No Christian wants to see children raised in the church deconvert. Yet that is happening in spades today. In a recent book published by the Gospel Coalition, Thaddeus Williams of Biola University argues that the church’s lack of concern for economic and social justice as a primary reason that many of those raised in Christian homes are deconstructing their faith. He writes, “The conclusion that Christianity is hardly the beacon of social justice that it should be is a common theme in many deconstruction stories.” “Instead of advocating for the poor by embracing economic justice, today’s church,” it is argued, “embraces capitalistic greed which oppresses the poor.” No teen raised in a Christian home wants to be part of a movement that oppresses the poor. No wonder so many are jettisoning biblical Christianity in favor of joining “social justice” ideologies that they believe support the poor instead of American consumerism. So, are American Christians enslaved to consumerism and affluence? Is Christianity guilty of neglecting the poor? And is ECONOMIC EQUALITY something that justice-loving people should pursue? This episode answers these tree questions. So, let’s conduct an honest evaluation of the critique of Christianity that is leading many to abandon it today.
Accusation #1: American Christians are enslaved to consumerism.
- The average America home contains 300,000 items.
- The average American house has almost tripled in size over the past 50 years.
- Of the world’s children, 3.1 percent live in America but Americans purchase 40 percent of the toys sold worldwide.
- On average, American women have 30 outfits (that figure was 9 in 1930).
- There are more television sets than people in the average American home.
- Americans spend 11.2% of total consumer spending on non-necessary goods like jewelry, alcohol, recreation, gambling, etc. compared to 4% in 1959.
In view of the staggering wealth of American Christians, the question being raised by the rising generation about my generation’s materialism is valid. The church is beginning to respond, but we could do better. For the past thirty years, the rising generation has been challenging the established American church to be more engaged in mercy ministry. This is a very welcome balance to an overly spiritualized Evangelical Christianity that in the twentieth century turned a blind eye to social injustice here on earth because of what Francis Shaeffer called the “super spirituality” disguised as Christianity.
Accusation #2: Christianity is guilty of neglecting the poor. Do progressives do more to care for the poor than Christians. No. Here the facts:
- Christians rescued the unwanted babies who had been tossed away like garbage at the human dumps of the Roman Empire, usually simply for being female, and adopted them as cherished children.
- Christians built more hospitals and orphanages to serve the suffering than any other movement in history, while offering a robust framework for human rights and human sexuality that has brought freedom and dignity to millions.
- Christians inspired skyrocketing literacy rates around the world, even introducing written languages into cultures that had none.
- Christians directly inspired universities into existence, including St. Andrews, Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Princeton, and many more, along with sparking the Scientific Revolution under the conviction that science exists “to the glory of God and the benefit of the human race.”
- Christians organized resistance movements against Nazis. The Christian village of Le Chambon in Southern France saved thousands of Jews fleeing from Hitler’s SS.
- Christians fed the movement to abolish slavery not only n America and the United Kingdom but also in India, Africa, the Middle East, and South America.
This same historic commitment to social justice is continuing.
- A 2018 study in the United States found that practicing Christians outpace all other groups in providing food to the poor, donating clothing and furniture to the poor, praying for the poor, giving personal time to serve the poor in their communities, and serving those beyond American borders.
- A recent study by a nonreligious research group looked at a dozen faith communities around Philadelphia. (Using their own metric)…researchers found that a dozen congregations generated $50, 577,098 in economic benefit to their neighborhoods in a single year.
- Further, Christian communities today excel in adoption, foster parenting, fighting human trafficking, and community development (Ibid).
The narrative that Christians today are less involved in pursing social justice than progressive ideologues is simply false. Those messages coming at us from the social media about HOW TO HELP THE POOR are alsoo completely misguided. The rest of this episode answers the third accusation.
