The Church's Radical Pivot on Poverty

The Home Mission Council, which is the central organization of mission workers of all the evangelical churches of the United States, is reported to have entered upon a movement for investigating the causes of sin, poverty, and crime. If taken up fearlessly, unremittingly, and with the unshakable resolution to follow truth wherever it leads, it might reveal a central disease and change the complexion of society. Most comfortable and pious people, in accounting for the state of the uncomfortable and impious, do so by saying that people are poor and miserable because they are bad. This is not true. The real students of the matter know that they are bad because they are poor and miserable. The Home Mission Council will be confronted with the question as to whether poverty is preventable. They will be forced to the position that human misery in the mass is caused by social mal-adjustments, and that it can be cured by institutional changes which will cause wealth as it is produced to flow into the hands that make it, instead of the coffers of monopoly. Then the home missioners will be up against it. They will be afraid to break the monopoly egg. For general prosperity, when it comes, will demand the sacrifice of unjust privilege.