145 Million Americans Live in Poverty
In an twitter tiff with a troll, ranting about Democrat run cities, bashing California, and being stubborn as a mule, I realized many people do not understand poverty in America. This is not a Republican, Democrat, or Independent political issue; it’s an American issue. 145 million people live in poverty.
We need to get off the partisan high horses.
The wealth gap is growing across the nation. Minimum wage has not increased since 2007 (and wasn’t enacted until 2009), so people are still living on $7.25 per hour. Even though the cost of housing has doubled, and debt for school millennials (that’s my age, by the way, so nearly 40, many with kids) has also doubled. Without generational wealth, many Americans struggle to become home owners, and the loan process is so difficult, that it’s estimated 6M people could own a home, based on income and savings, but cannot get loan approval. Many middle class Americans also live paycheck to paycheck, with no ability to save or invest, even if they are homeowners. 1 in 6 children live in poverty (living in a household that makes under $25K per year). I can’t even begin to start with healthcare and education statistics.
People are suffering, so stop fighting, and start loving others.
Like so many social issues, we create a caricature of what poverty looks like - we give it a color, a gender, a state, a relational status. Maybe our bias is against the rust belt, or rural Mississippi, or farm workers, or coastal elites. In the hunt for someone to blame, the “other side” becomes someone to demonize and trash talk, especially when we are filling our minds and hearts with biased news media, meme misinformation on Facebook, and going down the rabbit holes of conspiracy theories. Sometimes, we make the most vulnerable people our enemy. “If they’d just make better choices… Well, look at this one exception to the rule… Nobody ever gave me anything, and look at me now…”
The bootstrap mentality might preach well, but it does not often live well in real time.
Meanwhile, people with houses, investments, savings, and access to nearly everything needed for a flourishing life, choose to believe they are being persecuted. Because fear makes us imagine what we might lose, we hoard, and hold on to what we have, and rage against anyone, or anything, we believe might take it away. I’ve seen particular damage to the Christian witness during this season, due to this. A friend in Southeast Asia wrote to me, lamenting her embarrassment over American Christians proclaiming persecution. She works in a place where people are martyred and incarcerated for proclaiming Jesus.
Are we in the twilight zone? I want to encourage us to begin to think critically, research effectively, and study history accurately, so we can make better decisions. And we must carry capacity to critique our camps. There is a log in our eye - it’s time to stop focusing on the speck in the eyes across the aisle. It’s time to innovate, work together, and stop being judgmental and divisive. Christians, we need to stop legislating our morality onto others. We are not the moral police of the universe, and there is one Holy Spirit, and you are (I am) not the one.
Christians can and should participate in civic engagement, but without making pundits, politicians and the president our idols.
These are not the hills to die on. No party is the Christian party - every single one pales in comparison to the love and mercy of Christ. Remember that Revelation 19 says, that the testimony of Jesus is the Spirit of prophecy, NOT YOUR POLITICS. It is a gross disservice to humanity, and a costly price to our witness, to enmesh the two.