Accusation #3: If Christians cared for the poor, they would oppose ECONOMIC INEQUALITY, which is unjust. But Christians know that economic inequality is not unjust. If it were, God would be an immoral monster, since by his providence he has caused one child to be born fabulously wealthy into the House of Saud—the royal family that rules Saudi Arabia, and another child into the poverty of a single mom who is a crack addict. God’s nature is the source of human justice. Yet, God simply does NOT create humans with the same level of talent, financial resources, or opportunity. The idea that economic justice requires leveling the economic playing field comes from the pen of Karl Marx.
So, what is the true economic justice, that Christians should pursue? The word, justice, means equal treatment under the law. That is why lady justice is blindfolded. Justice is the opposite of partiality or favoritism—giving the rich or those with status more legal rights than the poor. ECONOMIC justice means equal treatment under the law—applying laws against theft, unfair weights and measures, or property ownership equally to rich and poor alike. Economic justice for the poor should be fervently pursued by Christians; NOT economic equality. To realize how thoroughly Biblical Christianity rejects the idea that income inequality is unjust, we need to debunk some myths.
FOUR MYTHS ABOUT OVERCOMING POVERTY
Myth #1: Rich people having more means poor people have less. You might have heard the argument, “In America, the richest 1% have 40% of all the wealth. This kind of inequality is unjust.” The wealth gap between the upper class and everyone else is almost always framed in terms of inequality and fairness. However, this apparent injustice is based upon the FALSE idea that the total amount of wealth in a society is FIXED, like the size of an apple pie. If someone gets a bigger slice, that means someone else will only get a smaller slice. If there is only so much to go around, the richer Tom is the poorer Harry is. No one should have more than his fair share. However, that is NOT how economies work.
What if there is a way to make the pie double or triple or quadruple in size? God’s design for cultivating the garden so that humans flourish is for mankind to have the economic and political freedom so that humans can work with 1) material resources, 2) an understanding of human needs, 3) creativity, 4) legal protections (private ownership, patents), 5) information, and 6) technology—to transform natural resources into products that make life better for everyone. God has gifted and called humans to develop the potential of creation. Often humans do this by transforming things that have little economic value into resources and technologies that have great economic value. Light, for instance, has been turned into lasers. Wind turned into electricity. And sand is transformed into fiber optic cables and computer chips. Humans innovate. The late Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, didn’t steal iPhones from homeless people. He invented them, and by being free to create and sell them, Steve Jobs created new wealth. Economic and political freedom enabled Steve Jobs to grow rich; but that same FREEDOM is what led millions of others to get richer. The pie grew. Steve Jobs getting richer didn’t make everyone else poorer. In fact, the wealth he added to the pie, provided jobs and economic value to millions of people in the US and around the world.
In fact, economic INEQUALITY is often the mark of a TRULY FREE society, one that respects the right of every individual to make his own decisions about his gifts and the career he will follow. Because everyone is created in God’s image, everyone should be treated equally before the law. But that doesn’t mean that our efforts produce identical outcomes. Some choose jobs they love that barely pay the bills. Others choose to pursue careers that are risky or boring but lucrative. Others prefer regular work hours that pay less but are stable. A free society allows us to make these different choices. Having the economic and political freedom to choose the career that you WANT to choose is an enormous benefit because it gives you a greater sense of purpose and satisfaction, and even makes life more enjoyable. The only way to level economic outcomes would be to deprive people of this freedom. And whenever that’s been tried, it hasn’t worked. Rather than making everyone equally prosperous, governments who try to force economic equality only succeed in making everyone more equal in their poverty and misery.
Myth #2: Socialism’s redistribution of wealth follows a biblical pattern. In contrast to the so-called "selfish" capitalism of the West, socialism brings mental pictures of picturesque Scandinavian villages, farmers’ markets, smiling people working together for a common cause, an idyllic Camelot where everyone has his needs met, lives in harmony, and prospers. Certainly, the socialist ideal of sharing with others is to be preferred over the pursuit of the almighty buck under free market capitalism. Isn’t that the picture of the early Church in Acts? Actually, NO.
Acts 4 is an example of voluntary generosity to meet a temporary crisis, not a state-run economy. There is nothing about the generosity of the hometown believers doing everything they could to take care of their brothers and sisters in Christ who overstayed the shekels they had brought on their trip to Jerusalem to suggest the state confiscating property or crushing the market economy that allowed the believers to sell their privately owned land and give the proceeds to care for their brothers and sisters. That would have been socialism. There is no biblical teaching to support a government owning the means of production and controlling the economy.
Many Christians, today, confuse the utopian idea of everyone sharing and being guaranteed a job with the term, socialism. They have a misunderstanding of the term. Socialism is government control of the economy. The utopian dream of fairness has been used repeatedly by political leaders to take over ownership of the means of production—and that has never led to utopia but always to enormous human suffering. The twentieth century was one giant lab experiment. Political leaders, Lenin, then Stalin in Russia, Mao Zedong in China, Pol Pot in Cambodia, and Fidel Castro of Cuba, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela played on class envy, the hallmark of Marxism, fomented rage by the poor against the land, business, and factory owners (the Bourgeoisie), promised a utopia of justice, and took over government control of the economy. In every case, it was a disaster, leading to enormous slaughter and human suffering. From 85-100 million people were slaughtered because political leaders persuaded naïve people that the government (THEM) should be in control to bring about justice.
Myth #3: Capitalism is evil because it is based on greed. When many people think about businesspeople in a market economy, they think of characters in movies–like Ebenezer Scrooge, or the bankers in “Mary Poppins,” or Gordon Gekko in the movie “Wall Street.” These stereotypes reinforce the idea that greed is the very essence of capitalism. If capitalism really were all about greed, that would be a big problem for Christians who believe greed is a sin. However, capitalism is not all about greed and here are 3 reasons why:
- Taking responsibility for your own interests is not the same as greed. According to the Oxford Dictionary GREED is a strong desire for more wealth, possessions, power, etc. than a person needs. Wanting to make or sell a product to earn the money to put food on your table or provide a roof over your family is not SELFISH—it is about taking personal responsibility. Any successful economic system must reward one who takes personal responsibility for doing some form of work in exchange for the material goods he needs for himself and his family. That is called a market economy.
- Capitalism encourages servanthood. If a carpenter is to succeed, he will need to figure out how to meet your needs. The freedom of a market economy enables those who are most successful at meeting the needs of his customers to thrive. In contrast, a government-controlled economy rewards the political group the politician wants to reward. It therefore destroys the motivation of the worker to provide a product that effectively meets the need of others in order to be successful. EVERY socialistic attempt to put the government between the product produced and the economic reward has FAILED. Greed exists everywhere and in every society. But market economies at least force businesses to be oriented towards the needs of others.
- In a market economy, success requires a host of virtues. Entrepreneurs must have patience and discipline to save their wealth rather than consume it all. Rather than being self-absorbed, entrepreneurs must anticipate the needs of others. Through hard work and disciplined choices, they discover new ways of creating and combining resources in order to offer goods and services that serve other people. To thrive in a market economy, people must develop and practice patience, courage, hard work, creativity, and trust.
- In stark contrast here is a look at socialism.
- Communism did not come to Russia as the result of a popular uprising: it was imposed on her by intellectuals hiding behind slogans of “equality.”
- Vladimir Lenin led his Bolshevik Party to victory in a three-year civil war. He began to centralize large chunks of the Russian economy.
- He discovered that bureaucrats in Moscow were neither motivated nor competent to manage distant factories and farms. Disaster ensued.
- His regime dumped bank notes into the market causing catastrophic inflation. In 1923 prices were 1 million times greater than prices before Lenin’s revolution. The starvation that ensued was horrific.
- After Lenin took over the economy, the largescale industrial production in 1920 was 18% of what it had been in 1913 causing enormous suffering.
- Lenin first slaughtered the wealthier peasants, then tried to force the poorer peasants to sell their grain below market prices ending in massive starvation.
