The great evangelical weakness, pt. 3 - Poverty
I spent some time today talking to my good friend Carolyn about poverty. She works with it regionally and understands a lot about its causes. I hope she’ll write a guest post on the subject here soon. In the meantime, she helped me see some connections between our stalwart evangelical individualism and our lack of understanding about poverty. (See parts one and two in this series of posts).
Let’s say a guy comes by the church for food from the pantry (and let me make it clear that I’m making up these details, not trying to represent some specific real-life person). Because of the kindness and care he receives from Joanie M., he comes to church and accepts Christ. He even gets into some counseling and kicks his drug habit, which certainly contributed to his poverty. Because of our elevation of the individual, evangelicals tend to think that his problems with poverty should be over - or if not, it’s his fault. This is exactly where our belief in the power of self leads us.
But because this guy grew up in a culture of poverty, it isn’t so simple. He has a tenth-grade education, but he really stopped trying after fifth grade. He has few employable skills. He lives with five other people from his extended family who haven’t made the transition to faith with him, so he won’t get a lot of encouragement to clean himself up and get moving - quite the opposite. The house they occupy has had its water and electricity cut off many times for non-payment, so even staying clean and presentable for a job is a challenge. But he can’t leave that house since he has nowhere else to go.
Even more, he has some simple but chronic health problems - perhaps a recurring abscess tooth or severe allergies. Most of us would get treatment for such things and miss only a little work, but he has no health insurance and no money to pay for these basic medical services, so they may keep him from working regularly or even hamper his performance in a job-training program.
I could go on (and I hope Carolyn will read this and add to it) but the point is that saving the individual’s soul, while of eternal significance, is only the beginning. There’s a whole culture of poverty which still reaches out to enslave this man, and it takes the whole church community to pull him out of it.
And all of this is complicated further when race issues enter the picture, which is the subject for pt. 4…
The great evangelical weakness, pt. 2
I thought I’d get back to this topic sooner. Part 1 was more than two weeks ago.
Whether the issue is racism, poverty, missions or even salvation, we in the evangelical churches in America have a weakness that keeps us from seeing the whole picture. The weakness is our ingrained belief in the centrality and power of SELF. Call it rugged individualism or self-sufficiency if you like. Just know that it is a belief about our place in the universe that is part of the genetic code of Western civilization, and especially American civilization. Some of the loftiness expressions of this perspective can be found in our formative documents. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unailenable Rights…” These are wonderful truths, and the more we apply them, the better America is (and the better the world is).
The problem for evangelicals is that we fail to see BEYOND self when we think about poverty, racism, discipleship, etc. Here are some examples from discipleship:
- Communion: In our church we instruct people to take it as it is passed OR (for the extra-spiritual) to hold it and pray on your own to God before taking it at your own pace. But read through the Gospel accounts of the Lord’s Supper or look at Paul’s description in 1 Corinthians 11, and you’ll find communion primarily as a shared experience.
- Bible Study: It’s a given that Christians are people who have a regular quiet time for Bible-reading (or at least pretend to). Hey, I believe in this and we’d be foolish not to read Scripture at home since we have the opportunity. But from the days of the early church until well after Gutenberg, Bible-reading was first and foremost a communal activity. It isn’t so today.
- Gathering with the church: The congregation with the best music, preaching and youth activity gets the most business, so we at MHCC try to offer the best. Even so, in the consumer lifestyle (the ultimate expression of radical individualism) church is just one of many desirable weekend activities, and it’s only a small percentage who put the need of the Body to gather ahead of the right to choose among a hundred other things.
So how does this inform our thinking about race and poverty? Look for part three…
The great evangelical weakness, pt. 1
I wrote in an earlier post about how difficult it is to work constructively against race problems since we live in racially segregated worlds. Here are a few more thoughts…
In Divided by Faith, a book on how evangelical religion interacts with the race problems in America, 
Michael Emerson and Christian Smith did extensive interviews with evangelical Christians to get their opinions on issues of race. Emerson and Smith came away concluding that the vast majority of evangelicals want racism to be solved. Much to the chagrin of the popular press I’m sure, we’re not bigots.
But we are too simplistic in our thinking.
In interview after interview, the only thing white evangelical Christians can think to do about race problems is to make friends across racial lines and treat everyone well. These are undeniably positive actions, but they reveal shallow thinking. Indeed, Divided by Faith points out that this same approach - just treat others well - was taught as the Christian response to slavery and Jim Crow. In hindsight, we can see the enormous structural changes that needed to take place in those times. Kindness is better than hatred and violence, but you can see that to advocate nothing more than kindness in the Jim Crow era would have been entirely inadequate and even insulting.
Today, the obvious structures (slavery, Jim Crow laws) have changed. But (as I tried to show in the earlier post) all is not well. Yet we keep pulling the same tool out of our tool kit - “Let’s all just get along” or “If people will repent, society will change, and race problems will go away”. Is there something at the heart of our evangelical type of faith that keeps us from seeing problems beyond the individual level?
I have come to believe that there is. My hope and plan is to write about it here as a recurring theme for the next several weeks, interspersed with other stuff. I’d be glad to hear what you think.
Weight-loss, self-discipline and racial enequality
Here’s my summary of a little parable I just read in the book Divided by Faith, by Michael O. Emerson and Christian Smith.
Imagine that two friends, Maridel and Parker, decide to lose weight by checking in a six-week camp-style program (O.K., a “fat farm”). Upon arrival, they are separated and sent to different compounds.
In Maridel’s compound there are weights, running trails, aerobics classes, basketball courts and every other kind of exercise equipment you can think of. Maridel is surrounded by people in great shape who constantly testify to the wonderful benefits of good health. And the food is always healthy and delicious.
Parker’s compound is different. There is no exercise equipment other than the great outdoors. The staff members are all overweight, and nearly all of them have tried and failed many times to keep the pounds off. The food is delicious and plentiful, but it is loaded with calories and fat. Recreation is provided in the form of a large TV and lots of movies.
Maridel and Parker don’t see each other until the first weigh-in after two weeks, and each knows nothing of the other’s compound. At the weigh-in, Maridel is 12 pounds lighter, but Parker has actually gained a couple of pounds. Maridel can’t believe that Parker is wasting this great opportunity. She chides him for his lack of will power and tells him that if he will just discipline himself, he can lose weight. And Parker agrees. “I’ve got to eat less, and get outside and walk more” he tells himself. “I can do it! There’s no one stopping me. It’s up to me.” But it is incredibly hard for Parker, given the environment at his compound, and the best he can do is maintain his present weight, while Maridel continues to shed the pounds.
Emerson and Smith use this parable to illustrate the problem of racial inequality in America and our difficulties in diagnosing the problem. White evangelicals tend to think of solutions in terms of individuals - personal responsibility, vision, and self-discipline. All of these are valuable, but they fail to account for the structural problems in America that contribute to inequality. As a result, whites believe that race problems are solved if we simply treat each other with kindness and make discrimination illegal. If we can all “just get along”, there is no racism, right? And if it’s against the law to discriminate in the job market, housing, and schools, then everybody has equal opportunity, right?
Parker and Maridel each have to make a choice to lose weight, and then work hard to make it happen. But Maridel’s chances are dramatically better. For Parker, it would take immense self-motivation and discipline to do it.
And being isolated from each other makes understanding nearly impossible.
More on this eye-opening book later…
