The 1996 Lord Acton Essay Competition

A Theological Perspective on the Rise of Poverty in America

R. Dean Davenport
Georgetown College

But when the disciples saw it, they were indignant, saying, "To what purpose is this waste? For this fragrant oil might have been sold for much and given to the poor." But when Jesus was aware of it, He said to them, "Why do you trouble the woman? For she has done a good work for Me. For you have the poor with you always, but Me you do not have always."

Matthew 26:8-11

One of the most influential books of the past year concerning the historical relationship between welfare and poverty in America has been Marvin Olasky's Tragedy of American Compassion. The reason for the popularity of this book can be explained by the title alone, for it clearly enunciates the growing disillusionment that many Americans have with the current welfare system, and it summarizes our feeling that somehow our good intentions, like the those of Jesus' disciples, have succeeded in obtaining nothing but a sharp rebuke. The present crisis of poverty in the midst of a monolithic federal welfare system has grown to such a magnitude that even the Jesus Seminar would probably find it hard not to give these words, about the poor being with us perpetually, an authentic bead or two. It is now much more difficult to doubt the malevolent effects that the welfare state has had on the inner city than it was when Charles Murray's Losing Ground was first published in the early eighties. To see how disillusioned we have become, one needs only to remember that thirty years ago the end of economic deprivation in American was optimistically proclaimed by the Great Society. Richard John Neuhaus was certainly correct when he said that Americans are now suffering from "mendacity fatigue," realizing "that they have, over many years, been lied to about poverty."¹

The chronic striation of society along economic lines brings a profound crisis to modern liberal ideology which has always been at some level committed to technocratic means for progress and social advancement. Liberal sociologists are usually distinguished from conservatives by their attribution of the primary cause of social problems to structural and institutional evil which thereby alleviates individuals from bearing the primary responsibility for their condition. There is certainly a great deal of truth in the liberal approach, but as Lawrence Mead points out in his New Politics of Poverty, this approach has been overemphasized to the point that it has resulted in a "deterministic style of analysis" which he terms sociologism. This form of analysis

construes the personality as essentially passive: The poor are seen as inert, not active. They are spoken of in the passive voice. They are people who are or have been disadvantaged in multiple ways. They do not do things but rather have things done to them. They are objects, not the subjects of actions.²

This objectification of the poor is not harmless and has resulted in an inability to see poor people as potentially proactive individuals who can act independently and responsibly and are capable of freeing themselves from their circumstances. As Mead continues,

Sociologism provides a theory for helping people, but not for making them independent. Liberals speak of "emancipating" the poor, by which they mean helping them do difficult things...To a conservative, the idea of giving people power is self-contradictory. Power, as conservatives understand it, is not something anybody outside a person can give. To help people to work may well free them from a burden, but to be empowered they must become able to shoulder the burdens themselves. If only government makes work possible, then only government is powerful.³

If Mead's analysis is correct, then it would certainly help explain why our current welfare system has been so ineffective in curing the problems of poverty. If the only way to permanently free people from the shackles of poverty is to instill in them a desire to free themselves, and if the current system does not kindle this desire, then no amount of social regulation or welfare legislation can be effective. This is precisely the reason why many Americans feel the modern welfare state has been so unsuccessful in curing the problem of poverty. Mead is not the first one to argue this position; a little over a century ago Lord Acton himself reminded us of this principle when he wrote that:

The remedy for poverty is not in the material resources of the rich, but in the moral resources of the poor. These, which are lulled and deadened by money-gifts, can be raised and strengthened only by personal influence, sympathy, charity. Money-gifts save the poor man who gets them, but give longer life to pauperism in the country.⁴

This perspective on giving money-gifts to the poor is also the presupposition behind Jesus' rebuke of his disciples's desire to give to the poor in this particular verse. Jesus was not denying the place for charity, but he was firmly grounded in a religious approach to the analysis of social problems that took into account human freedom and dignity. He recognized that the problem with selling the oil and giving to the poor was not a simple issue of compassion versus compassionless actions, but rather a manifestation of myopia on the part of the disciples. They did not see that the opportunity for the woman to sacrifice the oil and exercise her compassion and charity toward an individual, namely Jesus, whom she cared about and desired to help was of greater importance than the opportunity of the poor to passively receive the charity. Jesus was interested in long-term moral development that could eliminate "pauperism in the country," not the short-term money-gifts that could only temporarily "save the poor man who gets them." After rebuking the disciples for their suggestion, He then commended the woman and proclaimed that "wherever this gospel is preached in the whole world, what this woman has done will also be told as a memorial to her."⁵ Jesus knew that mankind does not live by bread alone and that the poor could not be emancipated by welfare alone.

This is precisely the lesson that so desperately needs to be remembered by us today. The tragedy of our compassion is not in our compassion per se, but rather our obilviousness to the fact that money-gifts should never be considered superior to, nor radically separated from, the development of moral character. Americans are taxed, and told in so many words that they are relieved from the burden of providing for the poor because their money is being directed in their name by the government. But because paying taxes is a legal obligation, neither charity (which is voluntary) nor the accompanying free exercise and development of moral agency can be encouraged by this system. This forced "charity" not only breeds resentment, but also robs people of the opportunity to give voluntarily and the experience of making a sacrifice to help and show love toward another person. Having your oil confiscated and sold, and the proceeds given to "the poor" does not have the same moral or psychological effect as does personal and voluntary charity.

The stripping away of everything except monetary considerations from our welfare institutions did not happen in a vacuum. It is just another symptom of an even more widely spread pessimism in our society concerning the value and unique abilities of human beings. The current system of materialistic charity is just another example of how our society has forgotten that religious belief is the vision which inspires and motivates human creativity and that "where there is no vision, the people cast off restraint."⁶ The future-oriented vision that religion provides is the key element in overcoming poverty because it is essential to the maintenance of a long-term perspective and the development of moral character, which are essential for an individual to progressively gain more and more control over his or her environment. A free and virtuous society is always one that encourages and rewards human creativity and respects the fact that human creativity comes from a divine source. This type of society is always the most successful in eliminating societal poverty. Planned societies and redistributive economic systems never succeed in the long run because they have embedded in their methodology a materialistic philosophy coupled with an abiding pessimism concerning the future and an extremely depraved view of the creative potential of human beings. In static economic systems, social engineering accompanying static population growth is required in order to successfully avoid the imminent economic disasters because people are viewed as essentially passive victims of the environment. In these societies, dynamic and spontaneously generated economic systems based on human freedom and "superstitious" religious beliefs are seen as not having a reliable method of calculation and therefore as inherently unable to recognize and plan for future dangers. Even the theological whipping boy of Calvinism seems a bright alternative compared to the determinism of a society which believes in planned economic growth and forced economic redistribution and thereby systematically calculates out human freedom, creativity, and the free exercise of moral agency.⁷

Once the relationship between religious belief, human freedom, and social and economic policies is understood, then the rise in poverty, crime, and lawlessness which is like a cancer growing in the heart of Western societies is not as surprising. Western nations are more secularized and socialized than ever before, and with the resulting loss of freedom there is always a corresponding rise in licentiousness. Why should it be surprising to us that any people who are continuously told that they are not wise enough to manage their own gifts and who are relieved of the burden of distributing their own charities soon feel relieved of the responsibility to govern their own behavior?

No, we need not ask why a welfare state or a society which relieves people of their personal responsibility is doomed to fail, but, rather, what caused us to believe that any type of social program or socialized society which regards human creativity as unimportant would ever succeed? The answer to this question can be found in a comprehensive religious paradigm shift that took place in America in the nineteenth century and which was the catalyst behind the rise of the Leviathan state and socialism in twentieth century America. Although never developing it in detail, Marvin Olasky alludes to this paradigm shift in his discussion of the decline of successful poverty fighting programs by pointing out that Unitarian sympathies in mid nineteenth century America coincided with the rise of social movements who were opposed to the prevalent attitude that "man's sinful nature leads toward indolence, and that an impoverished person given a dole without obligation is likely to descend into pauperism."⁸

The rise of the welfare state in America cannot be completely understood apart from a consideration of the effects that the usurping of orthodox Trinitarian social institutions by these Unitarian sympathies had on American society. When this is taken into consideration, then the attenuation of private charities and other poverty fighting programs and their subsequent replacement by the welfare state is not at all surprising. It was not that people suddenly lost faith in human creativity and a decentralized system of personal charity, but, rather, that Unitarianism has the same effect on the social sphere as it does on the Godhead; that is, it eventually seeks to collapse a diversity of agents into a single unified entity. This process has resulted in the consolation of many spheres of American society into one sphere, namely, the federal government. What has resulted from this consolation is the belief, closely related to the one alluded to earlier by Mead, that since only the federal government is powerful, then only the federal government makes society possible. When the effects of this theological shift to Unitarian universalism by leading American institutions in the nineteenth century is fully understood, then the rise of a liberal ideology, which is so messianic in its outlook, can be properly understood as simply the natural progression and secularization of this Unitarian theology. Faulty theology can and does have drastic social consequences.⁹

