That a church council decided that such a decree was necessary suggests that predicting the exact date of the Antichrist’s arrival or of the End Times was already a widespread practice, and yet that prohibition has done little to deter the cottage industry that has thrived within Christianity dedicated to predicting the end of the world—with a reliably 100 percent rate of failure.
In spite of this ban, after the Reformation, those apocalyptic predictions, combined with rampant anti-Catholicism, made the papacy one of the most frequently suggested candidates for the Antichrist. But the collective belief of most any generation that they are living in the most important time contributes to our sense of an ending. Throughout the twentieth century, there were predictions that a dictator like Adolf Hitler, and then Josef Stalin, would be the Antichrist. Then the predictions turned to Islamist terrorists, among others. Our predictions for who might usher in the End Times are flexible enough to morph from one generation’s bogeyman to the next, because the prediction itself does not actually change that much. Each generation sees themselves living in a moment of unparalleled importance in world history, whether or not they are.
As a general rule, I try to stay away from the “we live in an auspicious moment in history” sort of rhetoric. We may well be living in such a moment, but that assessment is probably best made by future historians. However, I do believe in each generation rising to meet the challenges unique to its particular epoch of time.
The Greatest Generation took on Nazism and European fascism. The generation before theirs had to arrest the Great Depression and the destructive effects of Prohibition. And, among the other challenges like climate change and the reemergence of fascism in the form of far-right governments across Europe, Generation X, Generation Z, and my generation of millennials will have to face down the tide of economic inequality on a scale more massive than anything seen in the United States prior to the Great Depression.
These challenges are not merely economic, diplomatic, or environmental. They are fundamental moral challenges as well, for they concern the basic wellbeing of humanity, and our capacity to flourish within those circumstances. Economic challenges are not limited to dollars and cents. Environmental challenges are not limited to tree hugging and spotted owls. Ecology concerns the very fabric of life, and because God is the author of life, these challenges are inherently theological. They demand a response from the church beyond inexplicably deciding that the environment is not worth sweating over because Jesus might return before the earth runs out of the resources to sustain human life.
I see similarities in the church’s limited response to the economic inequities of our post-Great-Recession era. The willingness to punt on the issue, a hastening to justify a person’s poverty because of their personal immorality, a misappropriation of scripture to justify wealth-hoarding, are all behaviors that I have seen frequently throughout a decade of parish ministry, and have come to believe are symptoms of a deeper malaise affecting the church. The raison d’être of this book is not only to try to define and arrest that malaise, but to offer a vision of moral clarity against inequality in response.
To buttress this vision of a church that sees its moral calling in standing against the wage and wealth thefts of the poor by the rich, I cannot rely on anecdotal evidence. Statistics are also needed to underscore the breadth and depth of the present crisis.
Numbers Tell a Story, Too
Back when I was beginning the initial work for this book, news broke that Facebook had experienced one of the worst single-day losses of market value in history. Nearly $120 billion in value was erased. Mark Zuckerberg lost an estimated $11 billion in personal worth.2
To put those staggering figures in the context of an ordinary household’s income, the $11 billion that Zuckerberg lost in a single day is over 243,000 times higher than my before-taxes annual salary was at my first full-time ministry call. Assuming an active career of forty years, because of its biblical connotations and it represents the time between ages twenty-five and the traditional retirement age of sixty-five, I would have to work 6,075 active careers in ordained ministry to gross what he lost in one day.
That one person would have to work over six thousand lifetimes to earn what another could lose in a single day and still be a billionaire should serve as prima facie evidence that our economic system is grievously immoral. I do not think that our economy is broken, however. I think it is working exactly as it was designed. While I did not get into professional ministry to get rich, neither did I do it to be happy with an economy that lavishly bestows the fatted calves on a select few while the rest are left to content ourselves with the crumbs that fall (or trickle down, as it were) from the table. Our economy is fundamentally unequal, not broken by accident.
The juxtaposition of my personal finances with Zuckerberg’s illustrates a fundamental principle that I try to adhere to in ministry: I believe in combining personal experience with statistical data because the two have a symbiotic relationship. Without the data, I cannot place my personal narrative into a wider context, but without the personal stories, it is tempting to see the data only as abstract and impersonal. As with Oregon Trail Theology, then, On Earth as It Is in Heaven will strive to utilize both narratives and statistics. In order to communicate the sheer dimensions of the golden calf we have created for ourselves, it is necessary to discuss some ghastly, but hopefully reversible, statistics.
In the United States, a stratification of wealth like that of the Gilded Age of the 1910s or the Roaring Twenties has set in: 35 percent of the total net worth of the United States population is owned by the wealthiest 1 percent; 63 percent by the wealthiest 5 percent; 76 percent by the wealthiest 10 percent; 88 percent by the wealthiest 20 percent; and 97 percent by the wealthiest 40 percent;3 leaving a scarce 3 percent of the nation’s wealth for the remaining 60 percent of the population, or nearly two hundred million people.
In the past, labor unions have acted as instruments against this rising tide of wealth inequality, but the union membership rate of the United States workforce for 2015 (the most recent year available as of this writing) sat at only 11.1 percent,4 well below one-third of the peak union membership rate of 35 percent during the mid-1950s.5 Meanwhile, the minimum wage has failed to keep up with inflation since its peak value in the year 1968,6 and the amount of savings for most individuals in the United States is low—in most cases, less than $1,000. The rate of saving is approximately half of what it was during the mid-1960s.7 Compared to the vast sums held by modern-day tycoons, these meager savings are the humble ashes of which Jeremiah speaks when he says that nations collectively labor in vain. The scales of wealth are not simply tipped to one side or the other. The scale itself has toppled over from the lopsided weight.
Today this stratification of wealth continues seemingly unabated, as does the neutralization of institutional bulwarks meant to check against such stratification ever happening again after the Gilded Age, Roaring Twenties, and Great Depression. The 60 percent of the United States population who hold only 3 percent of the wealth risk losing any voice they may once have had to advocate for their physical and spiritual needs in the public square and the media.
While physical and spiritual needs do intersect, it is important to differentiate them here for the purposes of this book. I am a pastor by vocation; I have been trained in the provision of spiritual care primarily and economic care secondarily. Concern for spiritual need can overlap into fields such as the sociology of religion to perform studies on the nature of spirituality and economic inequality. However, sociologists are not pastors, and it is unfair to expect them to function or think like pastors. Being a pastor offers particular interest and skills in the practice of spiritual care with which to address and potentially answer the basic question of how the church can, and should, address economic inequality in our time.
It may be tempting to either view the people I will write about solely as data points in an effort to be as objective as possible (even if full objectivity is an impossible goal) or to romanticize the plight of the laborer and the poor. “David versus Goliath” is a common axiom in the American zeitgeist, as are “heartland values” and the “voices of rural Americans.” This book aims to fall into neither trap, and to instead let the data, scripture, and church history speak and give you