Envy Versus Justice
go4tli
this: to visit orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep
oneself unstained by the world.
-- James 1:27 (NASB)
There are too many churches I know that would probably have tend to
focus on the beginning and the end of that verse: "Pure and undefiled
religion in the sight of our God and Father is... to keep oneself
unstained by the world." That's what marks you as a Christian. It's
so important to "keep oneself unstained by the world" that it makes
them refrain from doing anything about distressed widows and orphans.
After all, have you seen where those people *live*? Definitely
seedy. We can't ask our people to go down there. They might get
"stained".
Better to play it safe. We'd better only concern ourselves with the
*deserving* widows and orphans. One's own moral purity, and how one's
own moral purity is perceived, is much more important than the needs
of those who are less fortunate than we.
The interesting wrinkle in all this is that being concerned about
one's own moral purity over others' physical needs is one of the
things Jesus Himself -- James' brother -- decried in no uncertain
terms, and He showed us how to do it. His idea of being polluted by
the world wasn't dining with the prostitutes and the publicans; it
wasn't being *in* the world -- it was to consider the opinion of the
world, *even about things like purity*, more important than God's
opinion. (I love great chunks of Matthew's gospel for this.)
And if you think about it from the standpoint that God is supposed to
be love, that makes sense. Love cannot be love without an object.
Unless it reaches out, it cannot be love. In refusing to try to
understand and meet the world's needs, we are refusing to exercise the
single most powerful way we can emulate God Himself; we are refusing
to be the very thing that is supposed to show the world what being a
Christian *really* is (John 13:35 -- Jesus never said, "All men will
know you are My disciples because you are obviously unpolluted").
This came to my attention from an article written no less than Chuck
Colson.
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The line between clamoring for justice and envy can be very thin.
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http://global.christianpost.com/news/killing-your-neighbors-cow-income-inequality-61679/
The column's thrust is that the line between justice and envy is *so*
thin that anyone clamoring for justice has already crossed it. Anyone
who clamors for justice is, in his words, "encouraging people to
indulge in a vice".
*Everyone*. He makes no exceptions in his column. He comes to within
a hair's breadth of equating justice and envy. And, sadly, it leads
him to a conclusion that I wish were less typical: that purity
consists of separating oneself from the world and its needs.
This view -- that virtue is no more than shunning vice -- is all about
playing it safe. But let me leave that aside for now (I don't think
Christians are supposed to be "safe", either to themselves or to
anyone around them); for just a moment, let me examine where Mr.
Colson is coming from.
"Envy", he claims, is what motivates calling for increasing taxes on
the wealthiest one percent of the country. The top marginal income
tax rate right now is 35%; according to Colson, anyone who advocates
that it should be higher is motivated by envy (a quality which we can
all agree is bad).
But consider that Colson served as special counsel during the Nixon
Administration from 1969 through March 1973. During all the years he
was there, the top marginal income tax rate was never below 70%.
http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Docid=213
So, from a percentage point of view, when Colson was in the White
House, the wealthiest Americans were taxed *double* what they are
today. The capital gains tax (meant to make up the difference for
people who are wealthy enough to make money from money) is even worse
-- it's 15% currently, which is why Warren Buffet has a lower tax rate
than his secretary.
When Colson was in the White House, revenue as a share of GDP was
17.6%. It's now 14.4%, the lowest it's been since 1950.
So according to Colson's column, Colson (and the Nixon Administration)
were radical redistributionists, driven by socialist envy. Because,
according to that column, the only motivation one could have to tax
the wealthy any more than they're currently being taxed is envy.
(Side note: I find it interesting that Colson would use a parable in
which *all workers make the same wages* and *some workers want more
because they think they deserve it*, and magically turns it into an
issue where people who are paid *less than they need to survive* are a
bunch of jealous poopyheads.)
Let me be plain about my motivation. The only reason I care that the
1% are making billions of dollars is that the poor do not have access
to nutritious food, reliable health care, good schools, or solid
roofs. The only reason I care that the average CEO makes 450 times as
much as the average worker is because the average worker isn't making
enough to sleep at night (never mind work to ensure the well-being of
his family twenty or thirty years down the road). The workers produce
the wealth, but only the owner gets to keep it. If a worker screws
up, his world is turned upside-down. If a CEO screws up, they fire
the people who *didn't* screw up. If I'm guilty of a so-called
"deadly sin", it's not envy; it's *wrath*.
If everyone in this country had a safe place to live, enough food to
eat, adequate health care, access to good education, and jobs that
allowed one to build up a measure of security for their families, I
probably would never have even *noticed* that the most wealthy are
much, much, much more wealthy than the people immediately beneath
them. It's only gross injustices that woke me up into wanting to
research who has the money, how they got it, how they keep it, and how
they get away with destroying the lives of the powerless and less
fortunate.
I'd like to live in a world where the rich get to a good place because
they work hard. I'd also like to live in a world where the only
protests against the rich would be a lonely guy with a bullhorn and
pamphlets he printed up at Kinko's, because the only *reason* to
protest the rich in that world would be in service to some political
ideology. But we don't live in that world; we live in a world where
the rich have some vague idea that they actually earned all their
money. Where the guy who makes $40k *resents* the guy who makes $20k,
because the $20k guy doesn't pay income tax -- even though the $40k
earner has much more in common, socially and economically, with the
$20k earner than he has with *anyone* making more than $1m. Where the
powerless receive the blame for things that are done by the most
powerful.
I don't covet the ability to screw people over. I want to see
justice, and it angers me to see powerful people hold justice out of
reach of the powerless, and trying to convince others that this is
somehow the right thing to do. I hear so many times that we're the
best, richest, most opportunity-laden country in the world; I want to
see *evidence* that these superlatives are remotely true.