The Material and the Spiritual
The defense of many religious conservatives for their position has to do with their view of the role of the government and its relation to their view of the root of humankind’s problems. They say we are naïve when we suggest that there is a relationship between the evil things that people do (I’ll not shrink from such an absolutist characterization) and one’s socioeconomic status. This is a compelling argument for many. Higher murder rates, higher crime rates—robbery and murder are undoubtedly evil, and the rates of such are generally higher in urban centers. Why is that? As I see it, one can either hold an unstated racist answer or an acknowledgement of a correlation between certain crimes of desperation and poverty. And if one is to believe the right, one would have to hold a rather narrow view of sin. Many of its proponents do—sin is confined to things, and only certain things—that one can see.
If we believe, though, that we are all susceptible to any kind of sin, the right conditions may lead to our doing just about anything. So if one lived in an environment in which there were little hope for advancement yet quick money could be gotten so easily, a certain percentage of us would act in kind. So I feel comfortable in at least saying that poverty creates the conditions in which many will succumb to violent crime. That’s the only way we can account for higher crime in urban center. So we should be committed to minimizing the effects of poverty. Naïve, says the religious right. Why? Their position ranges from the aforementioned view that our problems are spiritual, not material to even a belief that free-market capitalism is biblical, which is just foolish. Enough people before me have made the case that at least the early Christian church in the book of acts looks a lot more like a socialist model (a rather early one, too).
Maybe it’s not in all cases intentional, but the religious right’s position on this only serves the interest of the very wealthy and further widens the gap between the wealthiest and the poorest. Again, if this kind of problem is undeniably more prevalent in this kind of environment, it should be our goal to alter that environment. This illustration will be problematic for some, but imagine if a person were surrounded by pornography—videos, magazines, etc.—and therefore struggled with some kind of sexual sin. Would the thing to do be to give the person a tract or Bible while leaving the surrounding environment intact? His success in that environment would be very difficult, to say the least. So again, we should seek to improve the conditions that lead to a particular problem in order to address the problem. Whoever originally set the material and the spiritual in a dialectic with each other was wrong—the material affects the spiritual. Imagine this—if a person repeatedly became sick because her house was filled with germs, one shouldn’t resist cleaning the germs from the house because the real problem is the body’s susceptibility to illness in general. Pardon my imperfect analogy, but it seems that a lot of Christians have contented themselves with leaving the material out of the equation because the problems associated with it are only symptoms of a larger problem—humankind’s sinfulness. While this is true, the issue is how to confront this larger issue. Certain conditions tempt us to sin, and to only worsen the conditions that tempt a few of our most troubling sins is probably to aid that sin itself. Maybe our allowance of poverty itself is a sin.
If we believe, though, that we are all susceptible to any kind of sin, the right conditions may lead to our doing just about anything. So if one lived in an environment in which there were little hope for advancement yet quick money could be gotten so easily, a certain percentage of us would act in kind. So I feel comfortable in at least saying that poverty creates the conditions in which many will succumb to violent crime. That’s the only way we can account for higher crime in urban center. So we should be committed to minimizing the effects of poverty. Naïve, says the religious right. Why? Their position ranges from the aforementioned view that our problems are spiritual, not material to even a belief that free-market capitalism is biblical, which is just foolish. Enough people before me have made the case that at least the early Christian church in the book of acts looks a lot more like a socialist model (a rather early one, too).
Maybe it’s not in all cases intentional, but the religious right’s position on this only serves the interest of the very wealthy and further widens the gap between the wealthiest and the poorest. Again, if this kind of problem is undeniably more prevalent in this kind of environment, it should be our goal to alter that environment. This illustration will be problematic for some, but imagine if a person were surrounded by pornography—videos, magazines, etc.—and therefore struggled with some kind of sexual sin. Would the thing to do be to give the person a tract or Bible while leaving the surrounding environment intact? His success in that environment would be very difficult, to say the least. So again, we should seek to improve the conditions that lead to a particular problem in order to address the problem. Whoever originally set the material and the spiritual in a dialectic with each other was wrong—the material affects the spiritual. Imagine this—if a person repeatedly became sick because her house was filled with germs, one shouldn’t resist cleaning the germs from the house because the real problem is the body’s susceptibility to illness in general. Pardon my imperfect analogy, but it seems that a lot of Christians have contented themselves with leaving the material out of the equation because the problems associated with it are only symptoms of a larger problem—humankind’s sinfulness. While this is true, the issue is how to confront this larger issue. Certain conditions tempt us to sin, and to only worsen the conditions that tempt a few of our most troubling sins is probably to aid that sin itself. Maybe our allowance of poverty itself is a sin.
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