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poverty and the struggle for the american evangelical soul
There is a struggle underway among American evangelicals. Thank God. It’s a struggle to regain the heart of Jesus, which is a heart that leans toward the poor. Evangelicalism is a movement fueled by spiritual awakenings.
These awakenings typically begin with the poor and spread to the rich. Without the poor, there would be no evangelical movement in the United States. So this struggle is for the existence and the future existence of the evangelical church here.
How could any movement whose claimed-founder is Jesus of Nazareth possibly need reminding that the poor are especially on his heart and need to be a primary concern of theirs as well?
But it’s so.
Causes of this Heart Rot in Evangelical Churches
Several years ago, as the pastor of a church in the evangelical stream, I began to preach in a more focused way about the poor as a central concern of the gospel. A deacon in our church called me to complain that this sounded to him like “the social gospel”–a movement of the 19th and early 20th century that fueled the liberal Christian tradition in America. He assumed that Christianity by definition was conservative, so anything that sounded liberal must be unfaithful to God. Even something as central as the gospel’s concern for the poor. Which goes to show you: every moment spent backing away from what we’re not also takes us further from what we are.
This confusion plays itself out across the evangelical landscape. White evangelicals, in particular, have a fondness for conservative talk radio. There they hear frequent rants about “bleeding heart liberals” and more recently “community organizers” who work with the poor. I heard a rant recently from a local conservative talk radio host who wondered how bad poverty in America could be given the high rates of obesity among the urban poor. This radio host was from the city of Detroit and should have known better.
There are virtually no major grocery store chains in the city of Detroit. Many residents get their food from the dollar menu at McDonalds or the local “party store” which doesn’t sell fresh fruit or vegetables. The cheapest calories are from highly processed corn, which is about as healthy as cane sugar. None of this was part of the obesity rant.
Evangelicals in America have difficulty recognizing structural causes of poverty. I have an evangelical pastor friend who claims there are no structural causes of poverty in America. He attributes poverty entirely to the personal choices made by poor people, forgetting that bit about “powers and principalities in high places.”
My daughter taught middle school in Harlem. She had several students who lived in homeless shelters. None had computers at home. Most grew up without any dental care. If kids in the suburbs have parents who fall into drug addiction it’s not likely to involve crack cocaine, which triggers much tougher and mandatory sentences than the drugs availalbe in the burbs. I don’t know what my pastor friend thinks is wrong with those kids in Harlem that they can’t do as well on the SAT’s as their counterparts in other places.
I blame the devil. How convenient, how demonically convenient, to convince the most vibrant and powerful form of religion in America–evangelicalism–that we don’t need to pay too much attention to poverty. Because it turns out that poverty in America is something that needs to be addressed by the very thing evangelical churches are good at: forming relational networks.
The Unique Contribution Churches Can Make
Robert Putnam at Harvard has detailed the devastating effects of what he calls a “loss of social capital” in the United States–beginning with the Baby Boom and worsening with every generation since. People are connected with less people than ever and it leads to all sort of social ills. Though secular in perspective, Putnam prescribes a “spiritual awakening” to reverse this decline in social captital, because it’s one of the few things that works. In a follow up book, he highlighted the small group ministry of Saddleback Church in California as an example of what it takes to reverse social capital.
Relationships are the currency of the Kingdom of God. The Christian vision of God is irreducible relationship: Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Which is why, in the Christian vision, God IS love, and not simply loving.
The poor need help with groceries and heating oil and health care. But the poor need relationships more than anything. Because the poor are human and God’s first word to the representative human was “It’s not good for the man to be alone.”
I received this from a thoughtful friend recently reporting on a blog posting on poverty:
Robert Fogel, University of Chicago economic historian and co-winner of the 1993 Nobel prize in economics, says that, in a developed country like the U.S., human capital is more important that material capital, like money or machinery. Fogel defines spiritual assets as “a sense of purpose, self-esteem, a sense of discipline, a vision of opportunity, and a thirst for knowledge,” and he says that these assets play an enormous role in whether people succeed or fail.
Without spiritual assets, poor families have a hard time making the kinds of choices that can transform their lives. But they can only be developed over the long haul, by one human being investing time love and energy in another human being.
Churches–and the most vibrant ones in America today are evangelical, according to a study by sociologist Christian Smith–are uniquely positioned to deal with this aspect of poverty: restoring social capital through relationships.
