Editor’s Note: This is another installment in an interview with Gerry Charlotte Phelps (click her name to see the other articles in this series).
ReformationUCC: What myths about the poor did you once hold that your Christian faith (and perhaps the school of hard knocks) has changed? How have these beliefs changed?
My myths about the poor actually came from our culture, not from my Christianity. Christianity is very solid on how to help the poor. It also lists and condemns the causes of poverty. What my Christianity supplies is the powerful motive to help the poor. It is a scriptural commandment.
Our major myths about the poor are about how to help the poor, and about what the causes of poverty are.
Myths about how we should help the poor are what I was talking about in my answer to the last question. The first myth is that the ideal way to help the poor is to give them what they want, or what they think they need, not what they actually need. And the second myth is that never embarrassing the poor or making them feel bad is much more important than helping them to stop being poor. The other big myth is about what causes poverty.
There are actually many causes of poverty. But the mix of causes varies from country to country, and from time to time within each country. If our actions to help the poor are to be effective, we must know what the mix of causes of poverty is in that particular country at that time.
It turns out that what we think causes poverty also shapes our politics. When we think the poor are poor because they are oppressed, that moves us left politically. When we think they are poor mostly because of inadequate use of available opportunities, that moves us right politically. (See my article “The Power of the Poor”) Since both oppression and availability of opportunities are at society-wide, they are often addressed politically, rather than with a person-by-person approach.
On the left, the ways to protect people from oppression range from Marxism at the most extreme left, to various degrees of mix between capitalism and Marxism as leftists move toward the center. On the right, fairly pure capitalism and a high degree of freedom are considered the best antidote, not only to oppression, but also to poverty.
I started out on the extreme left, and during the time I worked with the poor, I moved to the right because of two things: first, what I learned from working with the poor, and second, what we all learned when the Iron Curtain fell in 1989, giving us our first clear view of the disastrous results of the 70 year Marxist experiment in the Soviet Union. As a leftist economist, it took me a few years of strenuous re-evaluation to process that. At the end of that process, there was an almost-perfect match between my new economic understanding, and what I had already learned about the poor in the U.S. Oppression simply was not a significant cause of poverty, at least not in the U.S., nor in most of the West.
Why is that? It is not that oppression does not exist in the U.S. Of course it does –oppression is part of the human equation. But what seems to happen most of the time is that there is so much freedom and prosperity in the U.S. that people can usually get away from whatever kind of oppression they may face. Is the boss oppressive? There are other bosses, other jobs, even self-employment. Is there some kind of discrimination? The economy is so large, so rich and so free that there are many roads around discrimination. Is there a lack of education? That can be remedied. Has a job become obsolete? There is training available for other jobs. Is a business being oppressed? It has many legal recourses. Or it can simply get up and move, to another location or town or state or country. Or the owner can pull his capital out of that business and change to another one. Would-be oppressors are much less successful in the U.S. than elsewhere. All of which makes it much easier to stop being poor.
Well then, if oppression is not a major cause of poverty in the U.S., what is? It has long been thought to be lack of education, racial discrimination and an unfair wage structure. Although these each have their own effect, none of them, nor all of them together, are a major cause of U.S. poverty. So what is? In the U.S., some 80% of the poor are unmarried moms and their children. That is, the major cause of poverty in the U.S., at this time in our history, is fatherlessness.
That’s not all, fatherlessness is also the major predictor of violent crime. Surprised? The experts were too. That was information they backed into while looking for other things. They found that 70% of the most violent young offenders in prison were fatherless. Now mapping fatherlessness has become the most reliable way to map violent crime.
The remarkable thing is that fatherlessness on such a large scale is totally new in U.S. history. We have never seen such a thing before. In 1960, the rate of births outside of marriage (fatherless kids) was 5.3%. Today it is 36% - a 700% increase! (See Chapter 6 of “Up and Out,” at www.gerrycharlottephelps.com.) That’s not all: during this socially-disastrous period, violent crime also has risen by 500%, teen suicides by 300%, and divorce by 200%. Our tremendous wealth merely disguises the fact that we are living through a national time of great trouble.
So where does fatherlessness come from? From births outside marriage, of course, which in turn comes from having sex outside marriage. People have always done that, and there have always been fatherless children. But before 1960 it was on a very small scale. Now it is on a huge scale – and considered normal.
So you want to help the poor? Are you sure? Even if it means cutting back on the rate of fatherlessness? Even if that means returning to the customs of celibacy before marriage and faithfulness after marriage? No more co-habitation? Or hooking up? Because until we are willing to do what it takes to push fatherlessness back to pre-1960 levels, we cannot honestly claim to be concerned about the poor. Think about it.
This is what we are facing. The primary cause of most poverty in the U.S. is basically something we do not want to hear about, much less to do anything about. Where does that leave us?
It leaves us with our Biblical mandate to help the poor. When such a great change is needed in society, there is only one way. That is to change the culture through Christ. That is to evangelize like crazy, and to disciple Christians to live according to the scripture like never before. The more people who do that, the fewer fatherless kids there will be. And as that number drops, there should be fewer poor, as well as less crime and a much more benign society..
The hard thing about Christianity is the personal sacrifice. Fortunately, it is the kind of sacrifice that makes all of society better and better, in measurable ways that cannot be denied. Just as Christianity has always done in every place that it has been faithfully practiced by enough of the people.
So our job is clear. Patch up the poor we have, and help them move up. And practice our Christianity strenuously, to the point that society heals and the number of poor among us shrinks more and more. Down deep, haven’t we always known that?
