The Culture of Poverty

The term "culture of poverty" was introduced by Oscar Lewis in his seminal 1959 book Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty. (If you don’t know about Lewis, 1914~1970, as I didn’t until very recently, he was the son of a Jewish rabbi, the husband of Abraham Maslow’s sister, and a noted anthropologist and university professor.)

Michael Harrington used that same term in "Our Fifty Million Poor," a piece he wrote for the July 1959 issue of Commentary, the monthly magazine founded by the American Jewish Committee in 1945. (Some of you will recall that I mentioned Harrington in my previous, as well as my March 5, blog article.)

In his article, Harrington argued that American poverty constituted “a separate culture, another nation, with its own way of life.” Consequently, he argued, a “comprehensive assault on poverty” on the part of the federal government is needed if the problem of poverty is to be solved.

Harrington’s analysis of the problem of poverty in USAmerican society was further developed in his highly influential book The Other America (1962), which is credited with being one of the main works that stimulated President Johnson to declare the war on poverty in 1964.

The Food Stamp Act and the Economic Opportunity Act, both enacted that year, were major parts of the “assault” on national poverty. But that attack weakened during the presidency of Richard Nixon and declined even further after the election of President Reagan in 1980.

Moreover, according to Maurice Isserman, “neo-conservatives took [Harrington’s] notion of the ‘culture of poverty’ and, turning it on its head, used it as an argument against pursuing a federal war on poverty” (The Other American: The Life of Michael Harrington,” 2000, p. 305).

In the early 1970s Harvard University professors such as Edward Banfield (1916~99) and Nathan Glazer (b. 1923) wrote disparagingly of those who were a part of the culture of poverty and of government programs designed to help such people. These ideas affirmed by the neo-conservatives were endorsed by Nixon and have largely been the position of the Republican Party ever since.

Quoting Isserman again,

The trouble with the poor, as the neo-conservatives saw it, was that they had adjusted to a condition of permanent dependency.... Those who professed to be interested in aiding the poor by means of expanding the welfare state were, in effect, the poor’s worst enemies... (p. 306).

In her book My Invented Country (2003), which I recently read, Chilean author Isabel Allende writes about visiting the squatters’ settlements around Santiago when as a young woman she had a job as a journalist.

Allende comments, “That’s when I discovered that social climbing was a middle-class phenomenon, the poor never gave it a thought, they were too busy trying to survive” (p. 127).

To the conservatives of the past and maybe even more in the present—and especially to the strident voices I hear on “talk radio”—the victims of poverty are to blame for their own plight. They could do better if they tried.

But maybe they are just trying to survive.

There has been much talk about the culture war(s) in American society, but little regard for the “war” against those who live in a culture of poverty—although in 1995 Herbert Gans wrote a significant book titled The War Against the Poor. (The first chapter is here.)

Surely, we need to be understanding of and sympathetic to those living in a culture of poverty—seeing them as neighbors who need to be loved rather than slackers, or enemies, who should be condemned.

God's Funeral

It was reading part of Michael Harrington’s book “The Politics at God’s Funeral: The Crisis of Western Civilization” (1983) that got me thinking about the provocative words used as the title of this article. (I am still reading, and increasingly impressed with, Harrington’s book.)

Come to find out, “God’s funeral” has been used several times in the past 100+ years. Between 1908 and 1910 the English poet Thomas Hardy wrote a 17-stanza poem with that title.

Hardy’s poem is introduced, and printed in full, in A. N. Wilson’s 1999 book titled “God’s Funeral: A Biography of Faith and Doubt in Western Civilization.”

In contrast to Hardy and Wilson, who were agnostics/atheists, David Tyler, a Baptist pastor and “biblical counselor,” has more recently written “God’s Funeral” (2009), a book which deals with psychology and “trading the sacred for the secular.”

Although I don’t know that he said anything about a funeral, perhaps the best known statement about God’s demise was made by philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who declared “God is dead” in his 1882 book “The Gay Science” (with “gay” being the translation of the German fröhliche=cheerful, happy).

Actually, though, according to Harrington, “God’s death has been announced in every generation for about three hundred years” (p. 11).

Many of us remember that in 1966 Christian theologian Thomas Altizer penned a book titled “The Gospel of Christian Atheism.” And in April of that year Time magazine published a provocative issue with the cover having only the words “Is God Dead?” in bold red letters on a black background.

In my previous article I referred to a book by Harry Emerson Fosdick. Most of you know the story of Fosdick’s talk with a young man who came to confess that he could no longer believe in God.

The young man was a student at prestigious Columbia University, a short walk from Riverside Church, where Fosdick was the legendary pastor from 1925 to 1946.

Fosdick said, “Tell me about this God you don’t believe in.” After hearing the young man’s explanation, Fosdick remarked, “Well, son, I don’t believe in that God either!”

So perhaps God needs to be buried—at least some understandings of God, such as the God of imperial Christendom, the God of “manifest destiny,” the God of exploitative capitalism, and the God who supposedly sanctions male supremacy and who condemns all homoerotic activity (even between consenting adults).

But there are other, truer, concepts of God. And there are many who remain thoroughly convinced that there is a God who is certainly alive and well today.

For example, think about the current Pope, who reportedly has some fairly close ties to God. He seems to be in tune with a living God who is quite different from the dead God that Harrington wrote about.

Pope Francis appears to have considerable concern for God’s “preferential option for the poor,” a phrase that Harrington did not use, to my knowledge, but one he would have fully affirmed.

And now Pope Francis is also calling on the world to take action against global warming. And that pro-active position is based, of course, on his unwavering belief in the Creator God.

