Last year the Washington Post conducted a poll asking the question, “Does poverty result more often from lack of effort on an individual’s part, or from circumstances beyond that individual’s control?” The Post found that Christians are twice as likely as non-Christians to blame poverty on lack of effort. For every non-religious person who believes that the poor are primarily responsible for their condition, you can find three white evangelicals who agree.

This is not shocking. White evangelicals tend to emphasize the role of individual responsibility. And there is solid Scriptural support for this attitude: “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat,” wrote the Apostle Paul, words John Smith quoted* at Jamestown as he set his group of loitering noblemen to plow the fields. Proverbs exhorts the sluggard to observe the ant, and warns him of the poverty that will result from his apathy. Later Christian tradition numbered “sloth” among the seven deadly sins.

At this point, a couple of caveats are in order. First, I know a lot of white evangelicals, and none of them think that every poor person is lazy or that laziness is the sole cause of poverty. Second, evangelicals make for pretty bad Social Darwinists. Every church I’ve ever known has at least one program aimed at alleviating poverty, and evangelicals are at least as generous as other cohorts when it comes to charitable giving.

All that said, there are real dangers in naming “lack of effort” as the primary culprit of poverty. The first is theological. That poverty as such indicates a moral defect is an idea found nowhere in Scripture – and particularly not in the New Testament. “Blessed are you who are poor,” Jesus says flatly in Luke 6, afterwards adding, “But woe to you who are rich.” Elsewhere the NT stops short of condemning wealth outright, but it’s nowhere optimistic about the effects of financial success on the spiritual life.

Secondly, from a socioeconomic perspective, you don’t have to be Karl Marx to acknowledge that “circumstances beyond the individual’s control” are real, and that many are conspicuously difficult to overcome. There are the vagaries of the globalized economy: someone who’s tried to make a career at the now-shuttered US Steel plant in Granite City, IL, for example, isn’t going to transform himself into a software engineer overnight.

A bad home life sets a child up for failure long before he or she has the chance to enter the workforce. The breakdown of working class families is a long and complex story, but it’s setting poor kids at a huge disadvantage from the start.

In our major cities, the ongoing effects of once-official racial segregation have set up barriers to black success. It’s telling that black Christian respondents to the Post’s poll were far more likely than their white counterparts to attribute poverty primarily to external factors.  

Moreover, “lack of effort” can itself be a result of circumstances, at least partially. I was not born with a strong work ethic. Insofar as I have one, I can thank my parents, teachers and friends. I am not an exceptionally talented or motivated individual; were I born into a community worn down by generations of poverty, in which the adults had (for whatever reason) largely given up, then I really doubt I would have somehow risen above it. We are beings with moral responsibility, but we are likewise beings shaped by our environment. It’s a morally and spiritually dangerous business evaluating others who did not receive the advantages that we ourselves were given.

Thirdly and finally, white evangelicals need to confront the the fact that poor white people don’t go to  church (economic status has no statistical influence on church attendance by blacks and Latinos). Evangelical Christianity in the US is in real danger of becoming an exclusively middle-class institution, which is pretty unnerving since Jesus’ target demographic was unabashedly the poor (Matthew 11:5). There are undoubtedly a host of factors contributing to decreasing church attendance among poor whites, but it would be shameful if our attitude toward poverty was one of them. After all, “Has not God chosen those who are poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom?” (James 2:5).

* As did, weirdly, the 1936 constitution of the Soviet Union.