As the homeless man approached me, I could feel my heart begin to race, and my nerves go on edge.
It was sometime in the mid-2000s, and I was attending First Baptist in Dallas, TX. I was still trying to find a church home. My grandparents—on my father’s side—had attended the church in the sixties and seventies when they lived in Dallas and came up under W.A. Criswell.
I was a poor college student who barely had any money. I had around twenty-dollars to last me until the next week.
“Do you have anything you could spare?”
Guilt poured over me. I was standing outside the church on a Sunday. It had just let out; there were crowds of members everywhere. I’d managed to put on nicer clothes despite not having much, though everyone around me was dressed much nicer. Side eyes and glances cut over as the homeless man spoke with me.
“Sorry, I only have twenty to last me until next week and—”
“Oh, no, it’s okay. Don’t worry, man. God bless you.”
He turned around and started asking other members, most of whom rebuffed him until a few deacons showed up and escorted him off.
One of the deacons came up to me and put a hand on my shoulder.
“Don’t worry, son, we don’t normally have that happen here.”
“Huh?”
“Being bothered by the homeless.”
“He wasn’t bothering me. I felt bad that I didn’t have any money.”
He frowned at me and looked me in the eyes, as though he were imparting ancient wisdom.
“Son, enabling these creatures is the most unloving thing you could possibly do. We have a ministry for them; we can send them there to get ministered to. This place here isn’t for them, at least not in their condition.”
This would be my experience in Christianity; God is love, but with conditions. Grace is free, but only if you pay the price. Every member has value; some more than others.
The poor among us
I’ve never been wealthy. There’ve been times in my life when I was financially “okay” and didn't have to squeeze effort out of every dollar, but those moments have been rare in my life. At the same time, I’ve also never been truly destitute.
I’ve always had a place to stay. I’ve always found some way to land on my feet, even if it hurt. I’ve always found a way to fight back. Most of this is due to the fact that I grew up in an upper-middle-class suburb of Wichita and attended a middle-class suburban public school; I was given advantages that helped. Before the economic bottom fell out from under my family at eighteen, disrupting my entire world, I had an understanding that “work=pay.”
But I’ve also been poor. Very poor. I’ve been a seminarian student, which is code for “impoverished.” As in, borrowing money so I could buy ramen noodles and just eat. Cutting myself down to a few hundred calories a day at times because I couldn’t afford to eat. When I worked as a research assistant at the seminary, my payment was my tuition plus an additional $40 a week. This was in 2006, when $40 would not get you very far.
As a result, I’ve always been more sensitive to the passages of the Bible that point to poverty and the injustices that result in poverty.
Poverty, in the ancient world, makes sense to a certain degree. A drought, a raid by bandits, or any number of events could bring ruin. Poverty seems more absolute when compared to our modern era.
I’m currently writing this sitting in an air-conditioned building, having drunk coffee and enjoyed a breakfast that included meat. Already, this morning, I’ve lived substantially better than 99% of humans who’ve ever lived. My routine morning would have been a glorious heavenly experience for someone from Biblical times.
Despite this, the Bible is rather big on caring for the poor. Even when resources weren’t as abundant as today, the Bible was clear on the fact that the poor are to be taken care of—at least in portions.
Understand that when I say, “the Bible says,” the implicit meaning is, “some parts of the Bible say.” I am not attempting to say that the Bible speaks with one voice. It doesn’t. It’s a mess of voices.
When I was a Christian, it was something that stood out to me and confused me within the daily Christian life. Commands on sexual purity, personal piety, and other things were taken as literal. “A man shall not lie with another man as one does with a woman,” despite being Levitical and alongside “ritualistic” commands, was taken literally and beyond, being applied to women and not just men.
The sin of gossip was condemned, especially if you were spreading the truth about someone in leadership. The sin of pride was condemned if it threatened people in leadership.
But helping the poor? I don’t recall too many sermons on that.
Which is really weird when you think about it, because most authors of the Bible seemed rather concerned with the poor.
The bible tells me so
Growing up reading the Bible, you get used to contradictions. You can either rationalize it there, or if the contradiction is too great, you go buy apologetics books that tell you how to smooth over the discrepancy.
