When we talk about Christian ethics, a lot of the things we address seem to be chalked up to the vicissitudes of living in a ‘fallen’ world. What we mean by a ‘fallen’ world is a world which is no longer perfect, or a world that is infected with various kinds of lack. I think this mindset leads us to view the various problems we tackle as basically organic functions of the world outside of our control, and some of them are. Disaster relief, for example, is important; so is caring for the sick, and in many cases sickness is a thing that happens outside of anybody’s control.

It’s my sense that a good number of folks see poverty and inequality as a pair of those ‘fallen world’ realities, things that just arise inevitably and organically from the machinations of the impure world we live in. Among the Christians who view poverty and inequality this way, the following verse comes up pretty frequently:

“The poor you will always have with you, and you can help them any time you want. But you will not always have me.”

This is Mark 14:7, but Jesus appears to be referring to a similar phrase in Deuteronomy 15:11:

“There will always be poor people in the land. Therefore I command you to be openhanded toward your fellow Israelites who are poor and needy in your land.”

What I want to note about each of these verses is where God locates the action: in both verses, we have the establishment of the poor, and then in the following clause, an address of action. But who does God expect to act in order to redress the wrong of poverty? You.

Now this is really interesting. First, it’s a far cry from rightwing ‘get ‘em back on their feet’ ideologies which endlessly brainstorm about how to force the poor into being less poor. Secondly, it shuts down the typical whinging one hears about the worthy and unworthy poors, because it shifts the obligation for answering poverty onto the listener. But the most important thing it does, in my thought, is highlight the fact that poverty and inequality are decisions that we make.

But if the poor will always be with you, how can poverty and inequality be choices? Aren’t we doomed to suffer them?

Not exactly. What these verses tell us about the world we live in is that there will always be people with greater needs than others, but they don’t necessitate that those needs will remain unmet. Thus, even though some will have greater needs, it is our decision as to whether or not those needs will be met. Understanding that this is a decision shifts the moral debate: poverty isn’t a morally neutral status-quo type situation, but rather a signal that we have elected to create inequality while the onus is on us to do otherwise. Matt Bruenig puts it like this:

Once you understand what I am saying, you realize that the old leftist cliche is right: who gets what is purely a matter of political power. If the rich elites continue to run the show, it doesn’t matter what you do. The distribution will continue to favor them and income stagnation and inequality will never be whipped. Even if you make some strides against those things within the existing set of economic rules, they can use their power to change those rules to preserve the distribution they like. What ultimately matters for inequality is who has the power to control the levers of distribution management and what result they are aiming to produce. Everything else — technology, education, competition, and so on — is completely secondary.

The set-up of our distribution systems doesn’t create need (that is, there are those with greater and lesser needs) but it does dictate which needs are met and which aren’t, and that is purely a function of our choosing. Thus the election of a system that creates inequality is not only a serious practical problem (if you haven’t read the Spirit Level yet, go ahead and read it) but also a moral problem: it is the direct refusal of the actionable commandment God makes that we offer continuing support to our poor.

Consider Augustine, here, in sermon XXXV:

Did [the poor] bring anything into the world? No, not even the rich brought anything into the world. You found all here, you were born as naked as the poor. In both alike is the same bodily infirmity; the same infant crying, the same witness of our misery…Be you all of one mind in obeying the word of God. God made both the rich and the poor…The rich and the poor are born alike. You meet one another was you walk on the way together. Do not oppress, and do not defraud. The one has need, the other has plenty.

What’s remarkable here is the utter equality Augustine sees between the rich and poor in terms of inherent value. We can take Augustine one step further and value that inherent equality to the degree that we choose to uphold it: after all, we’re born alike, and since whatever comes next in terms of distribution is going to rely upon how we as a society elect to set up the rules of distribution, we have the opportunity to achieve a state closer to equality. Now, the equality we achieve hopefully won’t be the naked and screaming sort Augustine associates with infants, but it can be the sort that honors the equal dignity of all persons by meeting their needs.

So when we look at regressive measures as Christians — say, the proposed cuts to SNAP, or the opposition to healthcare plans like the ACA that would extend greater coverage to more people — remember that getting rid of or opposing policies that would make people less poor do not return us to a neutral status quo. Instead, when we oppose or eliminate policies that have reduced or could reduce poverty, we’re acting in moral error against the instructions of God, and we’re not ‘returning’, as it were, to a neutral state produced by the machinations of a fallen world, but to a morally negative state we’re choosing to produce in direct contradiction to God’s instructions. It’s decisions all the way down.

Maybe this has been quite drawn out for what is likely a simple point, but my purpose here is mainly to reiterate this: when we talk about poverty and inequality, we are talking about moral errors that we are guilty of. When God talks to us about poverty, he doesn’t harass the poor or try to force them into non-poorness; he addresses us, those who make the distributive decisions that allow poverty and inequality to proliferate. Any vision of handling poverty that does anything other than address the choices we as a society make about distribution are thus severely suspect.