Thoughts on race, poverty, and Christianity

Kristor writes:

Your essay on the development of your understanding of racial differences was like deja vu all over again. I have been through that same sort of process, so many times, in respect to so many questions. I’m still climbing the ladder on race. What I’m struggling with now is how to deal with these realities humanely; how to deal with them the way a Christian civilization should. I suppose I revert to letting the free market sort things out, so that everyone finds more or less their proper place in our social economy, and the whole nation gets wealthier more quickly, so that even the dumbest among us have better and better lives, more noble lives. Some will fall through the cracks, of course; failure is ever with us. But charity to the poor is therefore a moral requirement no matter what the form of social organization.

Speaking of welfare policy and the Christian society, Rodney Stark has argued (in The Rise of Christianity) that one of the factors of the Christian explosion of the first centuries AD was that only Christians cared for the poor and the sick—a radically new idea at the time. It meant that people who had no place else to go (particularly widows, and slaves whose masters had gone bankrupt and turned them out) could go to a church, and count on getting help; and it meant that Christians did better in time of plague, because they provided simple nursing to each other. The pagans had no hospitals for the poor, no concept of charity. The Christian survival rate was so much better that some pagans accused them of sorcery, in addition to atheism and cannibalism. I learned recently (from a really wonderful little book of basic Christian apologetics, The Wood: An Outline of Christianity, by Anglican nun Sister Penelope (C.S. Lewis wrote a blurb for it)) that up until Henry VIII grabbed the monastic estates, the destitute in Britain were wards of the monasteries. When the monasteries were closed, the poor were turned out, and the problem of how to care for them has never since been satisfactorily solved. Having inherited the Christian moral universe from the ancient Church, we still feel, unlike the pagan Romans and Greeks, that we ought to care for the poor; but we have no great not-for-profit business enterprises generating rents and profits, and devoted to caring for them, no great farms or factories where they can find shelter, care and employment, such as the monasteries were.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 26, 2008 08:00 AM | Send