But one contradiction that never appeared as a contradiction to me is Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. The story is told in both Matthew and Luke, but what’s interesting is you get two different versions of the same message. That has resulted in centuries—millennia—of theological shifts and church polity.
Consider the beatitudes in Matthew:
· Blessed are the poor in spirit
· Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness
· Blessed are those who mourn
Now look at Luke 6 and what it includes:
· Blessed are the poor
· Blessed are those who hunger now
· Blessed are those who weep now
· Woe to you who are rich
· Woe to you who are full now
· Woe to you who laugh now
Yet, in the modern evangelical understanding, Luke 6 is interpreted in light of Matthew 5, not the other way around. We give Luke’s blessings and woes a spiritual overture and remove the physical implications of the message.
But rather than go into a huge historical-critical interpretation of the passage, let me state something far more controversial:
The person who wrote Matthew isn’t the same person who wrote Luke, meaning there’s two different agendas and you can’t (or shouldn’t) use one to interpret the other.
Under the common Two-Source/Q reconstruction, Luke’s simple “blessed are the poor” is frequently regarded as closer to the earlier form, with Matthew’s “poor in spirit” representing Matthean redaction. But Q itself is hypothetical; under the Farrer hypothesis, Luke knew Matthew and could have removed “in spirit.”
Whatever the source or literary direction, Matthew qualifies poverty in a way Luke emphatically does not.
The temptation among Christians who believe in the univocality of the Bible—the belief that the Bible is ultimately speaking in one voice and everything can be harmonized—is to try and interpret Luke in light of Matthew, or Matthew in light of Luke.
The question, however, isn’t which Gospel tells us what the other one secretly means. The question is what each author is trying to say. When we put Luke in his historical context, it doesn’t make sense to try and read a spiritual reading onto what he’s saying.
In a broader context, Luke, James, and a saying preserved in Thomas 54 (Gospel of Thomas) all have the kingdom of God being for the poor, or at least that the poor will inherit the kingdom of God. Their literary relationships are debated, but the tradition simply cannot be reduced to Matthew’s “poor in spirit.”
Comrade Luke
In seminary you learn that Luke is the intellect and historian. When you’re studying Greek, you realize he earned those accolades.
You can’t really see it in the English, but translating, say, the Gospel of John into English verses, translating Luke into English is the difference between night and day. John is easier, with simple compositions, definitely written for a simple audience. Luke, however, is closer to Attic Greek (Classical Greek—Homer) and can be quite difficult to understand.
That’s the takeaway from Luke. The man was smart and knew how to write. He was loyal to Paul, and thanks to Luke we have a Gospel and the story of the early church.
But if you put Luke in his own written context and ignore the idea of reinterpreting him from other unrelated passages, you get an idea that Luke probably wouldn’t be a fan of modern capitalism.
His Gospel starts in Luke 1:52-53 with the powerful being brought down, the lowly lifted, the hungry filled, and the rich sent away. Jesus’ birth is announced as overturning an old economic order.
Luke then has Jesus beginning his ministry to the poor in 4:18. He states:
“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free…”
His initial statement is that he’s come to proclaim good news to the poor, to free the oppressed, to free the prisoners. That doesn’t sound like a spiritual hero who has come to save people from hell; it sounds like someone who has come to end inequality within the world.
Which brings us to Luke 6, where we get the blessed are you poor, blessed are you who are hungry now, woe to the rich, and woe to those who are full now.
It’s followed up in Luke 12 with the rich fool. In the parable, a rich young ruler has an abundant harvest and, not knowing what to do with the extra grain, tears down his buildings and builds bigger ones so that he can store more grain. Jesus condemns this action, saying that God took his life that night. He closes it saying, “This is how it will be with whoever stores up things for themselves but is not rich toward God.”
The warning is clear—hoarding wealth at the expense of others is something God does not like.
In Luke 14, Jesus invites the poor, crippled, lame, and blind rather than people of returning favor. In Luke 16 we have the rich man and Lazarus. The rich man isn’t accused of homosexuality, adultery, theological liberalism, atheism, abortion, or even explicitly of obtaining his wealth dishonestly.
