A group of devout Christians once lived in a small village at the foot of a mountain. A winding, slippery road with hairpin curves and steep precipices without guard rails wound its way up one side of the mountain and down the other. There were frequent accidents, often fatal.
Deeply saddened by the injured people who were regularly pulled from the wrecked cars, the Christians in the village churches decided to act. They pooled their resources and purchased an ambulance so that they could rush the injured to the hospital in the next town. Week after week church volunteers gave faithfully, even sacrificially, of their time to operate the ambulance twenty-four hours a day. They saved many lives, though some victims remained crippled for life.
Then one day a visitor came to town. When he heard about the accidents, he asked why they did not try to get the deadly road over the mountain replaced by a tunnel. Startled at first, the ambulance volunteers quickly pointed out that this approach was unrealistic. The road had been there for a long time. Besides, the mayor would bitterly oppose the idea; he owned a restaurant and service station halfway up the mountain.
The visitor was shocked that the mayor’s economic interests seemed to matter more to these Christians than the many human casualties. Somewhat hesitantly, he suggested that perhaps they should speak to the mayor. After all, he was an elder in the oldest church in town. If he proved stubborn and unconcerned, perhaps they should elect a different mayor.
Now the Christians were shocked. With rising indignation and righteous conviction they informed the young radical that the Church dare not become involved in politics; the Church is called to preach the Gospel and give a cup of cold water.
Perplexed, the visitor left the town, a question churning in his mind: “Is it really more spiritual to operate ambulances to pick up the bloody victims of destructive social structures than to try to change the structures?”
The neglect of the biblical teaching on structural injustice, what we might call institutionalized evil, is one of the most deadly omissions in evangelicalism today. Sinful social institutions and bad economic structures harm thousands and millions of people. Slavery is an example of institutionalized or social evil. So is the Victorian factory system, in which ten-year-old children worked twelve to sixteen hours a day.
In the twentieth century evangelicals have been more concerned with personal sins than with social evils. The Bible, however, condemns both. Speaking through his prophet Amos, the Lord declared: “For three transgressions of Israel and for four, I will not revoke the punishment; because they sell … the needy for a pair of shoes … [and] trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth, and turn aside the way of the afflicted; a man and his father go in to the same maiden, so that my holy name is profaned” (Amos 2:6, 7). Biblical scholars have shown that some kind of legal fiction underlies the phrase “sell … the needy for a pair of shoes.” This mistreatment of the poor was legal! In one breath God condemns both sexual sins and legalized oppression of the poor.
God revealed the same thing through his prophet Isaiah: “Woe to those who join house to house, who add field to field, until there is no more room, and you are made to dwell alone in the midst of the land. The LORD of hosts has sworn in my hearing: ‘Surely many houses shall be desolate, large and beautiful houses, without inhabitant.…’ Woe to those who rise early in the morning, that they may run after strong drink, who tarry late into the evening till wine inflames them” (Isa. 5:8–11). God condemns the wealthy who amass large land holdings, doubtless at the poor’s expense, and the drunken.
Some young activists have supposed that as long as they were fighting for the rights of minorities and opposing militarism, they were righteous, regardless of how sexually promiscuous they were. Some of their elders, on the other hand, have supposed that because they did not smoke, drink, or lie (though they might stretch the truth a little for income-tax purposes), they were morally upright, even though they lived in segregated communities and received stock dividends from companies that exploit the poor. God, however, has shown in his revelation that personal and social ethics are equally important. Robbing your workers of a fair wage is just as sinful as robbing a bank. Voting for a racist because he is a racist is just as sinful as sleeping with your neighbor’s spouse.
God reveals his displeasure at evil institutions in Amos 5:10–15. Israel’s court sessions were held at the city gate. “They hate him who reproves in the gate [in the court].… I know how many are your transgressions, and how great are your sins—you who … take a bribe, and turn aside the needy in the gate.… Hate evil, and love good, and establish justice in the gate.” In other words, get rid of the corrupt legal system that allows the wealthy to buy their way out of trouble and does not give legal satisfaction to the poor.
