The Sin of Poverty
We will never overcome poverty in our nation until we stop equating it with sin
The recent trend of fiscal conservatism melding blindly into evangelical philosophy has led us to a startling place in our cultural existence: we all too easily conflate poverty with sin.
I live in a city with a large homeless population. The thing is, so do most of us. Homelessness is a simple fact of urban human existence, and has been since the industrial revolution. Ever since there have been people working in large urban areas, there has been a portion of those people who, due to varying circumstances, struggle to keep themselves (and sometimes also their families) fed and sheltered.
But most of our knee-jerk reactions upon seeing a homeless person involve disgust, pity, aversion, and, mostly, judgment. We are approached by humans who are often dirty from having to live outside, they ask for help in the form of some spare change, and we throw up defensive barriers built out of assumptions about how they got to be that way in the first place. How they came to need spare change, how they came to live in a makeshift structure out of tarp and plastic bags, built by the side of a freeway. We assume that they committed some crime — they must have. That they’ve lost their self-sufficiency to drugs, or spent all the money they had on alcohol. Or that they have committed the deadly…