Why God Gets Angry

“When you see God getting angry in the Bible, it’s often because the poor are being mistreated.” These are the words of Matthew Desmond in the August issue of Sojourners magazine (see here).

Over the years I have written about poverty several times on this blog, but reading the Sojourners’ interview with Desmond spurred me to post here again about that troubling topic.*¹

Matthew Desmond is a sociology professor at Princeton University. His first book was the Pulitzer Prize-winning Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016). His new book, Poverty, by America, was released in March. I was highly impressed by what I read in both books. 

In introducing their interview with Desmond (b. 1979/80), the editors of Sojourners note that he “is the son of a pastor, and his work is rich with spiritual metaphor and flare while founded in the material realities of poverty and the conditions that cause it.”

Indeed, rather than an outside academic studying the problem of poverty from the “ivory tower,” Desmond did his research by living among the poor for extended periods of time, becoming friends with those suffering from the many perils of poverty.

Interviewer Mitchell Atencio began by asking Desmond to comment on Gustavo Gutiérrez’s depiction of poverty.

The Peruvian liberation theologian defined poverty as “premature and unjust death,” and stated that “the poor person is someone who is treated as a non-person, someone who is considered insignificant from an economic, political, and cultural point of view.”*²

Desmond agreed, noting that “one of the leading causes of death in the United States is poverty.” For that and other reasons, Desmond declares, “I want to end poverty. I don’t want to treat it, I want to cure it. I don’t want to reduce it, I want to abolish it.”

Accordingly, he challenges his readers to join him in becoming “poverty abolitionists.”*³

The abolitionist movement was the name of the long struggle for the eradication of the enslavement of human beings mostly to do manual labor without pay.

There have also long been attempts to abolish capital punishment. The Death Penalty Information Center has a webpage titled The Abolitionist Movement, and it is, of course, about the history of attempts to abolish the death penalty.

Some people are seeking to abolish abortion. For example, the “Abolition of Abortion in Missouri Act” was introduced to the Missouri Senate last year.

Little has been said, though, about the abolition of poverty. There was, of course, “the war on poverty” launched by President Johnson in 1964. Although opposed by GOP politicians from the beginning, some positive steps to reduce poverty were made. But it soon began to lose effectiveness.

Accordingly, early in 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., started the Poor People's Campaign to address what he saw as the shortcomings of the war on poverty—and his trip to Memphis where he was assassinated in April was not to struggle against racism as such, but to protest against poverty.*⁴

Desmond’s call for a new abolitionist movement is something that we need to take seriously. That is so for all people of goodwill and especially true for those of us who are Christians, or Jews, and take our Scripture seriously.

Reflecting on what Desmond said about why God gets angry, consider the words of the Old Testament prophets speaking for God in judgment on those who are wealthy and mistreating or neglecting the poor, words, for example, found in Isaiah 1:11~17, Ezekiel 22:29~31, and Amos 2:6-7a, 4:1-2.

If we are going to work to abolish poverty, we must work toward ridding our neighborhoods, and our churches, of segregation—not of racial segregation so much as economic segregation. Most of our neighborhoods and churches now have far more of the latter than the former.

As Desmond says, “Segregation poisons our minds and souls. When affluents live, work, play, and worship mainly alongside fellow affluents, they can grow insular, quite literally forgetting the poor.” (Poverty, p. 162).

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*¹ My May 20, 2015, blog article was titled “The Culture of Poverty,” and it has been one of my most accessed blog posts with over 3,000 pageviews.

*² “50 years later, Gustavo Gutiérrez’s ‘A Theology of Liberation’ remains prophetic” is the title of an informative 8/17/23 article in America (the Jesuit review of faith and culture) about Gutiérrez and his ground-breaking book first published in English in 1973.

*³ “How to Be a Poverty Abolitionist: On Matthew Desmond’s ‘Poverty, by America’” is an excellent review of Desmond’s book published on March 21 by the Los Angeles Review of Books.

*⁴ In 2018, William Barber II launched the Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for a Moral Revival, seeking to complete what King started 50 years earlier. (See my May 5, 2018, blog post: “Can a Barber do what a King couldn’t?”.)

TTT #23 What We Do Is More Important than What We Believe

This new article is largely related to Christians and Christian theology—but not exclusively. In recent decades some Buddhist thinkers, such as the venerable Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh, have emphasized “engaged Buddhism,” which is closely connected to the movement in Christian theology referenced here.

Emphasis on Orthodoxy

Orthodoxy is a word that has had a long and checkered history in the story of the Christian faith. While the idea of orthodoxy was not completely absent even in New Testament times, the emphasis on the importance of orthodoxy was not prevalent in Christianity until the fourth century.