And it is not only dishonest and corrupt individuals who stand condemned; God clearly revealed that laws themselves are sometimes an abomination to him. Consider Psalm 94:20–23—
Can wicked rulers be allied with thee,
who frame mischief by statute?They band together against the life of the righteous,
and condemn the innocent to death,But the LORD has become my stronghold,
and my God the rock of my refuge.He will bring back on them their iniquity
and wipe them out for their wickedness;
the LORD our God will wipe them out.
God wants his people to know that wicked governments “frame mischief by statute.” Or as the New English Bible puts it, they contrive evil “under cover of law.” God proclaims the same word through the prophet Isaiah:
Woe to those who decree iniquitous decrees
and the writers who keep writing oppression,to turn aside the needy from justice
and to rob the poor of my people of their right.…What will you do on the day of punishment
with the storm which will come from afar?To whom will you flee for help,
and where will you leave your wealth?Nothing remains but to crouch among the prisoners
or fall among the slain.For all this [God’s] anger is not turned away
and his hand is stretched out still [Isa. 10:1–4].
It is quite possible to work oppression legally. Then, as now, legislators devised unjust laws and the bureaucracy (the scribes or writers) carried out the injustice. But God shouts a divine Woe against rulers who write unjust laws and unfair legal decisions. God will wipe out wicked rulers who frame mischief by statute.
Social, institutionalized evil can be so subtle that one can be entangled in it almost unawares. God inspired his prophet Amos to utter some of the harshest words in Scripture against some cultured, upper-class women of his day: “Hear this word, you cows of Bashan … who oppress the poor, who crush the needy, who say to [your] husbands, ‘Bring, that we may drink.’ The Lord GOD has sworn by his holiness that, behold, the days are coming upon you, when they shall take you away with hooks, even the last of you with fishhooks” (Amos 4:1, 2). These women probably had no contact with the impoverished peasants. They may never have realized that their lovely clothes and spirited parties were possible only because of the sweat and tears of toiling peasants. In fact, they may even have been kind to individual peasants they met. Perhaps they gave them “Christmas baskets” once a year. But God called these privileged women cows. They profited from social evil; hence they were personally and individually guilty before God.
If one is a member of a privileged class that profits from social evil and if one does nothing to try to change things, one stands guilty before God. Social evil is just as sinful as personal evil. Over and over again, God declared through his prophets that he would destroy the nation of Israel both because of its idolatry and because of its mistreatment of the poor.
The both/and is crucial. We dare not become so preoccupied with horizontal issues of social justice that we neglect vertical evils such as idolatry. Modern Christians seem to have an irrepressible urge to fall into one extreme or the other.
The following passages from Amos are similar to many other passages in Scripture: “Because you trample upon the poor, and take from him exactions of wheat, you have built houses of hewn stone, but you shall not dwell in them …” (5:11). “Hear this, you who trample upon the needy, and bring the poor of the land to an end, saying, ‘When will the new moon be over, that we may sell grain? And the sabbath, that we may offer wheat for sale … and deal deceitfully with false balances, that we may buy the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, and sell the refuse of the wheat’” (8:4–6). “Behold, the eyes of the Lord GOD are upon the sinful kingdom, and I will destroy it from the surface of the earth …” (9:8). In fact, within a generation after the time of the prophet Amos, the northern kingdom of Israel was wiped out—forever.
God works in history to destroy evil social structures and sinful societies where wealthy classes grow richer from the sweat, toil, and grief of the poor. Probably the most powerful statement of this fact is in the New Testament. In the Magnificat, Mary glorifies the Lord who “has put down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted those of low degree; he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent empty away” (Luke 1:52, 53).
What does this biblical teaching mean for us affluent Westerners? Are we exploiting the poor of the world in the way the wealthy did in Amos’s day?
