God didn't create corporations

The Declaration of Independence rests its claims for equal political rights on the fact that the "Creator" endowed human beings with "certain inalienable rights." The corporation is not mentioned.

As millions and millions of dollars of corporate money are funneled into the American electoral process, some of it even apparently from foreign sources,we can see why the Founders left corporations out of this fundamental assertion of who gets to be "We the People." In his famous dissent to the "Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission," ruling, Justice John Paul Stevens made this very clear:

"It might also be added that corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires. Corporations help structure and facilitate the activities of human beings, to be sure, and their "personhood" often serves as a useful legal fiction. But they are not themselves members of "We the People" by whom and for whom our Constitution was established."

Much has been written about the "judicial activism" of the Roberts' Supreme Court in making this extraordinary decision that overturned nearly a century of precedent, the net effect being to make a corporation into a person, as Dahlia Lithwick wrote for Slate on "The Pinocchio Project: Watching as the Supreme Court turns a corporation into a real live boy."

I have written previously on the concerns I felt after having read those of Justice Roberts' distributed to those of us who were witnesses in his confirmation hearings.

But it occurs to me now that this was not just "judicial activism," but "theological activism," in making the corporation into a person despite the corporation having, as Justice Stevens wrote, "no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires." To me, that means the corporation has no soul.

The soul of a person comes from that individual's capacity to be held morally accountable; in Christian theology, one of the sources of what is called the "imago Dei" is our mirroring the infinite Creator God, though in a finite way, both through creative action and in being morally aware and thus morally accountable. Adam and Eve get kicked out of the Garden of Eden precisely because God had given them responsibility and they ended up being irresponsible.

Justice Stevens, in his dissent, points out the difference in accountability between human beings and corporations. "Unlike natural persons, corporations have 'limited liability' for their 'owners and managers.'" Corporate political action, moreover, carries with it the temptation to "quid pro quo" arrangements and thus a considerable risk of corruption of government, Stevens argued, as had already been the case. "In an age in which money and television ads are the coin of the campaign realm, it is hardly surprising that corporations deployed these ads to curry favor with, and to gain influence over, public officials." In a theological sense, per Adam and Eve as an example, it is hard enough to hold an individual human being morally accountable. A corporation, because it is "limited" and not actually a person, even less so.

Stevens goes to some length to draw attention to the difference between "actual, flesh-and-blood persons" and corporations. It makes for better legal decisions, per Stevens, but in my view it also makes for better religious thinking as well. People are made of flesh and blood. In my religious belief, that's what it means to be created by God, and created morally accountable in an infinite sense. Corporations should be held accountable, but as they are "limited," that accountability extends to their limited function as corporate entities. It does not define their being in the same way that being created by God, as human beings are, defines the whole human being in relationship to God and the stewardship we have toward one another and all living things.

What the Roberts' court did in the Citizens United decision was to take an entity that is inanimate and limited and start to treat it as one of those the Creator endowed with "inalienable rights." A corporation with inalienable rights? That's a scary thought.

And just a concluding note on "scary" since we're approaching Halloween: when inanimate entities that aren't exactly composed of "flesh and blood" are made to get up and walk around like they're people, horror results. From Frankenstein to Zombies to Vampires, people tend to recoil at the idea that something that's really not a person starts to act like a person. These fictional horror creatures are often killers because they are "conscience-less," i.e. not human. I think that's the human sub-conscious telling us it's a really scary idea to regard an inanimate object as a person and treat it as such.

I know I'm starting to regard this mid-term election season with a lot of horror. Lots of shadows and secrecy in campaigning are scary for democracy.

For a lot of good reasons, we don't say "We the people and corporations"--it's just "We the people."

By Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite  |  October 17, 2010; 1:06 PM ET Save & Share:                 
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