Let’s talk about the culture war we should be waging. When we think about what’s important to the “religious right” or “white evangelicals,” the focus tends to be on social issues: abortion, the role of religion in public life, conflicts around sexual orientation and gender identity and, lately, controversies. on critical race theory.
Social issues determine which businesses conservative Christians deem moral or immoral, good or bad. There have been calls to boycott Disney for his apparently pro-LGBT stance. Disney too angry conservatives by pledging to help employees travel to other states to obtain an abortion. On the other hand, Hobby Lobby is considered a “Christian” company because of its stance on contraceptionIt is “Jesus saves, my brother” coffee cups and their commitment to print “Full-page ads celebrating the true meaning of Christmas, Easter and Independence Day.” A non-profit Christian legal organization puts companies appear on a “nice” or “naughty” list each year based on their use of the term “Christmas” in relation to the more general celebration of “holidays.” There was even a little dust in a specialized corner of Christian Twitter about “Whole Foods Christians” and “Cracker Barrel Christians.” This is what the culture wars are fueled by. It’s the subject of trending hashtags, indignation and denunciations.
But people who debate the morality (or lack thereof) of Disney or Hobby Lobby rarely discuss how much paid time off these companies give their employees or whether they pay a living wage or what the wealth disparity is between their highest and lowest employees or whether they have adequate maternity leave policies or how much a company gives back financially to a community.
Meanwhile, economic disparities continue to widen. In 2020, Reported bench that the middle class has been declining since the early 1970s. Since the 1980s, the largest increase in income has occurred among the richest 5% of earners in the United States. The report concludes that over the past five decades – throughout our lives for many of us – there has been a “long and steady increase in income inequality”. Yet despite the popularity of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in the 2020 Democratic primaries, a Pew report that same year, said that while a majority of Americans think there is “too much economic inequality” in the country, fewer than half consider it a top policy priority. The report also said Republicans are likely to blame individuals rather than systemic forces for economic inequality, citing lifestyle choices or the fact that “some people work harder than others.”
But how would our contemporary understanding of politics change if economic justice were in fact a “traditional value”? The indifference that right-wing Christians often show toward wealth disparity goes against thousands of years of Christian teaching. While Christians throughout church history cared deeply about sexual and personal morality, the keystone of a Christian vision of social order was the flourishing of the economically disadvantaged. When church leaders of all ages have cited evidence of social disorder, they have consistently pointed to vast economic inequalities.
It is not news that Christianity, like many other religions, values concern for the poor. Throw a dart at the Bible and you’ll likely come across a verse about helping the most vulnerable, caring for orphans and widows, loving “the least of these.” And most conservative Christians today would affirm the value of individual charity. But what strikes me as I listen to voices throughout history is not only that Christian leaders have called for charity toward the poor, but that they have also emphasized economic justice . The poor were not simply those masses we must condescendingly remember in our Christmas gifts; they had the right to material well-being. The rich were denounced as being in grave spiritual danger. Beyond this, the Church proclaimed that society – including government – had a responsibility to rein in greed and ensure a just distribution of wealth.
Basil the Great, one of the most influential theologians in the Christian tradition and a 4th-century bishop, asserted that the rich who refused to share their possessions with the poor were thieves and thieves. thieves: “He who strips another of his clothes is called a thief. And should not those who could clothe naked people and do not do so receive the same name? The bread on your board belongs to the hungry; the coat in your wardrobe belongs to those who are naked. He thunders: “the money in your coffers belongs to the most deprived”. The rich, he said, are “the murderers of the poor.”
He condemned making “profit from misery” and “making money from tears” through the exploitation of workers. Basil drew from the Scriptures that God had made all the earth communal property. It was greed, he said, that created a division in private property, and greed that caused the sophisticated or cunning to hoard their wealth. This kind of thinking is not unique to Basil.
John Chrysostom, archbishop of Constantinople in the 4th century, famous for his preaching, delivered scathing sermons about those who embraced privilege and luxury while others remained poor. He castigated government leaders for their opulence and neglect of the poor.