The answer, I think, is yes. Stan Mooneyham, the president of World Vision, speaks of the “stranglehold which the developed West has kept on the economic throats of the Third World.” He says: “At the heart of the problem of poverty and hunger are human systems which ignore, mistreat and exploit man.… If the hungry are to be fed … some of the systems will require drastic adjustments while others will have to be scrapped altogether” (What Do You Say to a Hungry World?, Word, 1975, pp. 128, 117).
It would be wrong to suggest that 210 million Americans bear sole responsibility for all the hunger and injustice in today’s world. All the rich, developed countries are directly involved. So too are the wealthy elite in poor countries. Ancient social patterns, inherited values, and cherished philosophical perspectives in countries like India also contribute to poverty.
But surely our first responsibility is to pluck the beam from our own eye. We need to understand and change what we are doing wrong. How then are we a part of sinful structures that contribute to world hunger?
First, and most important, the industrialized nations have carefully manipulated the patterns of international trade for their own economic advantage. Eighty per cent of all money that moves from rich to poor nations moves through international trade. Most of the exports of the poor countries are unmanufactured primary products. The prices of these have fluctuated widely in the past twenty-five years. Industrialized nations have managed to increase the price of manufactured goods that they sell to developing nations while at the same time they have held down the prices of primary products exported by the poor nations. Between 1950 and 1970, the value of primary products and raw materials declined relative to manufactured goods and other high-technology items.
A few examples will illustrate the effect. In 1954, it cost Brazil fourteen bags of coffee to buy one U.S. jeep. By 1968, that jeep cost forty-five bags of coffee. The government of Tanzania reports that one tractor cost five tons of sisal in 1963; in 1970, the same tractor cost ten tons of sisal. In 1960, a rubber-exporting country could purchase six tractors with twenty-five tons of rubber. In 1975, the same rubber would buy only two tractors.
In 1973 and 1974 there was a substantial increase in the prices of raw materials exported by developing countries. But it was short-lived. The prices then fell drastically. Overall, the Overseas Development Council’s 1976 Agenda for Action estimated that “the purchasing power of primary commodities … is estimated to have fallen by about 13 per cent during 1975.” The result of the lower prices and declining purchases (because of worldwide recession) was that non-oil-producing poor countries lost $8 billion in 1975, the report says.
While poor countries were losing money because of the declining prices of their exports, the United States was making a handsome profit. Even in 1972, before grain prices tripled, the United States had a $1 billion surplus of trade with poor countries. (We exported $16.3 billion of goods to developing countries and purchased only $15.3 billion from them.) But then the price of our grain exports tripled. In 1974, the United States earned $6.6 billion from farm exports shipped to poor countries. In 1972, the amount had been only $1.6 billion. The extra $5 billion resulted from the tripling of grain prices. Because of the low prices paid for their raw materials and primary products and the high prices charged for our manufactured goods and grain, we earned a total net profit of $5.5 billion from countries where one billion people are starving or malnourished.
Certain patterns of international trade are unjust, and we in the rich nations benefit from this injustice. God has said that he abhors structural evil. Do we?
International trade is not the only way in which we are implicated in structural evil. The rich nations use a very unfair share of the earth’s limited, non-renewable resources. Is it just for the 5 per cent of the world’s people who live in the United States to consume approximately 33 per cent of the world’s limited, non-renewable energy and minerals each year? We use 42 per cent of total annual aluminum output, 33 per cent of all copper, 44 per cent of all coal, 33 per cent of all petroleum, and 63 per cent of all natural gas. Is it just, then, to demand an ever expanding economy and an ever higher standard of living?
Our eating patterns are a third area where we are caught in institutionalized sin. Dr. Georg Borgstrom, an internationally known professor of nutrition at Michigan State, pointedly underscores our involvement. He shows that we ought to measure world population not merely by the number of human beings but in terms of the total “feeding burden.” When livestock as well as people are counted, one discovers that spaceship earth already has, not 4 billion, but 19 billion inhabitants (“population equivalents”) (see his Hungry Planet, Macmillan, 1967; I am drawing also from a lecture he gave in September, 1974). The feeding burden of the United States is accordingly not 210 million but 1.6 billion. India has three times as many people as the United States has. But when one adds in its livestock, India has only 1.2 billion population equivalents.