It’s Not Rocket Science
My wife is the single moms pastor in our church. She is adamant about this: the single moms ministry does provide some services to single moms, but what it provides first and foremost is an environment where relationships are fostered. The ministry can only grow, she claims, as relationships are fostered. So the centerpiece of the ministry is a monthly gourmet meal for the single moms served by wait staff. Because there’s nothing like a fine meal to foster relationships. Yes, we could provide more food less expensively to single moms, but food isn’t the critical need. Connections are.
I spoke to the leader of our Friday Night Mobile Homeless ministry. She mentioned a few of our homeless friends who have gotten into their own apartments recently. Government agencies had a hand in this. Thank God for them. But so did the relationships offered and fostered among the homeless by our modest homeless ministry. They provide food to the street people of Ann Arbor once a week in a downtown pocket park. They visit the homeless in their outdoor camps when invited. Food is provided and coats and gloves in the winter, but more than anything, relationship.
The homeless have names and the team members learn their names and call them by name. They have conversations. They hold hands and offer prayers. We have a Thanksgiving party for the homeless at our church modeled after what people do all over the country on thanksgiving–eat, talk, and watch football. “People become more hopeful when there are people around them who know their names and talk with them” said this leader. “And it makes a HUGE difference for some of them.”
We have a modest ministry to kids in Detroit. A group of adults from the church travels to Detroit every Saturday to do mentoring with a set of young students. They provide them with access to computers and help them with their homework once a week. They get to know the kids. They take them out to the ball game each year. They are mainly giving the stuff of relationships: time and attention. And it helps.
These are things that any evangelical church in America can do, if the people in the church want to. It doesn’t take a mega-church to do these things. It doesn’t take a huge budget. It takes people.
But they must be people who understand that concern for the poor is a central concern of the gospel of Jesus, who used the words of the prophet Isaiah announcing the coming reign of God’s justice on earth to announce his messianic campaign: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me to bring good news to the poor.”
Once we get the good back into the good news, we’ll all be a lot better off.
Tags: a.m. talk radio, awakenings, blog action day 2008, choices, evangelicals, Jesus, poverty, powers and principalities
October 16th, 2008 at 7:27 am
amen! thanks for that ken.
i thought i heard (and maybe they were just suggesting that it be so) on the NPR show “Tell Me More” that they had repealed the harsher sentences on crack cocaine, because of long-term studies and the obviousness of this as a “structural evil”.
October 16th, 2008 at 8:20 am
yes, the supreme court ruled that sentancing guidelines had to be the same for crack & coke. i think sometime in the spring the ruling was announced.
October 16th, 2008 at 8:22 am
i meant to include with my comment that this is a really great post…
October 16th, 2008 at 8:47 am
Well, I don’t know. Isn’t there a great deal of evil that has come to be structured into our basic expectations and motives and attitudes in America? Evil that is taken for granted and called something else. Something nicer. Something like. Oh. I don’t know. Self-interest. For example, a lot of people I know think that they “deserve” to retire, and to them retirement means making no contribution for a matter of decades before they pass on. They will travel, watch television, play golf, go out to dinner–have a wonderful time vacationing for 10, 15, 20 years. This idea is pernicious. It destroys one of our over-riding purposes–to make a positive contribution to the well-being of others and by doing so also to take care of ourselves. “The good life,” according to this way of thinking, is to do nothing productive. This is the height of malevolence. By doing nothing productive, we suck the economic value out of others. We make them work all the harder to support our indolence. What greed! What selfishness!
October 16th, 2008 at 11:50 am
Great post. BTW, when I emailed something about the social gospel at a previous church, the silence and the ostracism was absolutely deafening! Among many evangelicals, I’ve found something akin to contempt for the poor… and I think that’s the danger that we all face at a time when we’ve completely eroded something that the Greatest Generation took for granted… the notion of “the common good”. By the time I came around, it seemed as if people had retreated to their special interest groups and identity politics ruled the day.
Nothing like local, national, and global crises to bring people together and to remember that the question that Cain asked long ago WAS the answer… “I am my brother’s keeper.” And my sister’s, and my son’s and daughter’s too… and blood relationship has less to do with it than common humanity…
Ken, I’m glad to see that some church leaders are leading on this issue. It’s amazing to find an evangelical church like ours where I pretty much expected the Catholics and other liturgical churches to be (the legacy of Father Cunningham and Focus Hope in Detroit is why I will ALWAYS have a soft spot for the Catholic Church — it was Catholics who provided rehab time and again for my Dad, and who were there with free counseling for us when he died). The mercy work that the Ann Arbor Vineyard provides for the community was a major selling point for me.
Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Bono wants to use their vast fortunes to eliminate poverty in our lifetime. The Millennials see this as their mission as much as the Greatest saw their task to wipe out fascism and communism. I hope more of the church find their hearts tender towards God, who loves the poor and always holds them in His heart.
October 16th, 2008 at 1:50 pm
Poverty to me is where no one cares for you, does not teach you how to deal with life, leaves you to your own devices. Abandons you to raise yourself.
People usually work there way out of this one and that to me is Xers.
If this was all that happened to you, you would be resentful but ok. You are probably poor but you work hard for a buck.
The other half of how people stay in poverty is letting others make decisions for them like the government, homeless shelters, and jails. Giving our free will up to drugs, alcohol, and easy sex.
God created us to be free and have free will. When we hand this over to others and things we are in poverty.
When no one takes the time to motivate you, shows concern, or shows honest love then your life turns to hopelessness and despair. It would be easy to give up. Is not what has happened to a lot of people who are poor? Poor is not just little money.
October 16th, 2008 at 4:38 pm
What is the good life? How do we help those in poverty and prison? How do we view the world? Here is an evangelical leader who speaks with humility and wisdom “The Good Life” by Charles Colson.
http://books.google.com/books?id=35e5La4TF8cC&printsec=frontcover#PPP1,M1
It is one of the best books I have read on the subject.
October 20th, 2008 at 12:37 am
well, ken, nobody said you cant use your brain and your heart at the same time. being compassionate doesnt have to mean being stupid. ken, why dont you go open a grocery store in detroit? seriously! you would make a fortune since theres no competition. people will be kicking down the doors to get in and buy your broccoli. after all the grocery stores all shut down in detroit because too many people were demanding healthy food and they ran out. so the fast food places opened up, offering fatty food that nobody wants but has to eat, because the grocery stores are closed. people are so poor they cant afford vegetables, they have to buy big macs. please. gotta love white 60s era liberal guilt. makes one quite dumb. good lord, we cant actually believe that people would choose to eat unhealthy food! that would be racist. in reality, your views are more racist than those of the talk radio folks you lambast. in your view the minorities are incapable of making good decisions, so smart white people like yourself need to get in your cars, drive out of your white suburbs and ride to the rescue. youre the savior. lets not treat them like adults and have some expectations, no. somehow were not caring for the poor unless we adopt you liberal we-need-more-programs views. yes the situation in harlem is so bad because there arent enough liberals in new york to fix things. the situation in detroit is so bad because there arent enough liberals in detroit to fix things. good god, once the liberals are in power next year things are going to get fixed once and for all! it will be paradise, just like in europe (where there are no nasty evangelicals to mess things up). ken, do you even claim to be an evangelical? i did a wikipedia search and it doesnt sound anything like you. and i read part of your book on amazon and it doesnt sound evangelical. the way you describe them im surprised youre not trying to wipe them off the face of the earth. why not just become an episcopalian and be done with it? you and john shelby spong could be best buddies. hes also wailing about the coming demise of christianity because of those nasty evangelicals.
October 20th, 2008 at 10:35 am
Jake,
This hostility is not becoming. And it is not reasoned. And it is not worthy. And it is not faithful. The premise is the Isaiah agenda–the proclamation of Jesus’s ministry. You do not sound like you are with that program.
Duke
October 20th, 2008 at 2:09 pm
duke im not the one who is the self appointed basher of everything conservative and christian. if i sound hostile its because i care about the people he points fingers at. i guess you dont consider it hostile as long as you agree. ken is beating a dead horse and wrapping a lot of old fashioned liberalism in the disguise of a new evangelical. its just remaking the faith in his own image. he sees conservatives taking it in the teeth and is cashing in. not very brave. from his postings its obvious he is not evangelical at all. but hes a pastor so cant say that. so why not just admit it? his other book is empowered evangelical. please define evangelical ken. are you a universalist? do you think all religions lead to god? is the bible wrong about homosexuality? is the bible full of errors and mistakes?
