In this episode Rev. Deborah and Elizabeth explore poverty and how it is a policy choice. They describe examples from South Africa and Jim Crow America as illustrations of how poverty is enshrined into the law and ask what is required of us as people of faith because of that.
Transcript
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[00:03] Rev. Deborah Duguid-May (DDM): Hello and welcome to The Priest and the Prof. I am your host, the Rev. Deborah Duguid-May.
[00:09] Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe (MET): And I’m Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe.
[00:11] DDM: This podcast is a product of Trinity Episcopal Church in Greece, New York. I’m an Episcopal priest of 26 years and Elizabeth has been a rhetoric professor since 2010. And so join us as we explore the intersections of faith, community, politics, philosophy and action.
[00:39] MET: Hello and welcome to our second edition of The Priest and the Prof. We are so glad you have joined us again. I am Elizabeth.
[00:47] DDM: I am Reverend Deborah.
[00:49] MET: And we are excited to be here. Today we are talking about something that is near and dear to people of, well, we hope it’s near and dear to people of faith because it is so important to the Gospels. And what we want to do is approach this from the perspectives that we particularly bring to it in our professional lives, but also as people of faith. So today we’re talking about poverty. It’s not a dark topic, but it’s a serious topic. And we want to handle that with the, the reverence that it deserves because this is something that affects people in their daily lives, in their spiritual lives, in their physical lives. And we think it is important to understanding us both as people and as a society. I don’t know, does that kind of intro?
[01:47] DDM: Absolutely, Elizabeth. You know, and you know, my experience of poverty obviously was hugely shaped by living in South Africa, you know, because I think I kind of watched the way in which poverty dehumanized people. I almost felt, you know, looking back, you know, you become more and more aware of how poverty almost was a tool that the apartheid government used to almost reinforce the notion that people of color were not fully human. So you could blame poorer communities for the lack of refuse removal. People don’t mind living in this dirty manner, never unpacking the fact that there was no refuse removal. The lack of education, lack of access to running water, bathing, you know. I think I kind of watched that be used in a systemic way to literally dehumanize huge segments of the population. And I think for me one of the saddest things is that like if we’re speaking about South Africa, that legacy still remains today, you know. And that’s the problem with poverty is when you start to create generational poverty, right, It’s not easy to rewrite that and change that. Unless you are going to have intentional radical action, poverty doesn’t just necessarily change in one generation, and sometimes just tends to naturally, if it’s just left on its own, become worse generation after another. So one of the really interesting things in South Africa is that if you go to South Africa now, it is still one of the most unequal countries in the entire world. This is 30 years post-liberation. Around 50% of our population are still living in abject poverty. I mean, think about that, 1 in every 2 people. And yeah, I mean, I think somebody said the other day that the discrepancy between rich and poor is worse now than it was under apartheid. Now this is with a whole government, you know, a liberation government supposedly wanting to dismantle poverty and actually uplift our communities. It’s not working, it’s not working. So the legacy of poverty, it’s tenacious. It’s tenacious to break it is something that requires huge concerted effort, You know?
[04:22] MET: Yeah. My personal experience with poverty is nowhere near as insightful because I grew up, I did not grow up impoverished, so to speak. Now we didn’t have everything we wanted. Looking back, it’s one of those things where I don’t know how my parents did it, right? Like We spent a good chunk of my childhood living on a single income of a Texas public school teacher. And if you know anything about Texas or public school teachers, you know we were skating by the skin of our teeth.
[05:02] DDM: We don’t value education in our society.
[05:05] MET: That’s not a great way to live. Right. But at the same time, you know, I remember we had vacations and like, I got a cabbage patch doll when they were hot, right? Like, you know, it’s, we didn’t struggle. I didn’t go hungry. But I do remember things like one Christmas. And I remember my dad would say things like, well, it’s gonna be a small Christmas. But he said that every Christmas. There was one Christmas where I knew my parents were struggling and I decided I wanted to help in some way. I was 8 or whatever. And I got my sister to, we got all of the money that we had, which, you know, she was 6 and I was 8 or whatever, maybe younger. And that amounted to a couple of handfuls of spare change. And we took whatever boxes we had access to. And that was, you know, a happy meal box from McDonald’s. And we put our spare change in the boxes and we put it under the Christmas tree because that was, you know, all we knew to do. And that was our parents’ Christmas gift. And it did my parents in, right? Like they were just boohooing on Christmas morning. But we like, all we knew was that our parents were struggling with money. And we were like, well, we have money. We’ll give it to our parents. You know, a couple of pennies in some quarters. It’s a, you know, we didn’t know. But. I didn’t go hungry, And I knew that my mom was working with kids who did. My mom worked in some really rough schools And she kind of did some behind the scenes work for some of her students. Like we gave our clothes to our students. And I knew at some of her schools, cause I think I said we moved around a lot and moved around a lot. At some of her schools, there were kids in her classes that didn’t have electricity or didn’t have running water. So I was cognizant enough as a child to recognize, yeah, I don’t get to go to the movies every time I want to go, but I am warm. So I knew I didn’t have everything I wanted to all the time, but I was well aware that I was in a good position. Does that make sense? So my experience with poverty was like I was aware it was out there and I was aware we struggled but I put us in a pretty, I didn’t know the word privilege, but I put us in a pretty privileged middle position even if looking back maybe we weren’t.