Many affluent persons deplore the rapid population growth in the poor countries. And in fact during 1972–1974, the developing world added 140 million persons while the rich countries increased by a mere 22 million persons. But that, Borgstrom shows, is only a part of the total picture. When one figures in the additional livestock added in those two years, then the rich world increased the world’s “population equivalents” by 404 million. The poor majority added 280 million population equivalents when livestock are counted, and one-fourth of its livestock increase was for the export of meat to the rich world. Adjusting the figures, Borgstrom concludes: “The satisfied world, one-third of the human family, has in these two years in effect added 463 million population equivalents to the globe’s strained feeding burden as against the poor world, two-thirds of the human family, contributing 264 million.”
It is simply unfair to say that the population explosion in the poor countries is the sole cause of widespread hunger in the world. Our ever increasing affluence is also right at the heart of the problem. It is not just that North Americans consume five times as much grain (counting that fed to the animals they eat) as most Asians do. It is not just that each day we eat twice as much protein as our bodies need. It is not just that we consume so many extra calories that millions of us are overweight. We can do all these foolish, unjust, greedy things in part because the poor world exports vast quantities of food each year to the rich world!
Because Canada and the United States export huge amounts of grain, North Americans tend to assume that they grow all their own food plus large quantities for export. But the picture is not so simple. For example, the United States is the world’s largest importer of beef, and it imports large quantities of fish also. “The United States alone imports about twice as much fish, primarily in the form of feed for livestock, as do all the poor countries combined,” asserts Arthur Simon in Bread for the World. Two-thirds of the total world catch of tuna comes to the United States, and we use one-third of that imported tuna to feed our cats. We import beef not just from Australia and New Zealand but also from many countries in Latin America—approximately one million cattle every year from Mexico, for instance.
Honduras is a poor Central American country where one-third of the people earn less than $30 a year. Despite widespread poverty, Honduras exports large amounts of beef to the United States. The United States recently raised the import quota of beef from Honduras from 27.8 to 34.8 million pounds. Beef for export is grown by a tiny wealthy elite (around 0.3 per cent of the total population) who own more than one-fourth of all the arable land.
A struggle rages in Honduras. The poor peasants want more land. The powerful Honduran Cattle Farmers’ Federation, which represents the wealthy farmer, naturally objects. The rich farmers want to continue to grow beef for Americans.
The infant mortality rate in Honduras is six times that of the United States. The World Bank indicates that malnutrition is either the primary cause of or a major contributor to the death of 50–75 per cent of all one-to four-year-old children who die in Latin America. Who’s responsible for those dying children? The wealthy Hondurans who want to protect their affluence? The American companies that work closely with the Honduran elite? You and I who eat the beef needed by hundreds of thousands of hungry children in Honduras?
Are not our eating patterns intricately interlocked with very destructive economic structures?
International trade patterns are unjust in many ways. An affluent minority devours most of the earth’s non-renewable resources. Food consumption patterns are grossly lopsided. Unless you have retreated to some isolated valley where you produce everything you use, you benefit from unjust structures that contribute directly to the hunger of a billion unhappy neighbors.
The conclusion is not that all our international trade and investment in poor countries is immoral. Nor is it that the U.S. economy would be destroyed if these injustices were corrected. Only 5 per cent of the total U.S. income comes from abroad. Foreign trade makes up only about 4 per cent of the U.S. Gross National Product. Rather, the conclusion is that injustice has become embedded in some of our fundamental economic institutions. If they are faithful to Scripture, biblical Christians will dare to call such structures sinful and work to change them.
