The Production and Defeat of Poverty
Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash
Consider two interrelated possibilities:
-There is almost no one left to face the core social issue of poverty except the church;
-Nothing is more difficult for the church to talk honestly about than money in light of the gospel… not gender and not even race.
This leaves the church with the quandary of taking up the most difficult agendum that is at the heart of the gospel. For further resources on the subject consider:
-My recent book, Poverty in the Promised Land: Neighborliness, Resistance, and Restoration (2024); Matthew Desmond, Poverty by America (2023), the book from which my little study was generated; and Mark Robert Rank, The Poverty Paradox: Understanding Economic Hardship amid American Prosperity (2023).
All of these books attest to disastrous poverty in the midst of our most affluent economy. My immediate attention to this issue of poverty amid plenty has been triggered of late by the words of Lyndon Johnson in his inaugural address in 1964. In his words, he reminded us of the most elemental economic commitment that constitutes the American experiment and the American dream. He avers that US flourishing depends upon the actual practice of justice:
Conceived in justice, written in liberty, bound in union, it was meant one day to inspire the hopes of all mankind; and it still binds us. If we keep its terms, we will flourish. First, justice was the promise that all who made the journey would share in the fruits of the land. In a land of great wealth, families must not live in hopeless poverty. In a land rich in harvest, children must not go hungry. In a land of healing miracles, neighbors must not suffer and die unattended. In a great land of learning and scholars, young people must be taught to read and write (quoted by Rank, The Poverty Paradox, 135).
Johnson in turn identifies four publics always under threat of poverty who must, in the American experiment, be protected from poverty:
-families amid great wealth;
-children amid rich harvest;
-neighbors amid healing miracles, and
-young people amid great learning and scholarship.
These populations are variously vulnerable and warrant protection and resources that issue in wellbeing.
We in the church might focus on two closely connected processes. On the one hand, we may reflect on the production of poverty. Poverty is not a given or a decreed fate. It is rather the outcome of certain forms of economic practice and policy. Thus we might consider a combination of the following:
-low wages;
-high interest rates on borrowed money (as with credit cards);
-regressive taxation through which the economically vulnerable pay a disproportionate share of their income; and
-lack of regulation that might restrain predation upon the vulnerable.
These practices together assure that the economically vulnerable will end up in hopeless debt that in turn assigns to them menial work for low pay. The production of poverty is an essential ingredient in the consolidation of disproportionate wealth by those who are willing and able to impose such penalties and liabilities on others in society. Long ago, Isaiah could enumerate the exhibitionist signs of self-indulgence that will bring disaster on those who exploit others:
In that day the Lord will take away the finery of the anklets, the headbands, and the crescents; the pendants, the bracelets, and the scarfs; the headdresses, the armlets, the sashes, the perfume boxes, and the amulets; the signet rings, and nose rings; the festal robes, the mantles, the cloaks, and the handbags; the garments of gauze, and the linen garments, the turbans, and the veils (Isaiah 3:18-23).
On the other hand, we in the church might consider the overcoming of poverty which inescapably requires the negation of the above components of debt production. Thus
-a viable living wage for even the most menial tasks;
-low interest rates wherein resourceless persons can acquire what is needed by circumstance;
-progressive taxation in which those with greater wealth pay their “fair share” for the common good; and
-government regulation that can help to restrain or prevent predatory economic practice.
The issue of the production of poverty or the overcoming of poverty is a defining issue for the wellbeing of society. In parallel fashion, this either/or of production of poverty or overcoming poverty turns out to be a most elemental issue for gospel abundance. If and when the church sides with the producers of poverty, the gospel gets cast in privatistic other-worldly terms. If and when, to the contrary, the church sides with the economic needs of the vulnerable and exploited, the gospel is inescapably cast as a this-world enterprise of neighborliness.
The resources in biblical faith for the address of such issues are abundant, even if the Revised Common Lectionary plays it safe and avoids many such texts. Thus we can see the accent on the protection of the poor everywhere in the “law and the prophets.” In the law (Torah) provision is made for the economically vulnerable already in the earliest codification:
You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt. You shall not abuse any widow or orphan… If you lend money to my people, to the poor among you, you shall not deal with them as a creditor; you shall not exact interest from them (Exodus 22:21-25).
