The role of the church in fighting poverty

David Cay Johnson, Al Jazeera America - Nearly 1 in 5 Americans is now officially classified as poor. This fact naturally raises a question: Where are the religious leaders whose scriptures tell them that caring for their 60 million impoverished neighbors is their central moral duty?

I posed this question at a tax conference in New York City this week to one of the leaders in the small Christian movement focused on the role taxes play in creating inequality. She shrugged. “The church always leads from behind,” she said.

But this may be beginning to change. The awful realities of worsening poverty in America amid overwhelming abundance at the top are becoming harder to ignore, especially those tasked with following Jesus’ teachings.

For Catholics, poverty, inequality and government policies that take from the many to benefit the rich are under discussion because of Pope Francis, who last July said, “Poverty is at the center of the gospel.”

Asked by a British journalist whether he was preaching communism, the pope said that centuries before Marx, communal sharing was the Christian standard and that today, “the communists have stolen the flag. The flag of the poor is Christian.”

Now, after years of study and debate, the ninth-largest Protestant denomination, the Presbyterian Church USA, has come out with a detailed report that ties the religious duty of believers and government tax policy.

Calling taxation “a fundamental part of a moral society’s answer to poverty and its close relatives — inequality, economic insecurity and social immobility,” the report says the church’s 2.7 million members should work to devise a just tax system.

... To many major American religious organizations, poverty is a personal matter, not one requiring involvement with government policy. The largest protestant denomination, the 16-million-member Southern Baptist Convention, for example, issued a brief statement on poverty 28 years ago and various other statements over the years. A glossy 2013 brochure makes just one mention of poverty and the $1.1 million in food that Southern Baptists donated annually to poor Americans.

...Government rules today favor the wealthy at the expense of everyone else. So who can organize people to push for changes in government policy that will reduce poverty and extreme inequality?

The University of Chicago Divinity School’s Myriam Renaud provided an answer recently:

The only remaining, major, organized institutions in the U.S. with enough scope and moral authority to launch efforts to reverse this country’s growing income and wealth inequality are the religions. Other institutions have waned; today’s labor unions represent only 7 percent of private sector employees. Delays matter: As income inequality increases, more children are going to bed hungry.