One way of measuring the health of a society is the quality of life people can have with little wealth.
This is a metric that should be of particular interest to Christians. If we are not ourselves poor, it is our job to care about those who are. And since we are called to imitate Jesus, who lived in poverty, we should always be asking the awkward question of how we might become more poor.
The goal for Christians should be not the elimination of poverty—Jesus said that is futile, anyway—but actually to encourage more of it. Through poverty, we become less attached to our own power and pride. We learn to depend more on God and each other. A Christian society should want to ensure that poverty is a viable option.
The trouble is, while American society is especially good among wealthy countries at producing poverty, it is especially bad at making the lives of the poor tolerable. More and more of society’s basic functions have come to depend on the accumulation of private wealth, while instilling fear that a good life is otherwise impossible. The wealthy feel they need to amass more than they actually need, just to be sure, and the poor are sent away empty. Just for being poor, people risk exposure to the elements, lack of health care, criminalization and the inability to participate in cultural life.
For my parents’ generation, it was possible to attend a public university at almost negligible cost. Graduates could aim for a job with a pension; and if nothing else, they had Social Security to look forward to. Housing was plentiful and comparatively affordable. Luxuries of many kinds were more expensive than they are in today’s age of globalized manufacturing, but basics were cheaper. It is common to hear people who grew up in mid-20th-century America say, “We didn’t even know that we were poor.”
Since then, American society has veered in a different direction. Because of growing reliance on student debt to fund education and private savings to fund retirement, a cultured life is much harder to reach without piling up worldly wealth. (Don’t get me started on health care.) Fear of losing out completely compels us to accumulate rapaciously.
I feel this fear every day—that I will fail to provide adequately for my family’s future, that without too much we won’t have enough. It makes being generous harder. Voluntary poverty would mean not just giving up some luxuries, it would mean sacrificing my children’s future.
Members of religious orders, and to some extent of the military, know a different condition. They inhabit systems designed to support modest living through collective provisioning. Jesuits take a vow of poverty, but they rarely live in fear; their housing, health care and other basic needs are taken care of. They can be freer to live simply and pursue their spiritual callings as a result. The military provides similar systems for health care and education, too, and these make a life of service more possible.
A good society should be concerned not just with getting people out of poverty but enabling them to inhabit it with dignity. And dignity does not mean having to navigate degrading, means-tested programs that demand we prove our deservingness. Dignity begins with sharing wealth in common, as the apostles did after Pentecost. Similarly, medieval societies often ensured that even the poorest people had access to wood from the forest and leftovers in the fields. These were the “commons” that were available to anyone.
Poverty as we know it today is not just a matter of lacking money; it is the consequence of a society where you need money to do anything at all.
When staying at an ashram in India many years ago, I remember seeing the flocks of sadhus—older men who had entered the phase of ascetic renunciation before death, begging for their daily rice as a group, in a culture where such a retirement plan was considered normal. Part of me wishes I could look forward to a retirement like that.
If Jesus and his followers were traveling around the United States today, would anyone tolerate their encampments? How long before they would be thrown into jail for putting their faith in God above dollars? How could their families forgive them for failing to contribute to a 401(k)?
For those who want a policy strategy toward poverty with dignity, Natalie Foster has written an important book called The Guarantee. It is a blueprint for an economy based on providing for basic needs—the modern equivalent of the common forest, with guaranteed minimum access to income, education and health care.
While waiting for our ship of state to somehow reverse course, we can reorient how we judge our situation. We can ask: How healthy is our society from the perspective of the poor?
This is not just a question for the sake of the “less fortunate.” For Christians seeking to deepen our discipleship, we should ask for our own sake: Is our society well organized for the poverty to which we are called?
