By Bill Leonard
“The problem of our age is the administration of wealth, so that the ties of brotherhood may still bind together the rich and poor in harmonious relationship…. The contrast between the palace of the millionaire and the cottage of the laborer with us today measures the change which has come with civilization. This change, however, is not to be deplored, but welcomed as highly beneficial.”
Those words, written in 1889 by industrialist/philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, introduced what came to be called “the Gospel of Wealth,” Carnegie’s plan for using vast financial resources accumulated by certain individuals at the height of the Industrial Revolution.
The phrase Gospel of Wealth came to characterize the approach of certain 19th century Protestants, centered in a type of social/economic Darwinism suggesting that some people were “elected” to accumulate money. Carnegie sought to channel this economic theory into philanthropic practice.
“It is well, nay, essential for the progress of the race, that the houses of some should be homes for all that is highest and best in literature and the arts, and … the refinements of civilization,” he wrote. “Much better this great irregularity than universal squalor.
“We start, then, with a condition of affairs under which the best interests of the race are promoted, but which inevitably gives wealth to the few. Thus far, accepting conditions as they exist, the situation can be surveyed and pronounced good.”
Carnegie accepted this economic condition as a social and theological given, and insisted that the “only question” was, “What is the proper mode of administering wealth after the laws upon which civilization is founded have thrown it into the hands of the few?” He then outlined ways that the wealthy could use a portion of their funds to benefit society.
Carnegie was not alone. In Acres of Diamonds, a widely circulated address published in 1890, Baptist pastor Russell Conwell encouraged the accumulation and proper use of wealth. Of the poor, Conwell commented on the question, “Don’t you sympathize with the poor people?”
“Of course I do,” he wrote. “I wont give in but what I sympathize with the poor, but the number of poor who are to be with is very small. To sympathize with a man whom God has punished for his sins, thus to help him when God would still continue a just punishment, is to do wrong, no doubt about it, and we do that more than we help those who are deserving.”
Conwell continued: “While we should sympathize with God’s poor — that is, those who cannot help themselves — let us remember that is not a poor person in the United States who was not made poor by his own shortcomings, or by the shortcomings of someone else. It is all wrong to be poor, anyhow. Let us give in to that argument and pass that to one side.”
Many late 19th century preachers equated poverty with divine retribution. In the 1870s Henry Ward Beecher, pastor of Plymouth Congregational Church in Brooklyn, insisted that “no man in this land suffers from poverty unless it be more than his fault — unless it be his sin.”
The Social Gospel and Catholic Worker movements challenged those ideas, calling American Christians to reclaim Jesus’ own continued engagement with and concern for the poor.
Social Gospel advocate Walter Rauschenbusch saw poverty firsthand as a pastor in Hell’s Kitchen, New York, through “an endless procession” of families “out of work, out of clothes, out of shoes and out of hope.” Rauschenbusch called for the conversion of sinners and of corporations that exploited them.
Although the crassness of those 19th century preachers now seems less public, our 21st century sentiments sometime betray an implicit belief that those in poverty are “moochers” or “welfare cheaters.” While abuse of private/public programs does occur, the facts suggest the rapid growth of poverty in our day.
The “Feeding America” webpage notes that in 2010, 46.2 million people (15.1 percent) were in poverty, including 9.2 million (11.7 percent) families and 16.4 million (22 percent) children under age 18.
In 2010, 48.8 million Americans lived in “food insecure” households, including 32.6 million adults and 16.2 million children. Nine states reflect higher household food insecurity than the national average of 14.6 percent including Mississippi, Texas, Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia, Ohio, Florida, California and North Carolina.
While faith communities across the nation provide important direct responses to poverty in their communities, extensive conversation about confronting mounting poverty seems strangely limited, perhaps absent, in this election year. Nonetheless, biblical mandates for addressing poverty remain, spanning both testaments, clearly linked in Jesus’ synagogue sermon from Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, to bring good news to the poor.”
That mandate spares none of us. Philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev once protested that medieval monasticism “often led to the desiccation of the human heart, and to a love of the abstract instead of the concrete.”
“Against this protest only a reborn piety can stand,” he said. “Care for the life of another, even material, bodily care, is spiritual in essence. Bread for myself is a material question; bread for my neighbor is a spiritual question.”
Pervasive poverty isn’t about “them.” It’s about all of us.