October 20th, 2008 at 5:09 pm
Ken,
You make strong assertions about structural causes of poverty in America, but you don’t offer strong evidence. The US government offers many programs to assist the poor: medicaid, food stamps, school lunch programs, head start, home energy assistance, weatherization programs, and welfare, just to name a few. This doesn’t even factor in the help available through social service organizations and churches. In the county I live in we have a crisis hotline number (211) that will put people in touch with sources of help for rent assistance, food assistance, etc. We have a local social services organization that is supported by area churches that does excellent work helping the poor. This doesn’t even include the work churches do independently to help the poor.
Can you at least concede a reasonable person could look at the myriad resources available to help the poor and at least question your assertion about structural causes of poverty? I am willing to concede there may be structural injustices, it’s just that I’m not entirely certain what they are and, to be honest, your ‘evidence’ is less than convincing. One area where I think I may see structural injustice is in a public education system where only about half a dozen states or so provide for school vouchers. This is an excellent way for parents to get their kids out of school districts that aren’t getting the job done…but the NEA and other teachers unions fight against vouchers. I could see structural injustice in that? Can you? A poor school district might be part of the reason the kids in Harlem don’t do as well on their SATs. Are vouchers available there? I’m not sure.
You also claim that those evangelicals who don’t accept your take on structural injustices of poverty don’t think we need to pay too much attention to poverty. I disagree with much of what you say, but I absolutley believe we need to pay attention to poverty. Our young church is quite open-handed with those in need in our community despite disagreeing with your take on things. Most of the people in our church would fit in the demographic that seems constantly in your crosshairs (conservative evangelicals; largely republicans…although we do have a smattering of democrats who feel quite welcomed in our church) and yet they genuinely have a heart for the poor. One does not have to accept your claims about the causes of poverty to have a heart for the poor.
An inconvenient fact is that many of the poster children of the mean religious right have actually done great work with the poor. My democrat friend recently shared with me the great work done for the poor by that bastion of religious right conservatism, Thomas Road Baptist Church. The ‘conservative Christians equals uncaring jerk’ storyline may be conventional wisdom on Air America (is that still around?) but it doesn’t square with reality to near the extent Wallis and Company claim. (I am not saying it doesn’t exist…I have witnessed it firsthand…I’m just saying it’s not to the extent claimed)
Wow, this was way too long…sorry.
October 20th, 2008 at 6:46 pm
Brian,
I absolutely think that a reasonable person could be unconvinced by my arguments! I do think given the biblical teaching as a whole that poverty is a form of oppression “the poor and oppressed” being a familiar biblical couplet, etc., that the burden of proof would be on demonstrating that in the case of AMerican poverty there are no structural causes. Evil in the bible is replete with “powers and principalities”and is embedded in every level of humanity, including our structures. Arguing that it doesn’t apply in a particular time and place with respect to poverty, just doesn’t seem to me like an argument one would want to advance. I agree that many Christians who don’t agree with my assessment are probably much better at loving the poor than I am, and their churches. I am very encouraged by what’s happening in many evangelical circles on this issue e.g. Rick Warren and company, Vineyard, etc. It’s a plain fact that evangelicals give more money to the church and to outside charities than to (I think) any other demographic group–certainly more than religious traditions that lean less politcically conservative than evangelicals (white ones) currently do. That’s in Christian Smith’s study on evangelicalism in the mid-1990’s. I don’t know enough about vouchers to know whether they make sense or not. But if they work, then their not being available to poor communities would be a good example of a structural factor. Just because I don’t sound conservative doesn’t mean I’m liberal. I’m trying to be faithful. I just object to the fact that many evangelicals in the America assume that conservative equals faithful and liberal equals unfaithful. I think we’ve bought into a category error there and it’s quite pervasive and damaging. Other church movements have made the opposite mistake (equating liberal with faithful and conservative with unfaithful.) Category error is my point. Blessings good man!
October 20th, 2008 at 7:44 pm
Again, I’m open to being convinced about structural injustices. I even provided what I think might be an example of one. As for your claim the burden of proof is on those who question structural injustices…even assuming your scriptural references would mean structural injustices exist at all places and times (which I’m not sure they really mean that-but I’ll look at those verses closer) it still shouldn’t be that difficult to provide some good solid examples. I’m honestly a little surprised that was your reply. With as certain as your are on this topic I would expect you to have a whole list of examples. Perhaps you think I wouldn’t fairly consider your examples? Does the list of programs I referenced (which is just a sampling of the programs that are out there) really lend itself to a view that we live in a society that is intentionally trying to keep people in poverty? That is the deal with structural injustice isn’t it? Intentionally trying to keep people in poverty? If so, the existence of these programs would seem to suggest ours is not a society intent on forcefully keeping people in poverty. Since we “wrestle not against flesh and blood” I certainly believe there are spiritual forces that can keep people in poverty. It just seems that in the US those spiritual forces exert their influence more through sinful personal choices. Again, not to belabor the point, but it shouldn’t be that hard to come up with some clear-cut examples if our society really tries to intentially keep people in poverty.