[07:50] DDM: Sure, sure, sure, sure. Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think for me, poverty raises some pretty big theological questions, right? Because you know, we live in this world and I think capitalism has particularly designed it this way, that we always feel like we need more, and we always feel like we don’t have enough, right? I mean those are your two marks in some ways of capitalism. And so we almost begin to operate psychologically but also spiritually from this mentality of scarcity, right? And yet that is the complete antithesis of the biblical view. So the biblical view is that God creates a world of abundance. There is an abundance of water, there is an abundance of food, there is an abundance of everything that we need, and there are plenty for all people, not just for some. Right. Now the irony is, is that the facts actually support the biblical worldview. Like if you actually go in and look statistically, they say that we have absolutely enough to sustain all people in our world. With food, with shelter, with land, there is enough, right? We produce already in our world enough food to feed everyone. And yet the irony is hunger is still on the rise. So we have enough food, the problem is political will to distribute it. Right? And so I think we need to remember that theologically, God asks us to start not from a place of scarcity, but a place of abundance.
[09:38] MET: That is powerful.
[09:39] DDM: Yeah. And I mean, imagine if we could rewrite our own even internal scripts. There is enough, not just for me, but for all people, because in some ways, poverty is really the result of greed right it’s it’s some people wanting more than their fair share or they’re just simply so used to having more than their fair share that they think this is normative. And yet it’s not, right? Some of us are living way beyond our own legitimate share of world resources. Right? And so in some ways, we need to, if we were talking theologically, we need to almost name poverty as theft. Poverty is the sin of stealing. It is the theft of resources by the wealthy and powerful of another person’s right to what is not just needed to survive but to flourish. Because I think so often we kind of, if we want to address poverty, we think, well, how do we bring people to a level of kind of survival? God never intended us simply to survive. You know, I came that they might have life and life in all fullness, abundance. These are the words that Scripture uses, right? And so I think, you know, from a theological point of view, there really is a deep violence embedded in poverty because when poverty is present the most basic fundamental human rights are literally violated on on a daily basis for people and for communities. I have some problems with Gandhi, I don’t think Gandhi is always the saint we make him out to be. But Gandhi said poverty is the worst form of violence, which is an incredible statement giving that he was coming out of an incredibly violent colonial regime, right, and went through the whole kind of civil war of India, of independence. But for him, poverty was the worst form of violence because we can kill somebody quickly, or we can kill somebody slowly through poverty, you know hunger malnutrition inadequate health care inadequate housing sanitation access to clean water you know those things don’t just lower life expectancy, but they they hugely lower the day-to-day quality life quality of life of individuals and communities. So I think for me if we’re going to look at poverty as people of faith, we need to understand how sinful poverty actually is because it’s destroying on a moment-by-moment basis the beauty and the dignity that God has created and has given to human beings And so it’s a sin not just against one another but it’s actually a sin against God, God’s self. Because when we allow poverty or tolerate poverty, we actually begin to no longer see each other as sacred. And I think that’s one of the biggest sadnesses of our world, you know, run by capitalism is everything and everyone is simply an opportunity to make money. You know, and that’s the antithesis of why we were created.
[13:02] MET: So it’s interesting that you put it in terms of like systems of capitalism, because when I think about poverty, I think of it in terms of policy choices. And that’s just because of who I am and what I do. Because I’m gonna say this, you’re gonna be like, but let me finish my sentence because I 100% see poverty as a choice, but not as an individual choice, as a societal choice.
[13:31] DDM: Absolutely right.
