We spent part of the week down at Sam and Kelsea’s house, visiting our grandchildren. It was fall break down there, so kids were out in full force, riding their bicycles up and down the streets and playing football in the side yards. The family next door home schools their five children, which back when I was a kid was called truancy and was against the law. Five children are a lot of kids these days, but when I was growing up it wasn’t uncommon.
I remember this one family down the street from us had seven children in six years, born, as Garrison Keillor said, nine months and ten minutes apart. One day I was walking home from school with my brothers and one of the kids in that family, too young yet for school, was waiting outside for his siblings to return home. He announced to his siblings that while helping their mother clean the house, he’d found a dime in the couch cushions, and a big fight broke over that dime. They were going at it hammer and tong. I’d never seen anything like it. I’d quarreled with my siblings, but never over a dime, and never punching and kicking like they were. If I wanted a dime, I asked my parents and they’d give me a job to do and pay me a dime. Though I lacked the ability to understand and articulate what I had seen, years later, while studying poverty in college, the professor mentioned the correlation between poverty, despair, and crime, and I thought of those children fighting and understood I had witnessed desperation.
We’ve been hearing a lot these past several years about making America great again, causing me to think more deeply about the characteristics of national greatness. What do flourishing nations do that failing nations don’t do? What are the differences between flourishing and failing nations? In my last message, I spoke about the things we put in closets, the people we shut away, the uncomfortable topics we hide from the light of day. Healthy nations acknowledge and address their historic shortcomings. They don’t ignore the shadow side of their history. They don’t lock it away.
This morning I want to talk about why flourishing nations should endeavor to ensure all their citizens have access to the resources they need to thrive, including adequate housing, appropriate nutrition, meaningful employment, and, as my grandmother used to say, “a little left over for the nicer things.” For I have seen, and I’m sure you have too, the squalor of poverty and its toll on the human spirit. We have seen crime born of economic desperation, of families strained and broken by financial stress. And we all know enough and read enough to realize it does not have to be this way, that other nations have created economies that serve all their citizens and not just a lucky few. We know America does not lack the resources to create such a nation. We lack only the will, the political courage, and, it must be said, perhaps even the decency, to ensure the well-being of our fellow citizens.
In 2021, at the height of the Covid epidemic, the federal government expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit, reducing child poverty in the United States by half, lifting more than two million children above the poverty line. But that same year, a wealthy business owner I know, whose profits soared during the pandemic, received a half million-dollar loan from the federal government, which was ultimately forgiven. Rather than sharing the money with his employees, a provision of the loan, he used the money to start a classic car collection. When I spoke with him about doing the same for those Americans living in poverty, he accused me of being a socialist.
Flourishing nations share their national wealth. Failing nations funnel wealth to their richest citizens. This is the heart of our challenge. When the wealthy control the narrative, when the rich are given a voice and the poor are not, any effort to help the poor is described in negative terms. It is socialism or communism. We are told governmental largesse encourages laziness, that it stifles incentive and creativity. But when the rich are given help, it turns out we are rewarding hard work, permitting money to trickle down, incentivizing prosperity, and encouraging investment.
To be clear, I am not opposed to wealth, but I am opposed to governments that reward the wealthy and punish the poor. Just as I am opposed to religions that sanctify the wealthy and demonize the poor.
I am opposed to economic and political systems that grind the poor into dust, while hastening to help the affluent and well-connected. It is not democratic, it is not kind, and it is not Christian.
I am opposed to that mindset which allows the prosperous to neglect the poor. There is, in our nation, an epidemic of fear contaminating so many of us that even in the midst of much, we permit our hearts to harden, our worries to multiply, until the spirit of generosity, once robust within us, becomes calcified and cold.
This disease of fear leads first to personal stinginess, which creates a climate of cultural greed, culminating in patterns of national selfishness draped in the language of morality, so that even as we become more selfish, we simultaneously feel more noble and virtuous. The great Hoosier, Eugene Debs said, “In every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism, or religion, or both to deceive and overawe the People.” The antidote to cultural greed and degrading poverty is the witness of a Church that has not forgotten its sacred responsibility to care for the least of these. Instead, so many in today’s Church are in the grip of Christian Nationalism, which has forgotten its life and power are found in generosity, not in wealth. When spiritual amnesia is rampant, we are too easily deceived and overawed, too likely to worship at the altar of earthly power and treasure.
Last week, Friend John Essex spoke of his desire to see more children at our meeting. As one who enjoys the company of children, as one who was once a child himself, I share John’s desire. But even more than that, I desire a Quaker community devoted to the well-being of all people, unswervingly committed to human dignity and opportunity, especially for those who have been brutalized by economic machinations that elevate the few and cast down the many.
Those who fight over a dime today will fight over food tomorrow. So let this be our priority—to be like Jesus, who gathered the poor to him, took bread, broke it, gave thanks, and fed the multitude until all were satisfied. That isn’t communism. That isn’t socialism. That is the heart of our Christian-Quaker faith.