Chapter 8: The Economic Question
Chapter Eight
The Economic Question
“It’s the economy” has been a catch phrase in American politics since the election cycle of 1992, when Bill Clinton rode it to victory over George H.W. Bush. “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” was another famous campaign question, one that continues to surface after every economic downturn. On the one hand, those slogans remind us that we focus better on bread-and-butter issues than on international questions. On the other hand, they also remind us that most of our focus on economic issues is on ourselves and how the economy affects us.
“The one who dies with the most toys, wins!” (Bumper sticker often seen around the nation)
As this book is being written, economic issues struggle with news of terrorism and war to capture our attention. We learned recently that the number of persons living in poverty in the United States increased significantly over the past year. A large minority of those persons in poverty were children and seniors, and neither group was able to do much to directly change their economic condition. Economic “reforms” were threatening to eliminate overtime pay for many persons in the work force—a move that would push more families closer to poverty. Jobs were being shipped overseas and CEOs were rewarded for that. Workers were losing their pension funds while executives pillaged corporations. The economic news in the United States has not been good. We also wonder what the costs of war will do to the economy, and what another September-11-type attack might do.
What does that mean for real people? For some, it’s all bad news. A recent study showed that one in every five jobs in the United States pays less that a poverty level wage for a family of four. That’s thirty-nine million Americans, including twenty million children. These working families struggle to meet basic needs, such as housing, groceries, and childcare. The poverty level income in 2002 was identified as $18, 244. (AOL News, October 11, 2004)
It’s the Religious Question!
For John Wesley, all economic problems were ethical problems. And, therefore, they were religious questions. Wesley believed that religion was not confined to Sunday morning, but related to all of life. In his day, as in ours, the problems of making a living took up most of a person’s waking hours. Therefore, he argued, the whole area of economics is the most obvious place for Christians to work at cultivating holy living. If we don’t develop character and virtue in the economic world, he argued, where will we? If Christian character and holiness of life do not influence economic matters, what is the point of preaching Christ? The Bible itself is full of words relating to economic matters. As only one example, see James 2:1-7 and 4:13–5:6. What did that mean for Wesley, in practical terms?
Wesley had a life-long interest in the bread-and-butter issues of life. It may well be that being raised in poverty, and being teased at Charterhouse (the prep school he attended on a scholarship reserved for the poor) about his poverty had a great deal to do with that interest. The people among whom he served were, by and large, engaged in a grim, day-to-day, struggle for food and shelter. They were among the poorest of the poor. Some entries in Wesley’s Journal illustrate his concern for the conditions of the poor.
In the afternoon I visited many of the sick; but such scenes, who could be unmoved? There are none such to be found in a Pagan country. If any of the Indians in Georgia were sick...those that were near him gave him whatever he wanted. O who will convert the English into honest Heathens!
On Friday and Saturday I visited as many more as I could. I found some in their cells under ground; others in their garrets, half-starved both with cold and hunger, added to weakness and pain. But I found not one of them unemployed, who was able to crawl about the room. So wickedly, devilishly false is that common objection, “They are poor, only because they are idle.” If you saw those things with your own eyes, could you lay out money in ornaments or superfluities? (February 8–10, 1753, Journals, Vol. II, pages 279-280)
Wesley reacted to poverty in two ways. On one level, he did everything he could to care for the poor. On another level, he attacked the economic injustices of his day and proposed specific remedies to those injustices. And he did this on the ground of Christian ethics and the importance of living out one’s faith in every area of life.
We saw, in chapter 2, how “doing good works” was a key part of his prescription for the Christian life. Beginning at Oxford, he and his followers provided food, clothing, education, medicine, and social services for the poor whenever and wherever they could. One of the guidelines for the bands and societies was that each member would bring a penny every week (remember, these were very poor people, and a penny went a lot farther in those days) to be used to care for the poor. When he was in his late eighties, Wesley spent one Christmas Eve wading in ankle-deep icy slush from door to door, begging for money to help the poor.
But on a deeper level, Wesley looked at poverty and other economic questions through the lens of God’s concern for the poor and applied Christian ethics to larger questions of economic policy. First, he laid out rules for using money, in spite of the fact that most Methodists didn’t have any! He did this for two reasons: 1) most Christians didn’t know how to deal with money, and no one offered them any instructions, and 2) the use of money (for good or ill) had a profound effect for both the Christian and his neighbor. Even with all the “how-to” books on using money to make money that we have at our disposal, and all the financial planners whom we consult for advice, Wesley’s three simple rules are still among the best advice we could find.
Those “rules” are found in his famous sermon, On The Use of Money. They are, indeed, simple rules, and can be summarized in three sentences:
Earn all you can
Save all you can, so
You can give all you can.
