Election season has a way of shrinking our moral imagination.nWe are asked: Are you better off than you were two years ago? Which candidate will lower your taxes? Protect your interests? Make your family safer? Which party deserves your vote?
Those aren’t illegitimate questions. We have responsibilities to ourselves and to the people who depend on us. But for Christians, they can’t be the only questions. Scripture continually pulls our attention to the poor, the stranger, the worker, the widow, and the person without power. And Christian thinkers across centuries have wrestled with what that means when some people possess far more money, security, and influence than others.
They haven’t always agreed on the answer, and neither do Christians today. But as the midterms approach, perhaps some of these voices from history can help us ask better questions about wealth, power, responsibility, and the kind of society we are helping create.
When Does “Mine” Become “Ours”?
“The bread you store up belongs to the hungry; the cloak that lies in your chest belongs to the naked; the gold you have hidden in the ground belongs to the poor.” — St. Basil the Great
That sounds almost shockingly radical today, but it was written in the fourth century. Basil was a bishop and one of the most important theologians of the Early Church. He was also deeply troubled by the enormous disparity he saw between people with abundance and people without enough to survive.
His argument went considerably further than “Christians should be generous.” Basil questioned whether Christians could rightly regard their excess as exclusively their own while their neighbors lacked necessities.
That’s an uncomfortable idea in a culture built partly around private ownership and individual achievement. It also raises complicated questions. How much is enough? What obligations belong to individuals, and which belong to governments or institutions? Does redistribution solve inequality, create other problems, or both? Basil doesn’t hand us an economic platform. But he does make it difficult to assume that what we possess concerns only us.
Here’s an important question worth considering: What responsibilities accompany having more than we need?
Power Rarely Moves on Its Own
Frederick Douglass understood power from the underside of it. Born into slavery, he escaped and became one of the country’s most consequential abolitionists. In an 1857 speech, he offered an observation that has outlived the particular struggle in which he made it:
“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
We often talk about political power as though the important question is simply who possesses it. Douglass pushes us toward another: What causes those with power to respond to those without it? Nearly every expansion of American democracy has involved people who were excluded from power organizing to demand something different: Abolition, women’s suffrage, labor protections, civil rights, disability rights, etc.
That history doesn’t mean every demand made in the name of justice is necessarily just. It does suggest that we should pay attention to whose interests institutions naturally hear, and who has to fight simply to enter the conversation.
As we evaluate candidates and policies, it is worth asking not only, Who will have power? but Who will have access to it?
Poverty Isn’t Simply the Absence of Wealth
Civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson has spent much of his career representing people on death row and people whose poverty left them particularly vulnerable within the criminal justice system. One of his best-known observations is this:
“The opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice.”
It’s a provocative claim, because our instinct is to treat poverty primarily as an economic condition. Someone has too little money; the solution is for that person to acquire more. Sometimes it really is that straightforward. But Stevenson asks us to notice the other forces that shape people’s economic lives: the schools available to them, the neighborhoods into which they were born, encounters with the criminal justice system, discrimination, family stability, health, opportunity, and simple luck.
Acknowledging those factors does not require us to deny personal responsibility. Nor does believing in personal responsibility require us to pretend everyone begins from the same place. Both things can be true. That tension is worth remembering whenever political rhetoric reduces poverty either to individual failure or entirely to systems. Human lives are rarely that simple.
“Some Are Guilty, but All Are Responsible”
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marched alongside Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma and became one of the most important Jewish religious voices in the American civil rights movement. He made a distinction that feels particularly useful in our own polarized moment:
“In a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.”
Guilt and responsibility are not the same thing. We didn’t personally create every disparity we inherited. Most of us didn’t write the laws, establish the institutions, draw the neighborhood boundaries, set the wages, or make the decisions that shaped the world into which we arrived. That doesn’t mean what happens next has nothing to do with us. This is one of the strange gifts and burdens of citizenship. We inherit a society we didn’t build, and then we become partly responsible for what it becomes.
The question isn’t always Whose fault is this? Sometimes it’s What is ours to do now?
Where We Stand Changes What We See
James Cone spent his career asking American Christians to look at Christianity from a vantage point many white churches had largely ignored: the experience of Black Americans living under racism. Cone, who taught at Union Theological Seminary for decades and became known as the founder of Black liberation theology, could be intentionally confrontational. Some Christians embraced his work; others strongly disputed parts of his theology.
But the question underneath his work remains difficult to dismiss: Whose experience gets to shape our understanding of what is true? Cone once said:
“The truth about injustice always sounds outrageous.”
The economy can look very different depending on where you encounter it. Falling unemployment, rising wages, inflation, home values, the stock market — all of these can tell us something real, but none tells us everything. A homeowner watching the value of a house increase and a renter watching the possibility of homeownership move farther away can experience the same economy very differently.
So can a business owner and an hourly employee. A family with substantial savings and a family one emergency away from debt. A person whose parents paid for college and someone still carrying student loans decades later.
None of those experiences automatically settles a policy debate. But they should make us suspicious of any account of economic life that treats one person’s experience as everyone’s.
Charity, and the Question after Charity
“Riches too are good…if the wants of our neighbors be done away by them.” — John Chrysostom
The Early Church was surprisingly blunt about wealth. John Chrysostom, a 4th-century bishop known for his powerful preaching, repeatedly challenged wealthy Christians who worshiped extravagantly while people around them went hungry. Wealth itself was not the problem, he argued. The question was what we did with it—and whether our abundance served anyone beyond ourselves.
Christians have carried that conviction forward through hospitals, food pantries, shelters, disaster relief, mutual aid, charitable giving, and countless quiet acts of generosity. Those things matter. But there is a question charity alone cannot answer: Why does the need keep happening?
If a family is hungry tonight, they need food tonight. They do not need an analysis of food systems. But if families in the same community remain hungry year after year, eventually love should make us curious about the conditions producing the hunger. Charity asks, How can I help? Justice adds another question: Why does the need keep happening?
Christians may disagree, sometimes sharply, about the answer and about which solutions work. Government programs can help and can fail. Markets can create extraordinary opportunity and can also concentrate wealth and power. Private charity can transform lives and still be incapable of addressing some problems at scale. There is no faithful shortcut around those complexities. But neither should complexity become an excuse for indifference.
Where might compassion call us not only to respond to suffering, but also to ask what keeps producing it?
“If I Am Only for Myself, What Am I?”
Rabbi Hillel, who lived around the time of Jesus, is remembered for three questions:
“If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?”
Our own lives matter. So do our families, livelihoods, safety, homes, and futures. Christianity does not require us to pretend otherwise.
But if I am only for myself, what am I? An election invites us to exercise a small measure of power over a society we share with millions of people whose lives look nothing like ours. So perhaps before we ask which candidate or policy will benefit us, we add a few more questions.
What will this mean for someone earning less than I do? For someone without my education, savings, housing, health, citizenship status, connections, or security? Who benefits from the way things currently work? Who pays for it? Where is power concentrated? Where is opportunity scarce? And when competing policies all involve tradeoffs, as they almost always do, who is being asked to bear them?
There will not always be one obvious Christian answer. Faithful people will weigh competing goods differently. They will disagree about the proper role of government, the effectiveness of particular policies, taxation, markets, regulation, public spending, and the best ways to create opportunity. But Hillel’s question is one that is helpful for all of us as we head to the voting booth.
(Editor’s Note: In full transparency, AI assisted with this article in pulling quotes and giving historical background.)
