Tag Archive: Sermon on the Plain

Blessed Are the Poor

This post originally appeared on my blog, Koinonia Revolution.

I was reading a really interesting and really disappointing article about poverty and our perception of it yesterday. It does not say anything I did not already know, but it did get me thinking about something when I read this:

Prejudice against the poor increases during hard economic times, said John Dovidio, a Yale University psychology professor.

“Our society is based on the idea that if you work hard, you get more, and if you have less, you deserve less,” Dovidio said.

Unfortunately, this is exactly the case, and you can just turn on one of the major news stations or a political talk show to see it. I personally see it even among members of my own family, which is funny because my family is not very prosperous to begin with. Our society has the assumption that everything is the result of an individual’s actions, which seems to be product of our emphasis on individualism to me. If you are poor, it is because you are lazy, not because you might be mentally ill, handicapped, born into poverty, or unemployed. And if you are rich, it is because you are a “job creator” who works hard. It literally saturates American culture and media. (more…)