To fully appreciate the power of those rules, we need to look at them in more detail. First, Wesley urged the Methodists (and others) to “earn all you can.” The limit on this rule was that one had to be honest in one’s dealings with others. People in business were to give honest weight, not overcharge, take only a fair profit and not take advantage of their neighbors, and so on. Wesley was a political and economic conservative, who believed in liberty, but he always wanted to restrict liberty with honesty and openness. Within the boundaries of honesty and concern for others, one was free to earn all one could in honorable occupations. The choice of an occupation or vocation, for Wesley, had little to do with one’s abilities or wishes, but with 1) is the occupation an honorable one? and 2) is it an occupation that will allow us to serve God and our neighbor? He would have had little patience with the person overheard saying, “I don’t care what I do when I get out of school. I just want to be a millionaire!”
The best way to improve the living conditions of the poor was for them to earn all they could, and then to save all they could, after they had taken care of the necessities of food, clothing, and shelter. One needed to be thrifty, and to be diligent about saving. Don’t buy anything you don’t really need. Put the money into savings accounts instead. In our day, the rate of individual savings is at an all-time low. At the same time, individual debt is at an all-time high. Much of the debt is in home mortgages, but an incredibly significant amount is in credit card debt. Wesley might say to us, is it really necessary that you buy a $50,000 automobile, when you can get one that works just as well for $20,000 or less? Do you really need all the clothes and/or shoes you have in your closet? What if you didn’t spend that money, but put it in savings? What difference would that make for your life?
To earn all we can, and to save all we can were not rules about accumulating money for its own sake. Wesley’s economic ethics began with the assumption that money, in and of itself, was neither good nor evil. It could become an evil when individuals and corporations (yes, they existed in Wesley’s day, too) focused on the accumulation of wealth at the expense of others. When wealth became an end in itself, rather than a means to a greater end, it became an evil. And money did offer the possibilities for effective social help, making it possible for those with money to care for those without it. So, for Wesley, whether or not money was a good or evil depended on how people used it.
To earn all we can, and to save all we can, were means to a greater end for Wesley. That end was found in the third rule, to give all you can. For Wesley, there was a clear boundary between what was necessary for life, and the accumulation of wealth. We express something of the same idea today when we talk about the difference between “needs” and “wants.” We also recognize that today’s “want” becomes tomorrow’s “need;” that is, that we discover our needs tend to grow as we have more disposable wealth. Wesley argued that, once we had met the basic necessities of food, clothing, and shelter, we began to develop an excess of wealth. That excess was to be given to meet the needs of others. He based this argument on an understanding of Christian stewardship. The true owner of all things is God, and whatever property or wealth we have is given to us by God to manage. God teaches us, Wesley argued, that stewardship means giving whatever excess we have beyond the basic necessities of life to help others in need. To give to others was an act of obedience to the commandment to love our neighbor, and to love God in our neighbor. Wesley argued that we will have to account to God for the way we use our wealth. What is the record of our stewardship? Will we be able to say that we have been faithful stewards of God’s gifts? That does not mean that Wesley wanted his followers to own all things in common. He believed in the right of private property. He simply emphasized that the property is a gift from God and we need to use it wisely, in ways that please God. Private property, then, was not an absolute right, but a relative one, based on God’s ownership of all things, and the call to stewardship.
So what about the wealthy? If we are well-off economically, perhaps even above that magic line of persons making over $200,000 a year, are we condemned? No. Wesley didn’t want rich people to give up their possessions. Money can be used for commercial and industrial development. That kind of investment can benefit society as well as the individual. Wesley believed, however, that money for its own sake could lead to both personal and communal pain. The rich, he said, have a special call from God to help others, to use their wealth for the benefit of the poor, and the physical and spiritual welfare of others. When money became an end in itself, then gaining wealth led to social injustice. So, Wesley wanted the wealthy to follow the same simple rules he set up for his poorer followers—earn all you can, save all you can, so you can give all you can.
Society and Economic Responsibility
We argue, in our day, about the role of society and government in economic issues. On the one hand, some argue that the poor are poor only because they don’t want to work. Against that, there are some stark realities. First, many of the poor are children, who are forbidden to work by law. Second, many of the poor are elderly, who are not physically able to work, even if they could find employment. Third, many of the poor are working—some of them at two or three jobs, just to make ends meet. In a just society, would we have both homeless people and million-dollar homes within the same metropolitan area? On the other hand, most of the suggestions put forward for building a more equitable economic system are either unworkable or incredibly expensive. So is there anything we can learn from John Wesley about how we can work on basic economic structures to make a difference to the poor?