He’s rich. He eats extravagantly. And a destitute man is outside his gate.
That’s all it takes for Luke to construct a condemnation around him. We often read into this passage, “Oh, well, he was greedy,” or, “Oh, he was the reason Lazarus was poor.” But the passage doesn’t say that. His only crime is that he was wealthy, and Lazarus was not. And for this, he goes to hell.
We then get to Luke 18 where Jesus tells a rich man to sell his property and distribute his goods to the poor if he truly wants to follow God.
It’s followed in Luke 19 with Zacchaeus, where the entire act of Zacchaeus embracing Jesus results in half his possessions going to the poor and his fraud being met with restitution.
If we follow Luke to Acts, we begin to see how the early church interpreted the teachings of Jesus. Early in the book, in Acts 2, we see that possessions are distributed according to those who have need. In Acts 4, this is apparently so successful that “there was not a needy person among them.”
That’s especially important. That line isn’t thrown in there on accident. Luke wasn’t thinking, “Someday there will be socialists, and they’ll love this line.” No, it was a callback to Deuteronomy 15:4, where God commands Israel to not have any poor among them. This is Luke saying that the church is fulfilling Israel’s role as God’s representative on earth.
We get to Acts 6 where a dispute arises because widows aren’t receiving an equitable distribution of food. The response is that the church reorganizes itself rather than sticking to its guns.
Luke doesn’t portray poverty relief as an extracurricular ministry for unusually compassionate Christians. He portrays the distribution of material resources as part of the organizational life of the church, no different than the calls for holiness or worship of God.
James has entered the chat
Where Luke walks, James opts to run.
If we take the tradition that James was writing before the Gospels were composed, that means he’s carrying on the tradition of the teachings of Jesus. Consider:
· James 5:12 and Matthew 5:34-37 overlap
· James 4:10 says the humble shall be exalted, just like Matthew 23:12 and Luke 14:11
· James 1:22 speaks to doing the word, not hearing it, just as Matthew 7:24-27 do
· James 2:5 and Luke 6:20/Matthew 5, for the blessed are the poor
· James 5:2-3’s condemnation of wealth matches more parables in the Gospels than I can recount
This is not to show the univocality of the Bible, but rather to point to the fact that James was writing within a known Gospel tradition. If we go with an early dating, then he was writing before the Gospels. If we go with a later dating, then he was writing around the time the Gospels were being composed in the late first or early second century.
I point this out so we have a cultural context for James. James 2:1-7 starts with a critique of showing favoritism in church. He points out that if someone in fine clothes comes in, they’re given a good seat, while the poor person is neglected. He doesn’t say, “be nicer about it.” Instead, he condemns the people for their actions.
James 2:14-17 almost got it banned from the Bible by Martin Luther. Growing up evangelical, this passage became a hinge point for the debate over faith versus works, Paul versus James, justification by grace or justification by faith.
But that misses the whole point of what James is trying to say here. James looks at someone saying they’re in need, sees a church that can fulfill it but offers thoughts and prayers, and goes, “Well, what the fuck good is that?”
The entire passage says that faith without works is dead. The passage isn’t giving a soteriological account. It’s not trying to dictate what constitutes salvation or what gets a person into heaven. James is stating that if you claim to be a follower of Jesus, then you’re going to help the poor, not show favoritism, and not give preferential treatment to the rich.
He doesn’t say you’ll go to hell otherwise. He doesn’t say you’ll lose your salvation. He’s not making any claims about salvation. He’s saying, “If you claim this, then do this.”
But no matter what one thinks about this passage—whether it deals with salvation, where someone will go, if faith or works save you—it’s instructive that the “faith without works” is illustrated by refusing to materially alleviate someone’s poverty. For all the emphasis Christians put on believing the right thing and living the right way, it’s curious they miss this.
But James goes on in the fifth chapter to talk about economic justice, not charity. He complains about labor exploitation,
“…the wages you withheld from the workers cry out against you.”
When was the last time you heard a church discipline an employer for cheating workers? There’s church discipline for who you’re sleeping with. Where is the church discipline for stealing someone’s wages?
This isn’t some ancient problem. Currently, in the United States, the US Department of Labor recovered $259 million in back wages for almost 200,000 workers in 2025. Where are the sermons about it? Where are the Christian pastors getting up in the pulpit to condemn this?
Jesus didn’t invent this
The Christian message in the Gospels of helping the poor isn’t unique to Christianity. It very much comes from its Jewish roots.
Leviticus 19:9-10 allows for gleaning in the fields. Deuteronomy 15 is about debt release, open-handedness, and “there should be no poor among you.” Deuteronomy 24:14-15 talks about not exploiting your laborers.
In the prophets, we see in Isaiah 1 that God is for the poor, the oppressed, the orphaned, and the widowed. Amos has multiple passages about exploitation and selling poor people for economic gain. Micah condemns people in power consuming the vulnerable.
Most of the Hebrew Bible was written during times when Israel and Judah were in positions of weakness. While they might contain triumphal language, especially in Judges, the reality is much of it is propaganda. It was composed for a people who had lost their homeland and were exiled to Babylon, or in the case of Israel, scattered by the Assyrians.
As such, within the Hebrew Bible we see passages that concern themselves with far more than personal piety when it comes to helping the poor. It’s the powerful themselves, those who sit on the throne, who are condemned and judged. Multiple prophets within the Hebrew Bible seemingly believe that personal piety ought to flow from the throne as much as it does from a person making a sacrifice in a temple.
James isn’t suddenly turning Christianity into economic activism. He is standing inside a Jewish prophetic tradition in which exploitation of the poor is a religious offense against God.
Early Christianity inherited this tradition. It’s interesting to read the critiques of the Romans and Greeks against the earliest Christians, because it gives us some insight into how Christians were perceived and potentially how they operated.
Celsus criticized Christians for allowing women in worship. Stating that they “…show that they want and are able to convince only the foolish, dishonorable and stupid, only slaves, women and little children.”
Pliny the Younger, in writing to Trajan, specified that the Christians he knew were “two female slaves.”
Lucian, another critic, pointed out that “widows and orphan children” made up the community of Christians.
When you go through other critics, that seems to be the common refrain; this is a religion that picks up slaves, women, children. The unwanted of society.
Christianity inherited a Judaic tradition of social justice. They didn’t inherit charity. Charity looks at a person in need and asks, “What can I give this person?” Justice looks at the person in need and asks, “Why does this person who is working forty hours a week still need my food pantry?”
That’s what the prophets were condemning. They weren’t condemning a lack of private charity; they were condemning systematic failures to address poverty within Israelite and Judahite societies.
Render unto Caesar
At this point, someone will point out that no one gives more than Christians. To an extent, that’s correct. Religious institutions do help the poor in a lot of ways, and we shouldn’t detract from that. The reality is, even in a society where everything functions well, you’re going to have people fall through the cracks. Religious institutions and private charities should exist for the people who fall through the cracks.
But when the cracks are the size of the Grand Canyon, there aren’t enough private charities on earth to compensate for those falling.
Many will say, “Yes, I agree, we should be helping the poor. But Christians do that!”
Christians vote for a political party that is doing all it can to remove any semblance of the government helping people. 81% of white evangelical protestants voted for Donald Trump. In fact, White evangelicals led the pack, but Hispanic Protestants followed with 63%. White Catholics were at 60%, and white non-evangelical Protestants were at 57%. It’s not until you get to Hispanic Catholics that a minority voted for Trump.
Let’s look and see everything that vote cost the poor and oppressed in our country:
· DOGE’s cuts have resulted in an estimated 700,000 dead worldwide in 2026 alone
· Their “pro-life” stance has resulted in a high mortality rate in states that have banned abortion
· The rise of foodborne illnesses as a “cost-cutting” measure from RFK
· Cuts to healthcare that will result in the deaths of thousands to millions of Americans every year
· More Americans are going hungry now than they were before
· Americans are having to borrow their way forward and debt is at an all-time high
And the list goes on. It doesn’t take a genius to realize why; 40 years of conservative economic policies have been a disaster. And yet, Christians have supported it without any hint of irony.
Whatever one’s preferred economic system, private charity and public policy operate at radically different scales. Government transfer programs demonstrably move millions of Americans above poverty thresholds.
The Census Bureau estimated that Social Security alone moved 28.7 million people out of the Supplemental Poverty Measure in 2024. Government nutrition benefits also measurably affect poverty calculations.
A Review of Economic Studies paper using records covering 17.5 million Americans found that increased access to Food Stamps before age five was associated with better adult outcomes.
The question is not whether government anti-poverty programs are perfect. They aren’t. They have flaws. They’ll have corruption. That is inevitable. The relevant question is whether they actually alleviate poverty despite the flaws inherent to the system. And the answer is, they do.
Which makes the Christian insistence that poverty is a public concern when churches collect donations but merely a private concern when governments collect taxes worth examining.
Private morality, public power
All of this brings us to a question:
Why is poverty “private ethics,” while abortion, sexuality, gender, school policy, marriage, and religious expression become legitimate subjects of the government?
The stance of most Christians is that the government ought not help people, despite the government being one of the better mechanisms to help alleviate poverty. A Pew 2024 Religious Landscape Study found that among evangelical Protestants, more respondents wanted government to provide less assistance to people in need than wanted it to provide more. Sixty percent preferred a smaller government providing fewer services. By contrast. 69% (nice) of historically Black Protestants favored more government assistance to people in need.
In other words, while I’ve been using “Christian” loosely here, it’s probably best to understand that my critique is levied at white evangelical Christianity.
Black Protestant Christians, Catholics, and mainline Protestants all have differences, but each group seems to understand that the government has a role in alleviating poverty. White evangelical Protestants, alternatively, don’t.
The contradiction isn’t inherent to Christianity. It is something particular streams of American Christianity have constructed.
This creates one hell of a contradiction. We’re told that they need political representation so that they can protect their way of life. They talk about banning gay marriage, banning abortion. We’re told that the private holy codes in the Bible somehow apply to public policy. But not wealth. No, that’s private.
Why? Why do they relegate these passages to private practice?
Well, look at the church and its structure.
Who gets a good seat?
Imagine a modern church that exists in Suburbia, America. You’re standing in the vast atrium of an entrance, waiting for the service to begin. Two men walk in. One man is white, tall, broad-shouldered, wearing an incredibly expensive suit. The other man is black, wearing rags, and obviously just came off the street.
What will the church’s response be?
If we go off stereotypes, the man in the suit will be accepted and have a quick road to leadership. The homeless man will have to first redeem himself of being unhoused, of being poor, before he is accepted into the arms of the church. They might have programs to help him, but he’ll be kept away from the general populace.
Favoritism.
I believe we’ve covered that in James, yes?
Now, at this point, excuses will start coming out.
“But it’s not safe!”
“Different people have different needs!”
“You can’t have him around children!”
The action of segregation is often disguised in the most practical of concerns.
Churches are no more immune to class sorting than the neighborhoods surrounding them. Often you can feel the socioeconomic boundaries of a congregation before anyone says a word. You know the church’s membership typically from where it’s placed in the city.
There’s evidence that churches often seek the demographics of the community in which they find themselves. That sounds hardly revolutionary, until you realize that this creates churches that will never come into contact with anyone who is truly in need, who is truly poor.
Contrast this with one of the criticisms of the early church: that they refused to meet in public spaces and instead met in houses.
Within the modern church, there are socioeconomic hierarchies within churches that will often reflect the ones found in the community. That means that white evangelical Protestantism is more likely to entrench and reinforce the socioeconomic divisions of a society rather than challenge it.
Interestingly, so many authors in the Bible speak against these hierarchies, and yet modern Christianity often becomes extraordinarily comfortable with unequal relationships so long as the powerful person is benevolent. Look at how Christians approach any relationship.
· Employer/employee
· Pastor/member
· Husband/wife
· Parent/child
· Politician/citizen
· Rich donor/church
The ethical question that Christians ask isn’t if such hierarchies are necessary or should exist, but rather if the powerful person is being nice. Instead, they should be asking why this person possesses so much power over another human being in the first place.
Churches soothe the moral complications created by hierarchy rather than interrogating the hierarchy itself.
And that makes sense. Other passages in the Bible justify this approach (the Pastoral Epistles, for example). But the way Christians marry the hierarchical passages with the non-hierarchical passages is…interesting.
The boss doesn’t necessarily have to pay his workers more. After all, if it’s a good market rate, it’s the fault of the market, not the boss, that his employees are going hungry. He just needs to be a Christian boss…whatever that means.
The wealthy don’t have to surrender disproportionate influence. They should be generous with their wealth, but hold onto it, maintain it, and protect it.
The powerful pastor doesn’t need less authority. He just needs to exercise it biblically.
The husband doesn’t need to understand that he’s in a partnership with an equal. He needs to instead realize his authority comes from Christ, and therefore he should act as Christ acts toward the church toward his wife.
In all instances, Christianity doesn’t threaten hierarchy. It is providing hierarchy with an ethics manual.
So much so that studies have found that Christian nationalism’s association with approval of economic inequality was concentrated among higher-income Americans. The authors interpret the pattern in terms of legitimizing traditional status hierarchies. So for a religion where there is “neither Jew nor Greek, neither male nor female,” it’s doing a hell of a lot of work to entrench the divisions that divide us.
But what about…?
At this point, someone is going to point out that Christians give quite a bit. And it’s true. Christian organizations are responsible for:
· Homeless shelters
· Food pantries
· Hospitals and medical charities
· Private donations
· Community aid
There are also some Christians and churches to whom this screed simply doesn’t apply. Many Christians and pastors do understand the book they’re preaching and preach economic justice constantly.
But none of that answers my criticism.
My criticism isn’t that Christians never help poor people. It’s deeper than that.
Why is the Christian answer so often assistance after someone falls rather than opposition to the conditions pushing them down?
And the reason is because of that “univocality of Scripture” that I brought up earlier. Evangelicals who are committed to a belief that the Bible is inerrant—and most conservative Christians will believe this—believe it is speaking in one voice. So it doesn’t matter what Luke and James are saying, what about…[insert other Bible verse that prooftexts the belief]?”
They’ll point to Jesus saying that the poor will always be with us, ignoring that he’s quoting Deuteronomy 15, where the existence of poverty is the reason the Israelites are commanded to open their hands to the poor—not permission to stop trying.
They’ll say that Paul points out in 2 Thessalonians that if anyone will not work, neither shall he eat. But not that it simply says “does not.” And whatever its precise historical context or authorship, one sentence doesn’t erase Deuteronomy, the prophets, Acts, and James. If anything, it’s referring to a specific situation.
They’ll say that Acts was voluntary, not a government system. Fine. But it raises the question of what economic values does Luke imagine a Spirit-filled community exhibiting. One that apes and mirrors the world around them? So even if Acts were voluntary, how are Christians fulfilling it in the modern age?
Finally, they’ll point out Jesus wasn’t a socialist. To which I’ll say, yeah, you’re right. I don’t need Jesus to endorse a twenty-first-century economic platform. I only need to point out that the canonical texts repeatedly regard treatment of material poverty and economic exploitation as moral questions, while the modern white evangelical protestant church does not.
Who belongs?
I think back to that time at First Baptist Dallas. Sitting outside after the service, having seen the expensive interior, and the homeless man asking me.
Two poor people in a sea of wealth. Him worse than me, by far, but me relying on the last few of what little I had.
He recognized it and immediately didn’t want anything from me. He went to others.
“This place isn’t for them.”
That stuck with me. I can still see the man’s pinstripe suit, his gray hair with a buzzcut that he likely had since 1956.
“This place isn’t for them.”
Then who the fuck is it for?
“We have a ministry for them.”
A kind way of saying, “we created a ministry to care for the consequences of an economic system we have no intention of challenging and, in fact, support.”
If a doctor saves one hundred lives, but was the cause of one hundred sicknesses, is he really a good doctor? Should we praise him for his actions in saving lives when he’s the one who put them at risk in the first place?
If Christians support a system that makes charity necessary, if they support a system that makes poorer people poorer, if they support taking away support from those who need it, then why should they be praised when they clean up the mess they helped create?
A Christianity that can give generously to poor people while still defending the hierarchy that keeps producing poor people is a Christianity that isn’t worthy of belief.