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Tuesday, April 26, 2005

Jim Wallis, the Bible, and Poverty

(Note: The blog-eating monster struck again and I had to rewrite this post from the beginning. I imagine the version you're reading now will be somewhat condensed.)

A couple of months ago my dad sent me an article--"Watch For The Religious Left Sock Puppets On TV And Radio!"--from a conservative news source with his comments, claiming that "[Jim] Wallis and the Religious Left are trying to train liberals to speak like religious Americans. Sounds like wolves in sheep's clothing, in my humble opinion." I wrote him a lengthy email in response (what follows is an excerpt--and yes, I refrained from dissecting the article's ridiculous title):

I don't know a ton about Sojourners, [the group that Wallis runs, which I've since come to know more in depth] but they are highly respected for their work in social justice, specifically poverty. This is not a purely liberal value. The most prominent themes of the Old Testiment, in order, are idolatry and poverty. One of every sixteen verses in the New Testiment is about the poor. In the Gospels, the figure changes to one in every ten. God is incredibly concerned about poverty, and it's to our deteriment that the American church by and large has done little--statistically Christians contribute less to charity than non-Christians. Something is very wrong.

Of course, he emailed me back soon after, questioning the source of the statistics. When I did a little research and realized that they came from Wallis himself, I knew that for this discussion, they were inadmissible as evidence:

During his seminary days in Chicago, he and few of his classmates decided to do a study to find every biblical reference on one particular subject--the poor and oppressed. Thousands of verses later, and to their astonishment, they discovered that those who are marginalized, mistreated, abandoned and forgotten by everyone else fill the Bible.... In the Gospel of Luke, it's one of every seven [verses], and in the book of James, one of every five verses" (Jim Wallis, The Soul of Politics).

So tonight I finally finished a project I'd been meaning to start for some time: I went through James and Luke myself, highlighting every verse that referenced poverty and the marginalized. In the course of doing this, I realized that to some extent it's subjective; for example, does "But the wisdom that comes from heaven is first of all pure; then peaceloving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere" (James 3:17) meet the criteria? How about the many verses that talk about Jesus healing the sick? Or verses that condemn hording riches on earth?

In the end, my count was similar to Wallis's: I counted one in every seven verses in the Gospel of Luke and the same for the book of James. The sheer number is astonishing; these are verses that the Religious Right would do well to remember when making the issue of gay marriage a higher priority than feeding the poor. These are verses I would do well to remember when determining how I spend my time, my money. Perhaps the challenge can be summarized in James 1:27: "Pure and lasting religion in the sight of God our Father means that we must care for orphans and widows in their troubles, and refuse to let the world corrupt us."

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