'Love of money is the root of all evil." I heard these words paraphrased about six years ago while riding in the lurching jump seat of a truck-bus in rural Central America. The driver matter-of-factly had launched into a monologue about how much of a problem I was--not very nice words for a hired hand to say to a moneyed tourist.
"You rich Americans came down here and messed everything up. Just ten years ago, everybody was poor but we shared our stuff and were happy. If some lost their food or were sick, others helped out no matter how little they had to share.
"Now it's different. We're still poor but nobody shares with nobody, and some starve. No one's happy. There's stealing and fighting and killing and hating and everything."
I got quite uncomfortable. It didn't seem right that I had a future so different from his--one that corrupts his own lifestyle and hopes.
I thought of him the other day as I watched TV news of Latin American refugees beaching their dinghy in the middle of some sun-bathers lolling on Miami's shores. Our futures were coming together after all.
The recent influx of Cuban and Haitian refugees may well have done the cause of the gospel in the U.S. a mighty service. If there is anything that we in the U.S. should learn from their arrival, it is that our economic lifestyles are utterly sinful.
Much as we'd like to, it is becoming harder and harder for us to ignore the growing gap between rich and poor in our world. News coverage of global suffering, journeys abroad, and occasional eruptions in America's own pockets of poverty jar the tranquility of our wealth. But by far the most troublesome reminder comes when refugees cross our borders looking for a share in the good life.
The tens of thousands of refugees from the Caribbean this summer have been poor, some utterly so. Whatever else (e.g. political repression by the Left or Right) may have pushed them out of their homelands, the good life of the U.S. was without question an overwhelmingly important magnet. Cubans flee to the U.S., not Jamaica. Haitians flee to the U.S., not nearby Puerto Rico. Mexicans flee to the U.S., not Costa Rica.
As long as our nation is an island of wealth in a sea of poverty, poor people will float our direction. Latin American refugees have one thing in common: They've caught wind of the good life and have resolutely set sail for it. In the early 1970s, a Kettering Foundation study found that one out of every three Latin Americans wanted to emigrate to the U.S.
Today there are an estimated 9 to 14 million people worldwide who are refugees, displaced from their homes by poverty, war, and persecution. The numbers stagger the imagination. While poverty isn't the only cause, it clearly plays the lead role.
If you are poor and unskilled, it is almost impossible to get into the U.S. legally today. In the not-so-distant past, U.S. immigration restrictions excluded people by race--like the thousands of Jews we turned away who were trying to flee Hitler's purges before the Holocaust. Skin color, political views, and geographic origins have kept immigrants out. While recent reforms have removed many of these obstacles on paper at least, a major practical bar still remains: that of poverty. And while the annual numbers of immigrants to the U.S. are the highest in the world, our waiting lines are by far the longest.
In 1900, the average person in the rich world had four times as much as a person in the poor world. By 1970, the ratio was 40 to 1. As that gap continues to widen, it doesn't take an expert to figure out that migration in the future will more and more be from poor to rich areas of the globe, and that the numbers will swell exponentially.
In our increasingly interlocking global economy, the poor of far-off lands essentially are the serfs of lords living in richer nations. The act of emigration is an act of rebellion--slaves invading their masters' turf to claim part of the good life. Lifestyles so drastically different in scale can exist in tranquility only when they are distant and ignorant of each other. When awareness and proximity grows, those without can be counted on to do something about their lack. Especially when their basic survival is at stake.
What does a rich country do with poor newcomers who crash the legal gate? The first urge is to help. But that impulse is being quickly stifled by the question of whether America can afford to accept all of these poor with open arms. You can ask this question only if you believe in the sanctity of the status quo lifestyle in America. Yet the only decent question to ask is: If the United States can't afford to accept these poor, who in the world can?
During the debate over whether to let the Cubans and Haitians stay, it became clear that the American Dream grips North Americans even more tenaciously than it does the refugees. Official Washington spun itself into a dither trying to design a response that kept away those who hadn't gotten here and let stay those who had, while making sure we treated them badly enough to deter others from following. President Carter's top refugee aide fearfully warned against "extending an invitation to people to rush our shores." A congressman declared that the "...Statue of Liberty tenets no longer apply. We can no longer absorb all the distressed of the world." And worried citizens armed themselves in Arkansas and Florida, ready to beat back refugees who had escaped from holding camps.
The welcome for these latest refugees was so limp largely because, thanks to OPEC, the notion that our economic lives are closely linked together is beginning to catch hold. More people are starting to see that in a finite world, one person's wealth is another's poverty. Ours is an era of limits and budget balancing; we increase some things by decreasing others. Even economists like Lester Thurow are now saying that the only way to solve our economic problems is to have "some large group be willing to tolerate a large reduction in [its] real standard of living."
As people accept these zero-sum ideas, it becomes clear that the entrance of more poor to this country will take something from someone. The poor already here know that it is they, not the rich, who always have to pay the price, because they are powerless. The rich and powerful, meanwhile, maintain a telling silence, or condescendingly agree with the poor. The middle and upper classes are quite content to let the debate over new refugees be confined to the pros and cons of pitting poor against poor. With diversions like these, the rich are kept safe and secure.
From reading the Bible, one would expect the church, a group of people being freed from sinful mammon, to be the first to break down this false boundary to the debate. The reason it hasn't is because the church in this country is still full of rich people. Class interests speak louder than the interests of the gospel.
If the church were to speak without fetters, it would have to declare that economic disparities between the rich and poor are wrong everywhere. It would call them sin, and work for conversion.
It would maintain that borders can no longer be used as legal barrier reefs to keep the poor of the globe away from the concentration of riches. In the same breath, it would hold that the domestic poor should not be forced to compete with the emigrant poor for the scraps of the rich, but that the rich should divest themselves of their wealth for the sake of all those without.
It would not just say these things, it would live them. The mark of being a Christian would be known as living simply, accumulating little if anything, and consuming at subsistence levels.
Until the church can learn to live out the interests of the majority of people on the globe--the poor--its evangelism will be constrained, its message muted, its central principle of love a mockery. Sacrificial love, like the widow's giving of her last mite, is the only compassion that Jesus has told us God notices. And in our world today, it is the only compassion that has any practical worth.
Obviously, it's not natural for rich people to divest themselves of their possessions, especially when backed into a corner. But there are just two options: Either we build up the walls, hunker down, and prepare to fight it out against the poor with the heavy advantage of the firepower that money can buy, or we tear down the walls and redistribute wealth. It's either war or shalom.
Shalom in our time, as in all times, follows from repentance. Only such power can move us rich beyond self-interest to unselfish love for others. It will take this kind of personal and corporate revival if sacrificial living is to become the motif of our lives.
As Jesus warned, this is about as difficult as yanking a camel through the eye of a needle. But it must be done. The radical essence of the gospel bids nothing less. And it is up to those of us who know the gospel and are learning to live it to prove to the rich who don't that it is a joyous possibility for them as well.
Phil M. Shenk was on the editorial staff at Sojourners when this article appeared.
Got something to say about what you're reading? We value your feedback!