The first Ecumenical Councils of the church, beginning with the Council of Nicaea in 325, composed creeds which were intended to separate orthodoxy from heresy. More precisely, religious and political leaders sought to remove those deemed to be heretics from the orthodox within the Church.

Until about sixty years ago, the emphasis on orthodoxy was largely unchallenged in Christianity, although, to be sure, some small, “splinter” groups placed more emphasis on correct action than on correct belief.

For the church as a whole, however, the creeds were the focal point of correctness, and all who entered the Christian faith and sought to maintain good standing in that faith were expected to agree with the creeds.

Nevertheless, Christians, and all people, need to recognize that what they do is more important than what they believe.

The Contribution of Liberation Theology

That which is known as liberation theology has its strong supporters as well as severe critics. There are variations in all movements and schools of thought; some are more excessive in their emphases than others. That is true for liberation theology, too, of course.

Assuredly, there have been some statements made and some actions performed in the name of liberation theology that clearly must be labeled as extreme. But there is much that is good and important in liberation theology.

Three distinct liberation theology movements began in the early 1970s. For many, though, liberation theology refers primarily to a theological movement whose roots go back to the late 1960s in South America.

Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez became the clear leader of that theological movement with his book A Theology of Liberation (1973), based on his theological proposals of 1968. 

Gutiérrez defines liberation theology as “a critical reflection on Christian praxis in light of the word of God.” He goes on to assert that “a principal task of ‘reflection on praxis in the light of faith' will be to strengthen the necessary and fruitful links between ortho-praxis and orthodoxy.”

Emphasis on Orthopraxy

But what is all this talk about praxis and orthopraxis? Praxis simply means action or practice, but it often has the connotation of being the practical application of a theory.

For religious people, praxis refers to the idea of putting faith into action. For Christians, it is particularly related to the idea that “faith without works is dead,” as found in the book of James. 

Orthopraxy, then, simply refers to right action. This concept stands over against orthodoxy, which means right belief. Gutiérrez says that the purpose of orthopraxis is to recognize “the importance of concrete behavior, of deeds, of action, of praxis in the Christian life.”

Given the wretched economic conditions of the masses of people in South America, the liberation theology developed in that continent spoke much about liberation from poverty, and “the preferential option for the poor” became a widely used, and often misunderstood, slogan. 

For all forms of liberation theology, though, action (praxis) is considered more important than words. That is the important point I am making here: what we do is more important than what we believe.

So What About Liberation Theology?

My previous blog posting was partly about Bartolomé de las Casas (1484–1566), the Spanish colonialist, Dominican priest, and human rights advocate, and I referred to Las Casas as a liberator, which he certainly was.

Perhaps the best book ever written about that ardent advocate of the rights of the native peoples of the West Indies is Las Casas: In Search of the Poor of Jesus Christ (1993), written by the Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez. (That book is nearly 700 pages long, including 160 pages of endnotes!)

Gutiérrez (b. 1928) is often referred to as the “father” of South American liberation theology. His book on that subject was published in Spanish in 1971, and two years later it was issued in English translation as A Theology of Liberation. (A fifteenth anniversary edition with a new introduction by the author was published in 1988.)

This past summer, Glenn Beck, the widely influential radio and television host, political commentator, and author, publicly denounced liberation theology—and criticized President Obama for being linked to liberation theology through his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Beck declared that “liberation theology has completely perverted Christianity and teaching something radically different.”

The liberation theology of Rev. Wright was based on the writings of Dr. James Cone rather than of Father Gutiérrez, and there are certainly differences between the two. (To see what I have written about the two American-American Christian leaders, click on James Cone and Jeremiah Wright in the Labels list on the right.)

Despite their differences, there are also distinct similarities between Cone and Gutiérrez. Although it is a phrase used mostly by South American liberation theologians, Cone, Wright, and others advocating black liberation would agree with the statement, “to know God is to do justice.” And the justice referred to is social justice, which stands in staunch opposition to the exploitation of the poor by the rich and the prejudicial treatment of Blacks by the White majority.

As you probably heard, Beck also came out with strong criticism of Christians being involved in social justice. Back in March, Beck said on one of his daily radio and television shows, “I beg you, look for the words ‘social justice’ or ‘economic justice’ on your church Web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words. Now, am I advising people to leave their church? Yes!” Later, he referred to social justice as “a perversion of the Gospel.”

But it seems quite clear to me that in 1492 and the years following it was Columbus who was perverting the Gospel, not Las Casas. And in recent years it is Glenn Beck, rather than Gutiérrez or other liberation theologians, who is distorting the Gospel. For after all, social justice is “love distributed.”