[13:32] MET: We put in systems that make poverty happen, right? As a society, we choose to make poverty a thing. And There’s history to that. Let me give you an example, right? So we all know what Jim Crow was. Well, I hope you know what Jim Crow was. I don’t know. Maybe you live in Florida. So there were places that had things like curfew laws. And if there was a curfew law, it would say something like, in this town, a person of color, usually specifically a black person, cannot be on the streets or in public past 7 p.m. Okay, that in and of itself is horrendous enough. But very often in those same places, black people could not get a job during the daytime because they did not want black people to be in public facing jobs during the daytime because they did not want black people to be in contact with white people because you know, segregation. So what you happen, what happens is black people can’t get a job during daylight hours and they can’t be out of their houses during dark hours. So what happens? Black people are forced into poverty. They can’t afford food. They can’t get a job. They can’t get health care. Right. And that doesn’t even get into things like the separated nature of things like waiting rooms that basically force black people to just sit there with their broken limbs or their flu out in the cold. I mean, there’s so many things, right? Like just that’s an example of a curfew law that is a policy choice that forces poverty on a group of people. That’s one law that I can point to that was a systemic choice that was enforced poverty.
[15:25] DDM: I’m so glad you’re explaining Jim Crow, especially for our international followers.
[15:29] MET: Yeah. Right, like, I mean, so there’s, like most people think, oh, segregation, that was when black people were separated from white people, but it was not. It was a systemic policy system of choices That was to keep people oppressed and poverty was a part of that.
[15:49] DDM: Again used to disenfranchise communities. Yeah Right.
[15:53] MET: Absolutely. So when you have people like MLK who are out there working against segregation It’s not just a fight against segregation. It is a fight against poverty So when he does things like his March on Washington, it is a march against Poverty and he was very open about that. That’s why LBJ in the 60s declared a war on poverty right in the 60s. This was a thing we were fighting against then in the 50s and 60s you get this like really adamant we’re gonna do something about this and it’s not until later that you get this really kind of acerbic change in narrative about how we view poverty. Things really change in the eighties. Now for your reference, the highest tax bracket, today, like if you make a bazillion dollars, the highest tax bracket today is 37%. And let’s be clear, absolutely nobody pays 37% of their income to Uncle Sam. First, there’s the difference between things like your marginal tax rate and your effective tax rate. I won’t go into all of the differences of that. And then there are things like all of those loopholes that so many people who pay 37% can get,
[17:20] MET: like we all know about billionaires who don’t pay their taxes, right? That’s a common story. Well, Amazon. Right, yeah. Companies. And then there’s all the things about like, oh, you don’t pay it on your full income, you pay it on this top of your income, right? I’m not going to go through all of that, but nobody pays 37% of their income. And you think about like in the fifties and sixties, the marginal tax rate and the effective tax rate were things like 70%, 80%
[17:46] DDM: Are you serious? Wow!
[17:46] MET: Yeah. Like, wow. We have lost 40% of our tax.
[17:51] DDM: How, how, I mean, how was the community in terms of those issues? Cause I hear the complaints nowadays about…
[17:56] MET: No, no, no, no. Like there was a time when our tax rate was 90% on the top earners in our nation. Yeah. Like when I say the problem began in the eighties, like I want to say, Oh, it’s a nuanced set of circumstances that led to no, the problem began in the eighties…
[18:14] DDM: And that would have been with Ronald Reagan?
[18:16] MET: Yeah, like, Reaganomics is a serious problem. I can’t like automatically say, oh, all of our problems again in the 80s. But like if you look at a graph of quality of life, economic disparity, like all the markers of, you know, social safety net and who we are as a nation and how we take care of each other. The graph takes a huge jump and like 1982, it is a real problem.
[18:43] DDM: It’s so interesting.
[18:44] MET: I know. I know. Nobody wants to talk about that except, you know, people in my position, but it’s like a real issue. There is this sub Reddit called antiwork, and I promise I’m going to bring all this together in just a minute. And it’s not necessarily what you think of. Yeah, there are some people who like get on there to just gripe about their jobs. But for the most part, it’s where people go to talk about class oppression. So it’s really interesting. And somebody on that subreddit a couple of weeks ago made the comment that they don’t think people are so much anti-work as they think people are anti-American because they get on that subreddit And they’re like, I see people complaining about what you put up with in America. And I just, I can’t imagine. I mean, the systemic oppression of the working class in America, it’s off the charts and other countries don’t put up with it the way we do. And I think going back to the MLK discussion, we have to acknowledge that this is an intersectional problem. That is not to say this is a strictly race problem, right? We can’t ignore the way poverty has decimated rural white America, right? Like rural white America is falling apart. So I’m not going to sit here and say, Oh, black people are the only people who are affected by poverty. No, no, do not hear me say that.
