Charles Murray’s book Coming Apart has launched a firestorm of debate about the nature and causes of societal breakdown, poverty, and the increasingly stratified economic classes in America. In an op-ed for WSJ, he argues that the solution is two-fold: for the wealthier classes to a) recognize that their isolated, suburban life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and therefore to b) “preach what they practice” in terms of work, marriage, family, and civic responsibility to communities where these values are deteriorating.
Not everybody agrees. David Brooks observes that the left has responded to Murray with the argument that all of society’s dissolution traces its roots to “economic determinism;” the jobs left,
the family died. For Brooks, this view reduces “the rich texture of how disadvantage is actually lived to a crude materialism that has little to do with reality.” Nevertheless, he also argues that Murray ignores 25 years of research suggesting three significant features of real poverty:
1. Societal breakdown “snowballs,” getting worse and worse all on its own.
2. The problem with poor people is often not that they value such different things than the rest of the population, but rather that they “lack the social capital to enact those values.”
3. Social context heavily influences individual behavior. “If any of us grew up in a neighborhood where a third of the men dropped out of school, we’d be much worse off, too.”
What are Christians to make of all of this?
The firestorm around Murray has brought into mainstream conversation several key features of American poverty that the church needs to hear because it reflects what we know from the story of God and His world in the Bible. Yet in every case the church’s story goes farther, penetrating deeper into the heart of why things are broken and how they can be healed.
1. Poverty is the Result of Both Individual and Societal Sin
Poverty is caused and perpetuated by a complicated set of factors that includes deep personal sin and incredibly broken social systems. Election candidates will ignore one or the other; the Biblical story does not! Furthermore, systemic sins (e.g., racism, economic injustice, or broken education systems) encourage personal sin, and personal sin (e.g., greed, sexual immorality, or pride) encourage systemic sins.
And yet this is exactly the point where the church can offer something that secular society cannot; a description of sin as such, and an explanation of how to be healed from it. Both Brooks and Murray expect some sort of sense of “civic duty” to propel change forward, and neither can give much of an adequate account beyond self-interest. The right may emphasize individual and immediate self-interest, while the left may emphasize long-term societal self-interest; only the church of God condemns self-interest, names the source of it as individual and societal sin, and proclaims the remedy as the community shaped by the crucified, sacrificing Jesus Christ.
2. Economic Isolation Hurts Everybody
Whether it’s the prayer in Proverbs to be neither rich nor poor, Isaiah’s condemnation that the rich add house to house until they have no neighbors, or the New Testament vision of a church that involves rich and poor as equal participants, the Biblical story clearly envisions a God-shaped community whose sharing brings together and softens the divide between rich and poor. Brooks, Murray, and others rightly point to the divide, the keeping up with the Joneses, as a barrier to societal healing.
Meanwhile, neither Brooks nor Murray lifts up the biblical vision of a reconciling community which heals the brokenness of both rich and poor together in a community of true healing. Murray lifts up the so-called civic virtue of the upper class, and calls on it to tell the poor how to get married and go to work. But the wealthy neighborhoods where I grew up--in contrast to the neighborhood where I now live in South Memphis--knew relatively little about true hospitality, about giving the bed in the living room to a homeless stranger on a cold night, about sharing your last dollar, about staying in a place long enough to make it a neighborhood. A community formed around Christ is uniquely positioned to remind the rich of the blessedness of the poor; the “upper class” in the church comes ready to learn from the poor neighbors in the pew, as well as to share their own insights.
We should welcome the research, efforts, and insights of our secular neighbors, and we should joyfully work alongside them where appropriate. But if the church embraces her charter story, we are uniquely equipped to answer the questions of poverty and social disorder in our neighborhoods simply by being the church. We answer those questions as the body of Christ gathers together in neighborhoods among neighbors who do not let race, class, or culture keep them apart. We answer those questions in businesses that serve their employees and add value to the community. We answer those questions in families that take the raising of their children as a responsibility connected to their responsibility to the family of God around them. If the church lived as the church, right here in Memphis, maybe Murray, Brooks, and the rest would find an example, a living biblical text, to help them understand why the world is broken, and what Jesus is doing to fix it.
Michael Rhodes
michael@advancememphis.org
Sources:
Brooks- http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/14/opinion/brooks-the-materialist-fallacy.html?_r=2&hp
Murray- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204301404577170733817181646.html
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