The debate over the theological foundations of culture is still going on today. Pope John Paul II recently pointed out the necessity of a Trinitarian theology for a balanced and humane social order in his Centesimus Annus.¹⁰ In this encyclical, he relates his feelings of alienation and disillusionment with the "Unitarian" totalitarianism of the Poland of his youth and balances this with a warning against a "Unitarian" libertarianism which also seeks to collapses society into the single sphere of the marketplace.¹¹ Michael Novak interprets this encyclical as endorsing a "tripartite" system where the economic system of capitalism, the moral-cultural sphere, and the judicial sphere of society must all work together in a system of checks and balances in order for true progress, justice, and a peaceful order of solidarity to exist in all the societies of the world.¹²

The orthodox Christianity that gave rise to successful poverty programs in America was originally opposed both to the determinism of sociologism, which "denies that the poor are responsible for nonwork, crime, or family problems, on grounds they face a hostile society"¹³ and the messianic tendencies of ideologies and theologies that posit all power for the redemption of society in one element of society resulting only in oppressive totalitarianism and/or anarchical libertarianism. Orthodoxy recognized that an impoverished society is a violent society not because it is environmentally disadvantaged, but because it is a sinful society and that sin originates in the heart of individuals and then sends out corporate roots into the social realm. The problem of societal poverty, unlike the poverty of one or two individuals, has always been a problem of sin since God first cursed the ground for man's rebellion in the garden of Eden. Poverty is to be gradually overcome through the progressive sanctification of individual men and women's hearts, and then their societal institutions and environments. Social welfare is not the responsibility of only one social sphere nor is it a matter of confiscating, selling, and redistributing enough fragrant oil to feed the poor. It is, rather, a joining effort of all spheres of society based on religious belief and the creative power and importance of individual human beings. Welfare is not primarily a matter of giving people enough bread to eat, but rather a concern for the moral development and the changing of individual hearts to want to take responsibility for their own lives. The Western world was able to amass its wealth by following and instilling a certain system of moral precepts into civilization which in turn brought God's blessing and positive sanctions in history. Therefore, it is only to be expected that the abandonment of the historical religious foundations of the West will also bring with it a decline in the prosperity of the Western nations. It is impossible to have a prosperous, virtuous, and free society without that society also possessing a religious faith which liberates both individuals and their social institutions from the bondage of sin and from the curse of poverty. Individual poverty may very well be, and often is, a case of temporary hardship or misfortune, as the Old Testament example of Job illustrates, but the rampant societal poverty and the cultural disintegration that the West is currently experiencing is nothing less than a moral crisis. And this moral crisis is nothing other than the fruit which burgeons forth from a weak and decrepit system of theological roots.

Notes

1. David H. Hall, Welfare Reformed: A Compassionate Approach (Phillipsburg: Presbyterian and Reformed Press, 1995) x.
2. Lawrence M. Mead, The New Politics of Poverty (New York: Basic Books, 1992) 131.
3. Mead, 131.
4. John Emerich Dalberg-Acton, First Baron Acton, "Poverty," Essays in Religion, Politics, and Morality, Volume III, ed. J. Rufus Fears (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1988) 574.
5. Matthew 28:13.
6. Proverbs 29:18a.
7. The typical Calvinist stereotype ignores debates within the Reformed community on the doctrine of common grace. This doctrine addresses the undeniable image of God embedded in human nature. The Westminster Confession does not deny that unregenerate men and women can act in ways that produce benevolent results, but only that the good acts done by both the reprobate and the regenerate do not count as righteous toward God. The concept of "total depravity" means that every aspect of human nature is fallen, including our noetic faculties, and should never be understood as implying that people are totally incapable of doing good acts.
8. Marvin Olasky, The Tragedy of American Compassion (Washington: Regnery Gateway, 1992) 50.
9. The infiltration of Unitarian theology into American society and intellectual leadership is very apparent in American higher education, as illustrated by the toppling of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton by Unitarian sympathies and the subsequent rise of federally funded higher education. See George Marsden's The Soul of the American University. For even more in-depth studies of the "Messiah complex" see Thomas Sowell's The Vision of the Annointed and R. J. Rushdoony's The Messianic Character of American Education.
10. Pope John Paul II, Centessimus Annus, Encyclical Letter (Rome: Vatican Press, 1991).
11. Murray N. Rothbard's suggestion to substitute certain free market operations for the judicial system is a good example of "Unitarian" libertarianism (For a New Liberty, pp. 95–103).
12. Michael Novak, The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: The Free Press, 1993) 127.
13. Mead, 22.