October 20th, 2008 at 10:37 pm
About the term ’social gospel.’ It’s my understanding that the term is usually used to describe a Christian MO that leans into the cause of righting social wrongs while leaning AWAY from delivering the message of salvation through faith in Christ. The fact that the two are at opposite ends of a Christianity spectrum is a success story for the Enemy, quite apart from the shameful fact that we fight over all this as well.
While ideally each local church should undoubtedly manifest the whole spectrum as an enclave of the Kingdom of God, it’s probably not unreasonable to suppose that any given congregation/denomination will more likely have particular strengths in one or two areas of Kingdom expression and weaknesses in others. The way I see it, when we’re bothered by a ’strength’ or a ‘weakness’ in one church or another, we’ll do better to back up and look at the bigger picture: the whole Church with a capital ‘C’. What if these differences are the way it’s supposed to be (for now) so that every purpose of the Church gets fulfilled by hook or by crook? If, for example, Christians that are excelling in righting social wrongs were thinking and speaking gratefully about Christians that are excelling in preaching — and vice versa — WHAT MIGHT HAPPEN THEN?
I suspect that one thing that would happen is that our strengths would start strengthening each other’s weak knees instead of keeping them out of joint. I guarantee it would foil a major strategy of the enemy.
Honestly, in our day the passage that says “those who kill you will think they are doing a service to God” is a description of relations within our own Family — at least with regard to the tongue!
October 21st, 2008 at 9:15 am
Brian, Time is short but regarding your request for an example of structural injustice affecting the poor: are you aware of the differences in the quality of defense afforded the poor vs. those who can afford to pay for their own atttorney? This is a intrinsic inequity in our JUSTICE system. If you are poor and are charged with a crime (the punishment of which will make you more poor and all who depend on you) then the system of justice in our country insures, more or less, that you will be represented by a public defender who is overwhelmed with cases and is not able to provide as able a defense compared to the defense of private attornies. The people with the most money get the best defense. Is this not a clear cut example of a structural issue that adversely affects the poor? We certainly do better than many nations in that we do have a justice system and we do provide public defenders. So this is not a slam against America. This is much better than a dictatorship. I’m wearing my lapel pin. But we don’t provide enough money to make the quality of the defense equitable for poor people. We are satisfied with a system that provides better justice for the well off. I appreciate your willingness to consider these things. Ken
October 21st, 2008 at 3:56 pm
I just happened upon the following article, “Gap between rich and poor increases.” It goes on to state that, “The gap between the rich and the poor has grown in most wealthy nations, according to a report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.” Then I did a little Wikipedia search and learned that, “In the United States at the end of 2001, 10% of the population owned 71% of the wealth, and the top 1% controlled 38%. On the other hand, the bottom 40% owned less than 1% of the nation’s wealth.” I’m not exactly the most politically liberal person around, but does that statistic bother anyone else? What would Jesus do?
October 22nd, 2008 at 1:46 pm
I think the issue here is that churches need to be involved, not in the way of governmental programs like welfare, Head Start, food stamps, etc., but in the way of human connection – poverty of the spirit. This role for the churches goes way beyond whether or not poverty has “structural causes.” For example, my son was part of a Head Start program and my family is partially supported through the same governmental programs that support the poor. I visited his class on a number of occasions, and got to interact with a lot of the other kids in the class. The thing that I was struck by was the fact that the kids who seemed to be getting something out of the program, for whom Head Start was working, were the same kids whose parents came in to class. The kids who were not being served by this governmental program seemed to be the kids whose parents didn’t come. Now, I’m not blaming home life for the fact that is likely that some of those kids won’t escape poverty so much as I am blaming the failure of ANYONE to take a human interest in them. That is, to invest in them as people and make a enrich them spiritually. THAT is what churches are for; THAT is the call of Christ for the poor. Because governmental programs, no matter how well-intentioned, can’t do it all. And because, regardless of whether there are, or are not, “structural causes” of poverty, the thing that probably makes the difference for children of poverty is emotional, spiritual investment.