By Auguste Meyrat
Among the greatest challenges Jesus poses to his disciples are his precepts on wealth. On the one hand, Jesus praises poverty. He begins the Beatitudes with the declaration: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Elsewhere in the Gospels, he tells a rich man to give away all his possessions, since “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”
On the other hand, Jesus also recognizes the need for productivity, especially in the parable of the talents, where the third servant is punished for failing to generate a profit with the single talent his master had entrusted to him. Jesus also recognizes the need to pay taxes to Caesar (“Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s”) and even does so himself without complaint.
Traditionally, Christians have reconciled these two views by treating money as a means and not an end. One must certainly work and produce wealth, but one must never idolize money or fall into greed.
Unfortunately, instead of maintaining this balance, progressive Catholics (among others) now idolize the poor and condemn wealth. They therefore ignore the real causes of poverty (social and political dysfunction, lack of education, indolence, addiction and vice, etc.) and focus their anger on the ultra-rich and capitalism because it fits a false political “narrative.”
The main problem with this view, however, is that it frames poverty as a material rather than a spiritual phenomenon. In truth, behind every wealthy magnate and every penniless beggar lies a story involving certain beliefs, values, and perceptions—that is, the immaterial part of themselves. To better understand this dynamic, one would do well to read Theodore Dalrymple’s modern classic, Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass.
As a psychiatrist who worked in the slums and prisons of England, Dalrymple was close enough to see what truly afflicts the poor. It is usually not various systems of “oppression,” a lack of economic opportunity, or rising levels of $CO_2$; more often it is an attitude that rejects discipline, gratitude, and personal agency.
Of course, Dalrymple recognizes that this mindset does not arise spontaneously but has been instilled by the mass media, public education, and ideologues and demagogues. Growing up in unstable homes plagued by domestic abuse, alcoholism, and criminal neglect, children who reach adulthood are completely deprived of the tools to cope with reality and blame others for their problems. They cannot control their impulses, hold a steady job, or make sacrifices. Many cannot read, write, or do basic arithmetic, and few belong to a religious community.
As a result, almost no one in this social class possesses a moral compass to guide them. When Dalrymple speaks with a group of murderers in a prison where he worked, he notes that they were “so convinced of the flagrant injustice of the world that they were also convinced that nothing they did for themselves could add anything meaningful in their favor.”
This distorted moral perspective also appears in many stories of women who stay with abusive and unfaithful men because they have learned to equate love and commitment with lust and anger: “In the absence of a marriage ceremony, a black eye is his promissory note to love, honor, respect, and protect.”
Many souls are thus condemned to live in misery in an otherwise developed country like England. Men end up unemployed and frequently in prison; women have children out of wedlock and continue to join different partners; and children internalize the chaos around them, forming gangs, bullying others, and committing crimes with impunity.
Unfortunately, this situation only worsens because of the supposed defenders of the poor in the British upper classes. Like their counterparts in the United States, they demand more welfare subsidies, more social services, more subsidized housing, and less police presence.
They believe poverty is determined by external factors rather than a distorted worldview. In their minds, poverty, addiction, and violence simply descend upon this class of people like a plague, so it seems best, essentially, to quarantine them in a ghetto and offer them help from a distance.
Above all, there can be no judgment, since this “would amount to admitting that one way of life is preferable—morally, economically, culturally, and spiritually—to another… a thought that must be kept at bay at all costs, or else the entire ideology of modern education and social welfare would collapse in a heap.”
Although Dalrymple has much to say about the lives of the poor, he is relatively silent on what to do about their misery, beyond reintroducing basic measures of accountability such as imprisoning criminals, improving public education, and getting men to work and women to stop having children with idle men.
Anyone who feels a deep need to help the poor, however, can follow Dalrymple’s example and actually work in these neighborhoods, if they can tolerate the unpleasantness and hypocrisy.
Rather, Dalrymple likely wants his reader at least to reach their own conclusions about what to do for the poor in their own communities by providing a clearer view of who these people are. They are not the helpless victims of plutocrats, nor are they saints occupying a morally and spiritually superior position.
Like all of us, they are people who need to repent of their sins in order to live more dignified lives here on earth and, ultimately, to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
In other words, more than material assistance, economic opportunities, and public esteem, what they need is faith, hope, and charity. Otherwise, their suffering, largely self-inflicted, will continue unabated while the means of salvation disappear.
Perhaps this is why Jesus said: “The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me.” This suggests that Christians should focus on sharing the fullness of the Gospel with the less fortunate, rather than vainly trying to Christianize Marx and getting nowhere.
About the author
Auguste Meyrat is an English teacher in the Dallas area. He holds a master’s degree in Humanities and a master’s degree in Educational Leadership. He is senior editor of The Everyman and has written essays for The Federalist, The American Thinker, and The American Conservative, as well as for the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture.