“It has been tempting and easy for the church to reach a long-running settlement of the public/private matter by accenting charity as the work of private good while at the same time remaining silent about public matters while the market works its ruthless will. But such a bifurcation does not finally work, because it yields a major disconnect between faith and actual lived reality.”
It is evident that most persons in our society, across the political spectrum, are inclined to be generous toward neighbors. This is manifest in ready responses to serious crises and in cases of special dramatic need. It is clear in our common readiness to crowdsource all “sorts and conditions” of people who face special costly circumstances.
That evident generosity, however, is (also across the political spectrum) fully encased in an ideology that believes that wealth is private and that our neighbors are also competitors for limited resources. Practically, that deep commitment to capitalism is expressed as trust in the market that has come to dominate the economy through an ideology of individualism.
Thus while we may practice generosity face to face by way of charity, in terms of larger public reality, our generosity shrivels before the need for self-benefit and selfish well-being. The outcome of such generosity within an ideology of greed is that the public domain suffers and those without leverage are noticeably and visibly left behind. The task before us is that the vise grip of capitalism unregulated by moral constraints must be challenged through the offer of an alternative economy. That alternative is insistently offered in the testimony of Scripture.
For good reason, the Bible — for both the Moses community and the Jesus community — recognizes that “coveting” for private gain at the expense of the public good is a disaster. Thus we are able to see the profound either/or between an economy based on private gain or greed and a covenantal economy grounded in the public good. This either/or is stark and unaccommodating. It is the work of the synagogue and the church that treasures this biblical text to make the point clearly as it pertains to our present economic crisis of excessive wealth alongside unbearable need. These text-based communities must muster the courage and honesty to face the contradiction with some directness. The matter is urgent because all of us in faith communities — liberal and conservative — live amid this contradiction that so defines our daily life.
It has been tempting and easy for the church to reach a long-running settlement of the public/private matter by accenting charity as the work of private good while at the same time remaining silent about public matters while the market works its ruthless will. But such a bifurcation does not finally work, because it yields a major disconnect between faith and actual lived reality. Thus in the face of our current economic crisis, our work is to show how and in what ways the claims of covenantal economics are indispensable for our public practice. This will require the church (at the local level) to do the work of teaching and interpretation that it has too often failed to do.
While we do not and cannot expect our secular, multi-dimensioned society to adhere specifically to our claims of faith, we can anticipate that the claims of faith in matters economic can and must be taken seriously in the public conversation and in the formation of policy. The recurring problem has not been resistance of public engagement but the cowardice of the church in voicing its conviction. I fully anticipate that we are at a new moment when the church can articulate a faith perspective on the economy that will receive a serious hearing in our society, because these claims ring true in the actual human community. As Elijah discovered when he felt alone and bereft in his hard assignment, there are “still 7,000” who have not sold out (I Kings 19:18). The number is elastic. There are great numbers of folk, in church and in the synagogue and beyond both of these communities, who care intensely about these neighborly matters. The work is to gather such a company into the political energy of a transformative ilk.
Adapted with permission from Poverty in the Promised Land: Neighborliness, Resistance, and Restoration (Fortress Press 2024).