Myth #4 Christians should support government programs that give more money to the poor. Although there is a place for material support as relief—i.e. the urgent and temporary provision of emergency aid to reduce immediate suffering from natural or man-made crisis like hurricanes, long term poverty is not caused by the lack of material resources. American history more than proves this point. In 1964 President Lyndon Johnson launched “The War on Poverty in America.” In the 50 years since then, U.S. taxpayers have spent over $22 trillion on anti-poverty programs. Yet according to the Census Bureau, there has been no net progress in reducing poverty since then. The poverty rate has undulated slowly, falling by two to three percentage points during good economic times and rising by a similar amount when the economy slows. It has remained steady at between 12 and 15 % despite, the fact that anti-poverty or welfare spending during that period has simply exploded. These facts point to the reality that there is a huge difference between caring for the poor and caring for the poor effectively! So, how do we overcome poverty?
THE CALLING OF THE CHURCH--A HOLISTIC APPROACH TO HELPING THE POOR
Human flourishing in God’s design was the result of shalom (harmony, wholeness) in the 4 relationships of life: 1) Walking in harmony with God’s righteousness written on their hearts, Adam and Eve would have respected private ownership (theft being forbidden by the 8th commandment) and honest business practices (lying being forbidden in the 9th commandment). 2) They would be experiencing pre-fall wholeness--internal peace with themselves—no sense of inferiority, insecurity, or competitiveness, or envy. Sinful selfishness has not exerted itself—and their call to vocation was the call to use their talents, innovation, and resources to make products to serve others. 3) They would experiencing pre-fall harmony in their horizontal relationships with each other; their hearts were not governed by greed, selfishness, cheating each other, or jealousy. 4) Pre-fall Adam and Eve experienced harmony in the created order. There was no poverty that had resulted from natural calamity like, earthquakes, floods, or volcanoes erupting. But because of the fall, every human being is suffering from a poverty of spiritual intimacy with God, a poverty of internal wholeness and emotional health within himself, a poverty of community, and a poverty of stewardship. Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert illustrate how this combination of deficits in shalom (harmony), leads to financial poverty in the case of Mary, who lived in a slum in East Africa. They write,
As a female in a male dominated society, Mary is subjected to polygamy, to regular verbal and physical abuse from her husband to fewer years of schooling than males, and to an entire cultural system that tells her that she is inferior. As a result, Mary has a poverty of being and lacks the confidence to look for a job, leading her into material poverty.
Desperately Mary decides to be self-employed but needs a loan to get her business started. Unfortunately, her poverty of community rears its ugly head as the local loan shark exploits Mary, demanding a rate of 300% on her loan of $25.00, contributing to Mary’s material poverty…Mary starts a business of selling homemade charcoal in the local market just like hundreds of others just like her. The market is glutted with charcoal sellers, which keeps the prices very low. But it never even occurs to Mary to sell something else because she does not understand that she has been given the creativity and capacity to have dominion over creation. In other words, her poverty of stewardship locks her into an unprofitable business, further contributing to her material poverty…Mary goes to the witch doctor for help (a manifestation of her spiritual poverty). The healer tells Mary that her difficult life is a result of angry ancestral spirits that need to be appeased through the sacrificing of a bull….which further contributes to her material poverty.
This correct understanding of the causes of poverty explain why it is so difficult to eliminate, and why God’s plan, for churches that have a holistic view of life care for the poor, makes so much sense. The truth is that only the Church of Jesus Christ has all the resources required to overcome poverty. For this reason, I praise God that I see the rising generation of Christians calling the church back to ministry to the poor. And yet, I want to close with this thought: I believe that in the circle of every man reading this blog or listening to this podcast there are teenagers who will reject Christianity because they believe the message widely broadcast in the social media—that Christians are hypocrites’ who don’t care about social justice or the poor. If they did, they would oppose the greedy free-market economy, and embrace socialism, economic equality, and big government programs. They will believe that lie—UNLESS we intervene! The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him. (Prov 18:17).
Questions for Guiding the Rising Generation to think about this material.
- How would you answer the charge that Christians are guilty of neglecting the poor?
- How would you respond to the statement, “Rich people having more means that poor people have less.”
- How would you respond to the statement, “Socialism follows the pattern of the early church in Acts 4.
- How would you answer the charge that capitalism is evil because it is based on greed?