The trajectory that here concerns overcoming oppression and abuse comes to positive articulation in the provision of Deuteronomy 15:1-18 that offers redress for the poor, and restoration of poor persons to full, viable participation in the economy. And of course, it is not different in the prophetic tradition. Beyond the better-known texts of Amos, Isaiah, and Jeremiah, consider this stunning, not well-known text from Ezekiel:
This was the guilt of your sister Sodom; she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not give aid to the poor and needy. (Ezekiel 16:49).
We might have thought that the “sin of Sodom” was “safely” sexual; but here the matter is economic disproportion. The prophet sees that “pride” leads to self-indulgence that in turn draws energy away from the plight of the poor and the needy. When we become preoccupied in excessive ways with our own wellbeing, we readily become numb and indifferent to the great needs of those around us. Indeed we may eventually regard ourselves as self-made and self-sufficient, and without patience for those who are without such “achievement.”
In the New Testament, it is particularly the version of Luke that accents the alternative economics of the “coming kingdom” that exposes our current economics as failed and unacceptable. Thus:
-Already in that Song of Mother Mary, we may anticipate that her Son will decisively invert the economy:
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty (Luke 1:52-53).
-In his inaugural sermon in the synagogue, he claimed for himself the announcement of the Jubilee year that consisted in debt cancellation and restoration of property and livelihood to the poor (Luke 4:16-21).
-His best-known prayer concerns the cancelation of debt:
And forgive us our sins,
for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us (Luke 11:4).
-In his parable of the “rich fool” he warns against “storing up treasures” for ourselves (Luke 12:21).
Indeed turn almost anywhere in the Lucan gospel; the insistence is the same. Our preoccupation with self-securing efforts at the expense of the community is a non-starter that can yield no good outcomes. In a concise summary statement, the Lucan gospel clearly identifies those who receive Jesus and his new economy and those who urgently resist it:
Every day he was teaching in the temple. The chief priests, the scribes, and the leaders of the people kept looking for ways to kill him; but they did not find anything they could do, for all the people were spellbound by what they heard (Luke 19:47-48).
It was established, privileged leadership that was especially threatened by his subversive teaching. Conversely, it was the “people,” ordinary folk without access to abundance, who welcomed his alternative world and its economic implications.
The contemporary form of that ancient class contrast is the practice of rent capitalism whereby those who own keep non-owners insecure and regularly open to exploitation. Thus my friend, Peter Block, has helped me to see that the only viable, sustainable resolution of our on-going social crisis is that the victims of rent capitalism be given a viable opportunity to become owners of property that may provide a safe, reliable locus for life without the endless exploitation by more powerful economic agents. The Bible knows that the abiding presence of poor people is a social reality:
Since there will never cease to be some in need on the earth… (Deuteronomy 15:11).
That recognition, however, does not lead Moses or the Torah community to resignation. Rather it invites to transformative action through which,
There will, however, be no one in need among you (Deuteronomy 15:4).
The deep mandate of the Torah is that redress and restoration for the poor must be made for the sake of a viable neighborly future. Until that redress is accomplished, society is prone to conflict, threat, and risk. As I was pondering this dilemma and challenge of poverty and privilege, I read the Vice of Luxury: Economic Excess in a Consumer Age (2015) by David Cloutier. The book is an accessible, compelling expose of the way in which luxury characterizes and defines the dysfunction of our society. What interests me in the book, however, is Cloutier’s response to and remedy for excessive luxury. The alternative Cloutier commends is a sacramental world-view in which the things of this world are taken to be and seen to be carriers of the gift of grace:
One [theological project] is the recovery of a genuinely sacramental worldview in which the spiritual is participated in via the material. Secular luxury consumption needs to be seen as a kind of rival liturgy, and in particular a rival to the centrality of using excess wealth to care for the poor (p.15).
In order to engage fully in such a sacramental view of material reality, Cloutier commends “The universal call to holiness” (v.15). His book is written in a Roman Catholic frame of reference that readily appeals to papal teaching, in this case to the teaching of Benedict XVI:
The church’s social doctrine holds that authentically human social relationships of friendship, solidarity, and reciprocity can also be conducted within economic activity, and not only outside or “after” it. The economic sphere is neither ethically neutral, nor inherently inhumane and opposed to society. It is part and parcel of human activity and precisely because it is human, it must be structured and governed in an ethical manner (p. 15).
Cloutier continues his exposition:
There is need to recover an encompassing sacramental ontology as reflected in the treatment of property and the critique of luxury in the early church. Such a recovery is a necessary challenge to spiritual promises made in today’s marketplace by luxury goods and services. While Catholics fall into a dualism about possessions and spirituality, marketers know better—they know that products can evoke true “devotion” (p. 107).