Wesley lived in a time when there were no statistics of the kind that we take for granted today. What he said about England’s economy was based on what he saw. However, since he traveled all over the kingdom and worked with so many different groups of people, what he saw qualified him as much as anyone else to make judgments about the economy. What did he see? What did he say? First, he said that poverty was not a failure to work on the part of the poor. There were flaws in the economic system that made it impossible for them to earn a living. We saw, in Chapter 6, that the enclosure of land, and the drying up of the middle class of craftsmen caused a great deal of poverty. The development of machines and mass manufacturing put many others out of work. Nor, Wesley said (to slip into theology for a minute), were people poor because God had “predestined” them to be poor. All his life, Wesley argued against what he perceived as the ungodly statement that God elected some persons to be wealthy and others to be poor, and their economic status was a reflection of their status in God’s eyes. Against that Calvinist position, Wesley put forward the essential worth of every person in God’s eyes, and the call of God to love all our neighbors, but particularly the poor.
When Wesley looked at the question of poverty in England, he outlined the causes of poverty, denounced those who were guilty of creating and perpetuating a system that put people into poverty, exhorted the poor to work diligently, and worked to influence the wealthy and powerful to take responsibility for eliminating social evils.
In his Thoughts on the Present Scarcity of Provisions, Wesley lists the causes of starvation:
Unemployment
Scarcity and high prices of food
Squandering grain for use in breweries and for the horses of the wealthy
The monopolies on goods
The elimination of small-holder farms (what we could call the traditional family farm)
Rising rents
High taxes as a result of public debt. (Marquardt, p. 44)
Part of his analysis was naïve, of course, just as our statistics-based modern analysis is often naïve. But he hit on some basic issues, both for his day and for ours. Obviously, people are going to be hungry if they can’t find work, so the question of unemployment is always crucial. Jobs continue to be a major issue in political campaigns, and the suggestions for increasing employment range from the practical to the incredible. Wesley also saw that public debt was a major contributor to hunger and poverty. We’re all familiar with the arguments about the national debt in our society, and what we should do to reduce the debt. There is the political suicide involved in suggesting we raise taxes and/or cut services in order to manage the debt. Then there is the less tangible, but no less frightening, awareness that doing nothing means we leave the debt to our children and grandchildren. The latter means that we continue to enjoy our own comfort at the cost of putting a burden of debt on the shoulders of future generations, thereby cutting back on their economic security. There are, probably, no easy answers, but the question is one that has to be faced eventually.
Those are only two examples of parallels between Wesley’s analysis of his own day, and the realities of our day. What to do about them? Wesley believed in liberty, but he was also willing to support legal restrictions on the economy, and even to impose prohibitions on economic development. For example, he argued, on both economic and biblical grounds, that no farm should be larger than £100 a year in income. This would have had the effect of abolishing the great estates, which were the center of political power and influence. He argued that stewardship of the land meant to provide wholesome food at cheap prices, for all people. He believed that the great estates decreased the amount of grain, a point that was probably correct, since many productive fields were taken over for sheep pasture, a move that enriched those in the cloth trade.
Wesley was perfectly willing to prohibit the manufacture and sale of liquor, both because of the consequences of alcohol abuse, and because so much grain was involved in the manufacture, grain that was not available to make bread for the poor, which resulted in higher bread prices. He was against conspicuous consumption, and would have taxed the wealthy for the sake of the poor. He proposed a tax of £5 on every “gentleman’s horse”. He also recommended abolishing what he called “useless pensions,” especially those given to governors of forts and castles which had long since ceased to be of any military value. Now, note that “pensions” meant something entirely different in Wesley’s day from what they mean in ours. In his day, it was a subsidy to a wealthy person for, essentially, doing nothing. In our day, a pension is something we earn while we work, so can we can enjoy the necessities when we can no longer work.
Wesley also believed that the king should use his power of taxation to redistribute wealth more equitably, and to provide food and employment for the people. To lower food prices, for example, would increase demand for other goods, which would both improve the economy and produce more jobs. To achieve this end, Wesley felt, the government should intervene and take whatever steps were necessary to ensure lower food prices. He also called for ending the indirect taxes that hit hardest on the poor. This last argument is echoed today in concerns about sales taxes on food and medicine, for example.
When Wesley talked about loving our neighbor, particularly our poor neighbor, he meant far more than stocking food pantries or adopting a family at Christmas time. He believed in those acts of charity, obviously, but his concern went far deeper. He was interested in the economic responsibility of individual Christians to use their wealth as a means to a greater end of helping the poor. He was also interested in Christians coming together to work to change the underlying economic and political structure of society, so that the poor could have a better life.
Questions for Reflection
For Further Reading
Manfred Marquardt, John Wesley’s Social Ethics (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1992).
John Wesley, Sermon 51, “The Good Steward”