Faith, Politics, and Poverty

It takes a lot to really shock me. Through 18 years of ordained life, 15 years as a journalist, and a three-year stint working in a Third World country, I have been exposed to what the Episcopal prayer book calls “all sorts and conditions” of humanity.

But a recent article in "The New York Times" left me dumbfounded. The story is about a hotel in the Bowery, that section of New York City also known as Skid Row, home to the homeless, the addicted, and the destitute.

In recent years, the Bowery has been making something of a comeback, discovered by the hip and trendy. The inevitable culture clashes of those two worlds have become a marketing tool for the owner of a hotel that opened last summer, the Bowery House.

The Bowery House is actually an ancient flophouse, a warehouse for the “least of these” who occupy the bottom rungs of society. Part of it still is. On the building’s second floor, men pay less than $10 a night to sleep in cramped cubicles the size of walk-in closets, topped with chicken wire. Half the stalls in the shared bathroom are missing doors.

Directly above them, on the third and fourth floors, hip, affluent young men and women pay up $129 a night for what the paper calls “a refined version of the gritty experience below.” Their cubicles have custom-made mattresses with luxurious linens. Their shared bathrooms have marble sinks and heated floors. Their towels are Ralph Lauren.

One of the owners of the hotel refers to the destitute residents of the second floor as “an asset to the property.” Taking a reporter on a tour of the second floor, the owner pointed to men’s underwear and tattered clothing hanging on a fire escape to dry as a good “publicity shot” for the hotel.

Selling the “Ralph Lauren” version of a flophouse experience, considering the poor as “assets” and “good publicity shots” is dehumanizing and humiliating. It is revolting.

And it also illustrates the growing chasm between rich and poor in this country, and the attitudes of the “haves” toward the ‘have nots.’

Just as Jesus had things to say about the political issues of taxes and the treatment of the poor in his day, so are faith and politics intertwined today, perhaps in no place more than in the issues of money and the economy.

The growing gap between the rich and poor is not just a political issue, it is a theological, ethical, and moral one.

The president’s calls to increase taxes on the wealthy and close tax loopholes are greeted with cries of “class warfare”  from his political opponents. There is, indeed, class warfare going on in this country, but it is not the rich who are the victims.

About nine years ago I helped research and write a curriculum for congregations on the systemic causes of poverty. At that time I was appalled to learn that one in every nine people in this country lived in poverty; among children the number was one in six.

Less than a decade later, those numbers have risen to one in every six people in the richest nation in the world living below the poverty line; among children it is one in four. Our own state has the third highest percentage of people living in poverty.

Yet any attempt to expand social programs or to raise taxes among the wealthiest of our citizens is met with outrage and cries of class warfare. And many of those who scream the loudest call themselves Christians.

“God Hates Taxes” is one popular sign at Tea Party rallies. Others express what the Times called in a recent editorial “the new resentment of the poor.”  Unless, of course, they can be used as assets or publicity shots.

In a recent essay, theologian Susan Brooks Thistlewaite described the issue this way: “We need to understand that the so-called Christian underpinnings of the anti-tax, anti-government, anti-the-poor approach to public policy is profoundly unChristian.”

 Money has become a narcotic, Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann says. “We hardly notice our own prosperity or the poverty of so many others,” he says. “The great contradiction is that as we have more and more money, we have less and less generosity — less and less public money for the needy, less charity for the neighbor.”

 Consumerism, he adds, “has become a demonic spiritual force among us, and the theological question facing us is whether the gospel has the power to help us withstand it.”

Make no mistake about it. Scripture, both the Old and New Testaments, is clearer on this issue than any other.

The No. 1 responsibility for people of faith is to care for the poor, particularly single women, children, and immigrants — those who were the poorest of the poor in Biblical times and in our own.

Scripture is clear about the consequences of ignoring this responsibility. Nowhere is that plainer than in the Old Testament book of the prophet Amos, who lived in a time when Israel was at the peak of national prosperity.

At the same time, this affluence led to gross inequities between the elites and the poor. Through manipulation of debt and credit, wealthy landowners amassed capital and estates at the expense of small farmers and business owners.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Into this scene came the prophet Amos, who denounced the decadent opulence, immorality, and smug piety of the elites who “trampled the head of the poor into the dust of the earth.”

The way out of the plight, Amos says, is through justice and righteousness, through social equality and concern for the disadvantaged.

Jesus echoes Amos’ calls for justice. As Christians we are to work to bring about the kingdom of God here on earth, he says.

That means we are to work together for the common good. We are to take care of one another through shared sacrifice.

In a nation like ours, it means that those of us who have more are morally obligated to pay higher taxes to make sure health care is available to everyone, that social services are there for those who need them, that no child goes to bed hungry and that every child has a chance for a good education.

That is what it means to love our neighbors. That is how we show our love for God. That is how the gospel counters the demonic spiritual force of greed that is so rampant in our culture.