a trade. In every way but name, parents were selling their children into slavery and death.

To the two poems that Pinsky cites I’ve added a third, one that mentions child prostitutes along with chimney sweepers. It is called “London”:

I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.

How the Chimney-sweeper’s cry
Every black’ning Church appalls;
And the hapless Soldier’s sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls.

But most thro’ midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlot’s curse
Blasts the new-born Infant’s tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.

I suspect that Blake would have some choice words for Mr. Beck if he were writing today.

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