[20:23] DDM: And wasn’t there that concerted effort as well to break labor unions? And was that in the eighties as well?
[20:32] MET: So yes, I mean, there’s a long history of that, but it really started once again. Reagan was very anti-union and that has been going since then. Okay. I’m going to give you kind of a long history of this. After the Great Depression, there was this dude named John Maynard Keynes. He’s basically the economist who got us out of the Depression. There was World War II and John Maynard Keynes, And they were like, okay, we’re going to fix the depression. And FDR was like, great. John Maynard Keynes, his approach to economics was wildly different than what anybody was doing out there. And it involved a lot of government intervention and regulating the market. And he was instrumental in things like the works projects and social security and a lot of those programs that FDR put in. It cost a lot, but you know, it saved the economy. Right. And he was known for saying, well, you know, in the long run, we’re all dead. So he was all about putting the investment in now and like take care of your people now, and then we’ll pay it off when we can pay it off. This approach was not popular with those laissez faire economists who were just like, oh, no, just let the market take care of itself. We did this kind of Keynesian economics for a couple of decades and we were great. And then like the 70s and 80s, Reagan and his family came in, his family, I say his family, his cohort came in. They’re like, oh, just kidding. We like laissez faire economics. And we did that for the next 40 or 50 years. And basically what happened is the economy crashed over and over and over again. And the only time we saw any real progress is after the 2008 crash when Obama came in was like, okay, seriously, we have to fix this. And then when Biden came in after Trump and was like, no, seriously, I have to fix this and did a lot of work to instigate government regulation that had been slashed. So we don’t really know what kind of economic principles work because we just keep having to pick up the pieces after one crash after another.
[22:55] DDM: Right, right, right. And that is the problem with America. There never seems to be a consistent policy. Yeah, It’s just constantly changed depending…
[23:02] MET: We know what can get us out of trouble…
[23:04] DDM: Yeah, absolutely.
[23:06] MET: But that then like one side comes in and is like, oh, ha ha ha, just kidding. Get rid of that. All of that is to say, I know nobody wanted that discussion of economics, but there you are. All of that is to say, we keep putting policies in place after these, like after we get out of trouble, we then instigate those policies in place, those laissez faire economic policies that are systemic policies that will keep people poor, Those austerity policies that will keep people poor.
[23:36] DDM: Right, right, right. And I mean, I think that’s the reality is that you cannot speak about poverty without speaking about structural issues. You know, I mean, it’s so interesting because if we go back to the theological perspective, you know, you get certain churches that emphasis individual sin, right? But I think if we focus on individual sin and never speak about structural sin, institutional sin, we’ve really got a problem because, you know, individual sin has implications. But when you multiply that by hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of individuals, and sin becomes institutional and encoded into law, the impact of that is so great compared to, say for instance, individual sin. And I think for me, one of the most powerful movements within the Christian tradition is ironically liberation theology. Because liberation theology really deals with structural sin, you know, that the most damaging sin really is that which is structural, institutional, because of the power that it holds. And liberation theology really recognizes that poverty is invariably due to those structural injustices that you’ve been kind of unpacking, you know, in this nation, but obviously every single nation has them, that privilege those few over the majority. But what I also like about liberation theology is that it goes further than just saying we need to focus on structural sin. But it brings in this theological concept of God’s preferential option for the poor, which is a very interesting, interesting statement. You know, we like to think, well, God loves all people, right? Like, do you remember when there was the Black Lives Movement and then there was the, well, like, All Lives Matter, right? Right, so we like to think, well, God loves everybody. Of course, God loves everybody. That goes without saying. However, in the scriptures, we see very clearly that God has this preferential option for the poor. So if you look wherever God chooses to be found, it’s always in the marginal, amongst the poor. I mean we see this in Jesus right in the New Testament Jesus choosing to be born into a poor family. Jesus choosing that life of radical simplicity. I mean to the extent of saying no place to lay his head. If you look at the miracles most of the miracles were for those who were disabled, for those who were struggling, for those who were marginal and had almost been pushed out of the economic realities for whatever reason of the society. And so I think it’s a fascinating concept to unpack. Like what would, structurally, a preferential option for the poor look like in public policy? Right? You know? And especially as people of faith or as Christians, if our call is to stand in solidarity with the poor, I mean, you think about when Jesus speaks, he says, blessed are those who are poor. He’s not saying blessed is poverty. He’s saying blessed who