Similar language is found among Christian leaders throughout history – Lactantius, Augustine and Martin Luther. Healing the social order, these leaders believed, required the wealthy to change their motives in light of Christ, and to use their wealth not for private interests but for the public good. One after the other, a chorus of voices usury condemned — the loan of money at interest — except in very specific circumstances. This at least makes one wonder what Augustine or Basil would say about student loan reform, credit card interest rates, or calls for a minimum wage increase.
We can view these statements from Church history as mere idealisms, products of a naive era in which the dynamics and benefits of capitalism were not yet discovered. But we find similar ideas repeated in modern times.
Reformation era figures like English Bishop John Hooper railed against the rich of his diocese as “captors and eaters of the poor” and declared that “these men, unless they repent, cannot be saved.” Hooper certainly believed in the necessity of private charity, but not to the exclusion of systemic economic change. In a letter From King Edward VI’s Secretary of State, Hooper asked for “reparation” so that the wealth of “every county” would not be “taken into the hands of a few men” and that the rich would not be permitted to buy “when things are going well “. good cheap, to then resell at a high price. He called for what we would call today economic regulation.
Jonathan Edwards, famous for his terrifying sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (and, thanks to Lin-Manuel Miranda, for being Aaron Burr’s grandfather), issued fire-and-brimstone warnings to the winners of capitalism – those who would “buy as cheaply and sell as dearly as possible” – as much as to those who commit sexual immorality. Those who denounce “greed» finds a surprising ally in this puritan preacher. A recent biographer Edwards said he believed the “catastrophic price fluctuations” could be attributed to “a greedy spirit” among those who wanted to “advance their private interests at the cost of great loss and great damage to public society” . Edwards went as far as preach After widespread crop failures, because his community had not redistributed its wealth to meet the needs of the poor, God, in judgment on the rich, redistributed poverty through famine.
The 19th century Anglican bishop Brooke Foss Westcott He also insisted that Christianity deals “not only with personal character” but “also with the state, social classes, and social conditions.” He asked his priests to monitor labor conditions in their parish districts and seek economic justice. Christian leaders continued to advocate economic reforms well into the 20th century, but the fundamentalist-modernist controversy divided America’s Protestant churches. Evangelicals, fundamentalists, and others with more theologically conservative religious beliefs have become increasingly silent on economic justice. There are important exceptions to this. Catholic social teaching – and leaders like Dorothy Day – defended the union movement. Black church traditions also maintained beliefs that white conservatives and progressives dismissed. Even among Western white evangelicals, voices like John Stott, Ron Sider, and Jim Wallis have called for their movement to address economic disparities.
Likewise, the global Church, which grew exponentially in the 20th century, continued to advocate for economic justice. David Gitari, archbishop of the Anglican Church of Kenya from 1997 to 2002, identified as evangelical and was conservative on social issues. But he criticized American evangelicals for their tendency “to focus more on spiritual issues and ignore sociopolitical issues that also affect the individual as a whole.” Yet because of divisions among white Christians, advocating for economic justice and addressing income inequality are often seen as the preserve of a small subculture of religious progressivism instead of what they are. : a major concern of traditional Christian orthodoxy which is found throughout time.
Of course, many Christian voices of the past preceded widespread democracy. Their context was different, but we Christians should not easily ignore such a consistent witness to Christian tradition. It’s not that these leaders didn’t care about today’s “culture war” issues – they certainly had what today would be considered traditional or conservative mores regarding sex, gender, and gender. ‘abortion. But this Church teaching on economic justice highlights how the marriage of social and religious conservatism with libertarian and pro-capitalist economics is a bizarre modern invention.
If we do not talk about economic justice, if we are not passionate about fighting extreme wealth inequality, we offer an emaciated vision of Christian political engagement, a vision shaped more by contemporary American discourse than by the long history of the Church.