positively and negatively. A well-chosen, high-quality frame can bring a person’s attention to the object it is displaying in a way that augments the painting’s characteristics. A poorly chosen frame, by the same token, can detract or draw the person’s attention away from what the artist might have hoped they would see.
As we close this first chapter, I invite you to consider how finances have been framed in your life—including in your spiritual life. Where are they discussed? Were you taught they are impolite or impolitic conversation? Are they discussed on an individual or a communal level? What about money and wealth does not get discussed? What frames do you and your communities apply to money? We all start from different places in the conversation we are about to have over the next six chapters. My hope is that we can frame wealth inequality from a faith-based perspective.
Doing so will require repentance and reclamation. Repentance for the ways in which the church has enabled and abetted the wealthy and powerful at the expense of the poor. Reclamation of the sacred texts and historical traditions that we have ignored or reinterpreted to suit our own selfish ends. Through these two purposeful acts, we can liberate our economy from the frames that have enslaved and oppressed others on behalf of profit.
What we are called to weigh, then, is the extent to which we value our own comfort—to be blissful in our ignorance and to happily turn our eyes away from that which we prefer not to care about—versus the extent to which we value our own salvation and common humanness. It is the equation that Jesus asked his audience to consider with the parable of Lazarus and the (pointedly anonymous) rich man in Luke 16. The anonymous wealthy man preferred his comfort to his common humanness with Lazarus, and it ultimately cost him his own salvation, even as he begged Father Abraham for relief in the afterlife. His earlier calculus that his innate human connection with Lazarus was not worth the price of parting with even a morsel of his treasure was also a calculus that his salvation was not worth that treasure, either. The rich man had consciously decided from which he believed he had derived the most benefit, and while he may have avoided a temporary financial cost, the spiritual cost to him was great, arguably even infinite.
In the world of speech and debate where I spent my high school and college years, this process of weighing price versus advantage is called a cost-benefit analysis. In these pages, I will be asking you to weigh the costs of your comfort versus the benefits of our collective salvation, and, in so doing, I am asking myself the exact same question about the costs of my own comfort and salvation. In a book that focuses on the intersection of faith and economics, to borrow this bit of economic language and repurpose it is very much on purpose. After all, words can be taken and reclaimed. Their meanings can shift through time and effort. We can, and should, understand cost as something that extends far beyond the financial sphere, and benefits as transcending the realm of material selfishness.
Let’s reclaim our holy scriptures, our sacred historical and theological traditions, and the mission of today’s church and reframe the conversation over faith and wealth. I cannot promise that such a conversation will be comfortable or even easy. It is neither of those things. What is at stake is far greater than our comfort. The work of reclaiming and reframing is urgent, from underemployment to food insecurity to medical care and bankruptcies, and faithful responses are needed.
This book represents one such response, and should not be seen as the only or definitive word on the matter. Much like the scriptures and the history that we will spend the next few chapters putting into context, I hope that you will likewise place this book into its own context of a broad and vivid tapestry of Christian social teaching on wealth, finances, and the need for a more just and equitable economy. This is a conversation, and mine is simply one voice among it. Yours is as well.
In this holy conversation that we are having, may our works not be limited to our words. May we labor together to reclaim what has been lost, to create what has not yet been created, and to build up, insofar as we are able, the realm of a good and great God here on earth. It is a mighty labor that we are being called to do, one that can fundamentally change the lives of legions of our siblings and neighbors for the better.
Let us begin this divinely inspired labor. Together.
1. Jason Boyett, Pocket Guide to the Apocalypse: The Official Field Manual for the End of the World (Relevant Media Group, 2005), 34.
2. David P. Gelles, https://twitter.com/gelles/status/1022476401944002560, July 26, 2017, accessed July 27, 2017.
3. Christopher Ingraham, “If You Thought Income Inequality Was Bad, Get a Load of Wealth Inequality,” The Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/05/21/the-top-10-of-americans-own-76-of-the-stuff-and-its-dragging-our-economy-down/, May 21, 2015, accessed July 25, 2018.
4. “Union Members Summary,” U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, http://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.nr0.htm, January 28, 2016, accessed July 25, 2018.
5. Steven Greenhouse, “Union Membership in U.S. Fell to 70-Year Low Last Year,” The New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/22/business/22union.html, January 21, 2011, accessed July 25, 2018.
6. Drew DeSilver, “5 Facts about the Minimum Wage,” Pew Research Center, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/01/04/5-facts-about-the-minimum-wage/, January 4, 2017, accessed July 25, 2018.
7. Sean Williams, “Nearly 7 in 10 Americans Have Less Than $1,000 in Savings,” USA Today, http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2016/10/09/savings-study/91083712, October 9, 2016, accessed July 25, 2016.
8. Jeremy Hobson, Samantha Raphaelson, and Dean Russell, “As Trump Proposes Tax Cuts, Kansas Deals with Aftermath of Experiment,” NPR, https://www.npr.org/2017/10/25/560040131/as-trump-proposes-tax-cuts-kansas-deals-with-aftermath-of-experiment, October 25, 2017, accessed August 23, 2018.
9. Michael Leachman, Kathleen Masterson, and Eric Figueroa, “A Punishing Decade for School Funding,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, https://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/a-punishing-decade-for-school-funding, November 29, 2017, accessed August 24, 2018.
10. Mike Rosenberg, “Seattle Renters Score Big as Landlords Dangle Freebies to Fill Empty Apartments,” The Seattle Times, https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/free-amazon-echo-2-months-free-rent-2500-gift-cards-seattle-apartment-glut-gives-renters-freebies/, June 25, 2018, accessed August 20, 2018. I want to acknowledge that the reporter of this piece sexually harassed his female colleagues and subsequently resigned from The Seattle Times. I believe his accusers and recognize that the abuses he committed do not change the reality of the Seattle housing crisis, or the impact of the news when it first dropped.
11. Scott Greenstone, “Is Seattle’s Homeless Crisis the Worst in the Country?” The Seattle Times, https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/is-seattles-homeless-crisis-the-worst-in-the-country/, first published January 16, 2018, updated April 26, 2018, accessed August 20, 2018.
12.