Even though it came out before this week’s Pew report on the serious decline of religion in America, an earlier article this week advised, “Don’t plan any funerals for religion just yet.” (The Baylor conference covered in that article referred to the worldwide situation, not just the 5% of the world’s population in the U.S.)

And it is also still far too early, and far too presumptuous, to be talking about God’s funeral.

Christians for Socialism

"Socialism” is a word with a very negative connotation for most Americans. And yet perhaps socialism, especially democratic socialism, deserves to be much more highly evaluated by the public at large and by Christians in particular.

Last month I read with great interest two books about past socialist leaders in the U.S. One was Irving Stone’s Adversary in the House (1947), a biographical novel based on the life of Eugene V. Debs and his wife Kate. Debs (1855~1926) was a pioneer union leader and five times the Socialist Party of America candidate for President of the United States.

While reading that captivating book, I remarked to June, “I hope Debs was as good a man as Stone thought he was.” Needless to say, I was highly impressed by him—and by his thoughts and actions. 

The other impressive book was The Other American: The Life of Michael Harrington (2000), a superlative biographical work by historian Maurice Isserman. Harrington (1928~89) was the last great socialist leader in the U.S. 

Harrington was also the author of The Other America (1962), a very significant book that helped influence President Johnson to initiate the “war on poverty” in 1964.

Debs was not particularly religious, although he was friends with and a benefactor of a minister in his hometown of Terre Haute, Indiana. And although he became an agnostic, Harrington grew up as a devout Catholic and as a young man worked for two years with Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement.

Isserman writes how at a party in celebration of Harrington’s 60^th birthday, Ted Kennedy declared,

In our lifetime, it is Mike Harrington who has come the closest to fulfilling the vision of America that my brother Robert Kennedy had, when he said, “Some men see things as they are and say ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were and say ‘Why Not?’” . . . Some call it socialism; I call it the Sermon on the Mount (p. 359).

The other most prominent 20^th century socialist leader in the U.S was Norman Thomas, a six-time presidential candidate for the Socialist Party of America. Thomas (1894-1968) was also a Presbyterian minister for twenty years. 

So while socialism in America was not a Christian movement as such, it was closely tied to people shaped by a Christian worldview. Looking more broadly, though, some of the most prominent 20^th century Christian theologians and/or activists were advocates of socialism.

Among those who quickly come to mind are Karl Barth in Switzerland (and Germany), Paul Tillich in Germany (and the U.S. after 1933), Kagawa Toyohiko in Japan, and Reinhold Niebuhr in the U.S. In addition, in the 1970s and ’80s there was a “Christians for Socialism” movement in Latin America.

Kagawa, who as a young man began to live in solidarity with the poor in the slums of Kobe, stated his position quite clearly: “I am a socialist because I am a Christian.”

There are many different types of socialism, and it perhaps goes without saying that most Christians who have espoused socialism have been staunch opponents of the violent or coercive type of socialism. 

Barth and Tillich were strong opponents of Hitler’s National Socialism. And most American socialists have been strongly opposed to oppressive socialism such as that seen in Stalinism or Maoism.

Most Christian socialists are best designated as democratic socialists, and the socialist activities of Debs, Thomas, and Harrington have morphed into what is now known as the Democratic Socialists of America.

Perhaps it is again time, especially for Christians, to take socialism more seriously and evaluate it more highly.

Who Loves Capitalism?

My previous posting was about income tax, and I am continuing to think about economic matters in this article. Just the evening before Tax Day, June and I watched Michael Moore’s 2009 movie “Capitalism: A Love Story.” We thought it was a good movie. But there are those who not only don’t like it, they hate it.

I was a bit surprised that the movie included brief comments by a retired Catholic bishop from Detroit and two other Catholic priests, who were all quite negative in their comments about capitalism. But through the years there has been a rather long line of prominent Christians, Protestants as well as Catholics, who have been critical of capitalism.

As you know, those who are conservative politically are strong opponents of President Obama, and there has been a steady stream of criticism calling him a socialist and decrying his leading the country into socialism (or even Communism). His pushing for the healthcare reform bill, of course, has been one of the main reasons for that attack. And, in fact, the President is probably just one of many prominent politicians who are somewhat critical of capitalism.

In the previous posting, I mentioned Ronald Dellums, the current mayor of Oakland (CA). He served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1971 to 1998, and he was the first openly socialist congressperson since World War II. Although I have known of him since the early 1970s because of his opposition to the Vietnam War, I did not know until recently that he is a democratic socialist. But I was not surprised when I learned that.

Are you aware that Bernard “Bernie” Sanders (1941), the junior U.S. Senator from Vermont serving in his third year, also describes himself as a democratic socialist? He is said to be the first open socialist to serve in the Senate. There are, of course, many others, mostly liberal Democrats, who are regularly charged with being socialists. And maybe a number of them are democratic socialist sympathizers. But is should that be considered a bad thing?

If even half of the things Michael Moore says about capitalism are true—and probably more than half are, in fact, true—then it seems to me that followers of Jesus Christ ought to be among the leaders of those seeking an alternative economic system, or at least modification of the present capitalistic system.

Thankfully, there have been some modifications through the years. Michael Harrington (1928-89) was one of the outstanding socialist scholars in the twentieth century. Perhaps his most influential book was The Other America: Poverty in the United States (1962), a work that had an impact on the Kennedy administration and on Johnson’s subsequent “war on poverty.”

So, who loves capitalism? Primarily, those who have capital. And it probably can be said that, in general, the more capital one has, the more that person loves capitalism. But there is little love for capitalism by most of those who live in “the other America,” and also by those who are most concerned for people living in poverty.