William E Pannel:
Pastor Arthur Simon, Lutheran clergyman, lives on New York’s Lower East Side. In a moving volume, Faces of Poverty, he describes the bland sameness of those who flee from the challenge to love one’s neighbor.
“It (the middle class) is self promoting because it places too high a value on our own comfort: it indicates an inordinate desire for earthly possessions; and it is nourished by a search for status. It is exclusive because in this style of life people of similar background and circumstances are drawn together like iron filings by a magnet, into neighborhoods which have systematically eliminated the less worthy. It is evasive because it cuts us off from precisely those people whose needs are most acute and to whom the Gospel recommends us most of all.”?
Self promoting, exclusive, evasive. One could passionately wish these words exclusive of the church. But, of course, the church is middle-class, even that section of it called evangelical, and rather than challenge the oppressive system which denudes men of their humanity, the church reflects these majority values. Sargent Shriver, Director of the Office of Economic Opportunity, reveals considerable savvy when he says that “Christianity sometimes seems to have a case of moral hemophilia: its sense of social responsibility is bleeding away. The test of 20th Century Christianity is not how much the poor enter into the life of the church, but how much the church enters into the life of the poor.” Amen. One wonders if the church is Christian enough to understand this, for of all people, the children of the poor pioneers are now those who like to excuse their insensitivity by quoting Christ’s words about “the poor ye have with you always.” Sure, as long as the well-off do not care.