This is a recognition that a sustained address to the consumer crisis in which we are caught up requires theological discipline whereby our common life is marked by a self-aware passion for an alternative life in the world.
Peter Brown, the great historian of the church, has concluded that the early bishops of the church “invented the poor,” that is, identified poor persons as an object of God’s attentiveness and so a special care and concern in the church. Brown’s statement is surely reflective of the church in the world of Greek-Roman economics; but it does not take into account the long-running tradition of Israel’s Torah. If anything, we may judge that Moses, with acute theological perceptivity, saw that the existence of “the poor” is the peculiar subject of divine concern and therefore a peculiar concern for the community of Torah obedience. It requires great attentiveness in the church to such Jewish tradition in order to see that gospel teaching in the early church is derivative from and informed by the long practice of Torah tradition. The matter of good care for the poor is everywhere in the law and the prophets.
I have come to think that this is a moment for the church and its pastors to be clear, explicit, and unambiguous about the summons of the gospel. There will continue to be a “priestly rendering” of the work of Christ wherein we are “saved by the blood.” But now, surely, it is a time to insist upon a “prophetic rendering” of the gospel in which there is a judgment upon our failed economics and an invitation to an alternative economy of neighborliness. The work of the gospel is not simply to trust in Jesus, but to be among his followers, disciples, and advocates for the claims of neighborliness. One of the practical problems in a local congregation, moreover, is that much of the available hymnody of the church is reflective of a priestly model of faith. And at least in many evangelical congregations the escape from such “substitutionary atonement” in hymnody is appeal to so-called “praise hymns” that are mostly lacking in any narrative substance. Thus in the liturgic practice of the congregation, one part of the hard work is to produce hymns that sing of the coming economy that marks the rule of Christ. It is curious that our many Christmas carols and our few great Easter hymns sing of the new regime. Other than that, however, our singing is reflective of so much that is privatistic, individualistic, and other-worldly.
With the present moment of “democratic recovery” of hope in our society, it may be just the right moment for the church to endorse a new economy that works assertively against the production of poverty. It may be that this is a moment in which there is convergence between the claims of the gospel and the promises of the American Dream, that may both be propelled by the goodness of God’s abundance. The point of much convergence is the cancellation of debts wherein some are kept in hock to others. The pivot point for any socio-economic recovery is the cancellation of debt that keeps some dependent upon others. The church prays regularly for the “forgiveness of our debts.” But until we see (and speak) that the gospel concerns real economic activity, our prayer remains only an empty mantra. It is possible, in this season of hope, to see that the goodness of God’s abundance may override our fearful parsimony. In a world where God continues to give good gifts, the long running bugaboo of “scarcity” is a lie. In response to that lie, we attest regularly that the creator God continues to give good gifts that make our parsimony obsolete. The prayer of the Psalmist concerns exactly the continuing of good gifts:
The eyes of all look to you,
and you give them their food in due season.
You open your hand and satisfy the desire of every living thing (Psalm 145:15-16).
Recall my two governing propositions:
-There is almost no one to speak honestly about poverty except the church. That much continues to be true.
-The church finds it exceedingly difficult to speak honestly about money. We may not find it so difficult when we embrace with glad vigor the truth of God’s abundance. Given that boundless abundance, we may find it easier to affirm that there is enough for all, enough to be shared in both face-to-face neighborly generosity and in public policy. We only need to decide that the abundance of God is the truth of our creation.
Note well that Paul, in his assertive stewardship campaign, can declare:
I do not mean that there should be relief for others and pressure on you, but it is a question of a fair balance between your present abundance and their need, so that their abundance may be for our need, in order that there may be a fair balance. As it is written,
“The one who had much did not have too much,
and the one who had little did not have too little” (II Corinthians 8:13-15).
Paul’s reassurance is manna-based. Paul appeals to the manna narrative of Exodus 16 (see Psalm 105:40-41). Abundance is never grounded in Pharaoh’s surplus and strategy, but in the surprise of food given in inexplicable ways in wilderness circumstances. The God who funds abundance rejects private surplus, but specializes in community wellbeing. Thus the news performed by Jesus, in the long tradition of Moses, is indeed “good news” for the poor” (Luke 4:18). We who are not among the poor may also sign on with the good news that undoes the surplus of Pharaoh in order that all may prosper together.