find themselves in a situation of poverty because God’s presence is especially close to them. I always often wonder to myself what would a society look like if we took these faith-based perspectives and found a way to actually give them tangible shape and form in policies. I think we’d create an incredibly different society, right? I mean, it would be radically different. You know, if we go back to sharing stories, my only personal experience of poverty was when I decided to go and study theology. Had to give up our jobs, moved into seminary with a whole bunch of other people. I happened to have a couple of kids at that stage And they pay you a stipend that is consciously lower than what you can actually live on. So I remember when I was a seminary student, I mean, you’ve still got seminary student fees to pay, right? I mean, you’ve got all your student fees to pay, but they would give us a start-end of, I think it was like 500 Rand a month, right? You could not live on 500 Rand a month. Like that was way beyond poverty line, right? And I remember for the first time in my entire life, I didn’t have enough to eat. I remember we used to actually, if I tell you this honestly, Elizabeth, we used to, we made sure for the babies we always had milk, bottled milk, right? Because kids need milk when they’re growing, the little ones. But for the rest of us, once we were older, you know, the older kids and ourselves as adults, We used to eat once every 3 days and it was always a blend between tinned beans. Sometimes we used to throw in a tinned sweet corn and then we used to go and forage, forage greens that we would kind of like fry up and put into the beans or the sweet corn. I can’t tell you how bad it tasted. It was horrible. It was horrible, right? And I remember shame. I mean, sometimes as a mother, my heart used to break because my kids would be like, the older kids, they’d be like, mom, is today number 2 or number 3? Are we gonna eat today? But the children survived, the kids survived. I mean, as human beings, we are incredibly resilient, right? We are resilient. But that was my only experience. And then obviously once I got ordained, I became a priest and had a normal salary. But I remember like for instance, our car got stolen. We didn’t have money to in any shape or form replace it. And so we had to walk everywhere and you know carrying grocery bags and trying to carry a baby on your hip. I mean, I remember my arms feeling like they were stretching to double the length, right? And I’d have to walk all the way home. But it was, it was a very formative experience for me because it’s one thing to know about poverty in our heads. It’s a very different reality to know it in your stomach. Right? You know, it’s one thing to know about the problems of transportation for people in our heads or, you know, but to know it when your feet are throbbing, you’re trying to carry a baby and your arms just feel like they’re going to literally rip out of your sockets and unfortunately for too many of us we haven’t experienced it right and so and so there isn’t that real understanding of of that every moment of poverty not just in the in our spirits or in our minds but in the body right I mean poverty has a huge toll on the human body, huge. And it’s often made me think about this concept of voluntary poverty, because you see this in the spiritual traditions, where people will choose to enter into some form of a simple, very simple lifestyle in order to in some ways be in solidarity with the poor. I think there’s a lot of merit in it because I think we all should be reducing our lifestyle. We all should be simplifying. We all should be, you know, in some ways stepping down from the level and the standard of living that we’ve just become accustomed to. But voluntary poverty in no way is ever real poverty, right? Because for most people who choose to engage in voluntary poverty at any point in time because of your education privilege, because of maybe your race privilege, whatever, your family background privilege, you can normally opt out of it when you choose to. For people who actually live in poverty, there’s no capacity to opt out, right? You don’t have a choice. And I think that is such a huge fundamental difference. So you know I think for myself in concluding maybe this episode, you know, I mean I think some of the questions you know we need to ask ourselves is quite honestly do you see God in the face of the poor? When you actually physically look into those who are living in poverty’s faces, do you see God? Or have we, in some ways within ourselves, begun to blame the poor, despise the poor, or maybe judge the poor, just like the dominant culture. Do we in our lives genuinely side with the poor, like a god, or do we find ourselves automatically siding with the wealthy? What would it mean for us as communities to become so much more generous, but from a place of recognizing that we actually have more than our own fair share? And so using that opportunity to redistribute wealth or access to things really as a part of justice, not as charity, if that makes sense. And how are we on an ongoing basis actively supporting public policy groups that are lifting up the voice of the poor and really working to end poverty?
[33:32] MET: Thank you for listening to The Priest and the Prof. Find us at our website, PriestAndProf.org. If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact us at podcast@priestandprof.org. Make sure to subscribe, and if you feel led, please leave a donation at priestandprof.org/donate. That will help cover the costs of this podcast and support the ministries of Trinity Episcopal Church. Thank you, and we hope you have enjoyed our time together today.
[34:02] DDM: Music by Audionautix.com
