Wealth, Power, and Politics

Is it not the rich who are exploiting you? Are they not the ones who are dragging you into court? Are they not the ones who are blaspheming the noble name of him to whom you belong? - James 2:6-7

At the beginning of chapter 2, James challenges the church for how they mistreated poor people by making them sit in the back of their gatherings while giving the good seats to the rich. This was a specific problem with specific churches, and James addresses it head on.

But then, James zooms out for a broader critique of society and points out that the wealth gap in and of itself is a structured way that enables those with the privilege of money to selfishly leverage it against others. The way economics were set up then allowed the rich to ‘exploit’ (James 2:6) others. Some things don’t seem to change: the New York Times just ran an article yesterday with this headline: “Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google abused their monopoly power.”

And in James’s day, those with privilege would leverage it to use the legal system against those who stood in their way to gain more power and wealth. Again, these things have not changed. It was President Nixon who started the War on Drugs (even though drug use was on the decline) - but not to stop drug use. Instead, it was to ‘drag you into court’ (James 2:7) if you opposed their politics.

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” - John Ehrilchman, Chief Domestic Advisory to President Nixon in an interview by

We see those sorts of politics played out in our current political climate where, even when asked repeatedly to condemn White Supremacy during a presidential debate, one candidate would not do so.

So we have to wonder what the role of the church is. How much have we bought into the status quo because it helps protect our own wealth and power? How much have we tolerated - or benefited from - the system? How willing are we to enter into the costly way of Jesus to work in our individual and communal lives for the kind of kingdom that puts the poor, broken, and marginalized first? Take some time to look at these things head on, like James did, and to be changed by what we see.