By this point, the reader probably wishes that international economics were less complex. Or that faithful discipleship in our time had less to do with such a complicated subject. But in fact to give the cup of cold water effectively in the Age of Hunger often requires some understanding of international economic structures. Perhaps the story of bananas can help to focus these complex issues.
Have you ever wondered why apples grown in a neighboring orchard or state often cost more than bananas imported from another continent? American newspapers reported in April, 1975, that United Brands, one of three huge U.S. companies that grow and import our bananas, had arranged to pay $2.5 million (though only $1.25 million was actually paid) in bribes to top government officials in Honduras. Why? To get them to agree to cut by more than 50 per cent a proposed export tax on bananas. To increase profits for a U.S. company (and, incidentally, to lower banana prices for you and me), the Honduran officials agreed, for a price, to cut drastically the tax revenue desperately needed by its poor masses.
The daily newspapers, however, did not tell the whole story. In March, 1974, several banana-producing countries in Central America agreed to join together to demand a $1 tax on every case of bananas exported. Why? Because banana prices have not increased in the last twenty inflation-ridden years. Producers were getting no more for their bananas then they had in the early fifties. But their costs for manufactured goods had constantly escalated. As a result, the real purchasing power of exported bananas had declined by 60 per cent in that time span. At least half of the export income in countries like Honduras and Panama comes from bananas. No wonder they are poor. No wonder one-third of the inhabitants of Honduras earn less than $30 a year.
What did the banana companies do when the exporting countries put this $1-per-case tax on bananas? They refused to pay. Since three companies control 90 per cent of the marketing and distribution of bananas, they had powerful leverage. In Honduras, for instance, the banana company allowed 145,000 crates of bananas to rot at the dock. One after another the poor countries gave in. Costa Rica finally settled for $.25 a crate, and Panama, for $.35. Honduras, thanks to the large bribe, eventually agreed to a $.30 tax.
Why are bananas in North American and European supermarkets usually cheaper than apples? We profit, often unwittingly, from very unjust patterns of international trade.
The words of the apostle James seem to speak to the situation: “Come now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you.… Your gold and silver have rusted, and their rust will be evidence against you.… You have laid up treasure for the last days. Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out; and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. You have lived on the earth in luxury and in pleasure; you have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter” (Jas. 5:1–5).
What should be our response? For biblical Christians, the response to sin is repentance. Unconsciously, at least to a degree, we have become entangled in a complex web of institutionalized sin. God is merciful. He forgives. But only if we repent. And biblical repentance involves more than a hasty tear and a weekly liturgical confession. Biblical repentance involves conversion, a change of behavior. The One who stands ready to forgive us of our sinful involvement in economic injustice offers us his grace to begin living a new, transformed life of identification with the poor and oppressed.
Institutionalized sin is not just an inconvenience or a tragedy for our neighbors. It is an outrage against the Almighty Lord of the Universe. We who live in affluent nations have profited from systemic injustice—sometimes only half knowing, sometimes only half caring, and always half hoping not to know. We are guilty of an offense against God and neighbor.
But that is not God’s last word to us. The one who points a finger is the one who died for us sinners.
John Newton was the captain of a slave ship in the eighteenth century. A brutal, callous man, he played a central role in a horrendous system that fed tens of thousands to the sharks and delivered millions to a living death. But one day he saw his sin and repented. His well-known hymn overflows with joy and gratitude for God’s acceptance and forgiveness.
Amazing grace! How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.‘Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,
And grace my fears relieved;
How precious did that grace appear
The hour I first believed.
We are participants in a system that dooms even more people to agony and death than the slave system did. But God’s grace will also teach our hearts to fear—and then to rest and trust. And it will not stop there. God’s grace will flood our lives with a new dynamic to work for less unjust social structures.
Ronald J. Sider is associate professor of history and religion at Messiah College (Temple University campus), Philadelphia. He is a fellow for 1976 of the Institute for Advanced Christian Studies. This article is from a chapter in Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger: A Biblical Study, to be published by InterVarsity Press.
