Open Letter to the #Occupy Movement
(Video and analysis: Hans Rosling’s 200 Countries, 200 Years)
Liberal social policies are “actually pretty conservative because the biblical teachings are from the prophets, from the Torah, from the Old Testament, from Hebrew scripture, and from Jesus.” Dr. Paul Alexander
Poverty is a bad thing in the eyes of most people—Christians included. But why do we see poverty that way? How we answer that question influences the kinds of things we do to try to reduce or relieve poverty. The why shapes the where, when and how.
So far in this series, we’ve considered briefly what poverty is (relative vs. absolute) and surveyed the causes of poverty in Scripture. We’ve assumed that poverty is a negative that should be reduced as much as possible wherever it exists.
But not everyone sees it that way. From the days of Benedict of Nursia to today,1 Roman Catholicism has included some who take vows of poverty, and many evangelicals teach that average Christians should increase their relative poverty in order to relieve others’ absolute poverty.2 A few imply that the relatively poor (all of us, compared to those who are richer) should become much more poor so that those who are relatively poorer than we are (“the needy around us”) can become less so.3
But Scripture provides reasons to view poverty as a condition we should avoid in our own lives as well as the lives of others.
Before we consider some of the best reasons to fight poverty, we need to take one faulty reason off the table. Unfortunately, it may well be the most popular reason in the American mind today. The worst reason to fight poverty is, in a word, inequality.
