The invisible poor

Jesus & John Adams on poverty and public life

I pulled out my phone Saturday and appeared to take pictures of people. I must be vague here because these people must stay invisible. There’s a reason why, as it turns out, these people were uncomfortable with my taking pictures.

What am I able to say? I was helping a group in Memphis distribute fresh fruit, bread, and canned food. I was taking pictures only of the community organizer, whom I was permitted to photograph as part of a future podcast episode. But how could the people be sure that I wasn’t taking pictures of them?

After I left, some people contacted the organizer with their concerns about me. Their community had been affected badly by ICE’s actions, and they didn’t want photos ending up in the wrong hands.

What else can I say? I changed the location and the nature of what we gave the people in this account because, as I say, the people must stay invisible.

Poorer communities have long been invisible. Most immigrants, for instance, were invisible long before our country began taking some of them from their homes here and sending them back to their countries of origin or to prisons in third countries.

Above: this picture is intentionally left invisible.

Impoverishment and invisibility work together to further marginalize historically targeted minorities. Thus, a book on Americans’ misconceptions about First Nations places the biggest misconception in the title: “All the Real Indians Died Off”: And 20 Other Myths About Native Americans. A recent book about systemic racism is entitled, I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness.

Invisibility, then, is a big problem. For sure, the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament care a lot about the poor’s need for food, shelter and clothing. But both the Hebrew and Christian Bibles are concerned even more with the poor’s invisibility. Witness Jesus: he begins his Sermon on the Plain by equating poverty with political place in the coming age of God’s earthly rule:

“How blissful the destitute, for yours is the Kingdom of God.”¹

In the early models of that rule—the first two centuries of life among the Jesus assemblies—Jesus’s followers are known around the empire for their care of and respect for the poor.²

But this care and respect aren’t always the case. And in the New Testament’s epistles, when assemblies mistreat the poor, we read about shame as much as we read about hunger. The apostles Paul and James address how the poor are shamed and, through shame, made invisible. Here’s Paul:

Therefore when you meet together, it is not to eat the Lord’s Supper, for in your eating each one takes his own supper first; and one is hungry and another is drunk. What! Do you not have houses in which to eat and drink? Or do you despise the church of God and shame those who have nothing?³

The Corinthian church, Paul says, shames the poor. Shaming happens in public; it’s actually a shutdown that excludes people from public life. Paul’s emphasis here is not on feeding the poor—though Paul frequently refers to his efforts to help the assemblies do just that⁴—but on honoring and therefore benefitting from the poor.

James makes the same point when the churches to whom he writes refuse the poor chairs, when they make the poor stand or sit on the floor at the rich people’s feet:

Listen, my dear friends: has not God chosen those who are poor in the eyes of the world to be rich in faith and to possess the kingdom he has promised to those who love him? And yet you have humiliated the poor man.⁵

Future political stature promised again. Present shame and humiliation experienced again. The wicked distinctions we make—who eats and who doesn’t, who sits in chairs and who stands—make people visible or invisible. We end up shutting down those who are rich in faith, those with much to give.

John Adams, like Paul and James, notices poor people at church—and at other places, too. Adams also emphasizes the poor person’s shame and invisibility:

The poor man’s conscience is clear; yet he is ashamed . . . He feels himself out of the sight of others, groping in the dark. Mankind takes no notice of him. He rambles and wanders unheeded. In the midst of a crowd, at church, in the market . . . he is in as much obscurity as he would be in a garret or a cellar. He is not disapproved, censured, or reproached; he is only not seen . . . To be wholly overlooked, and to know it, are intolerable.⁶

Quoting Adams’s remarks, Hannah Arendt observes that Adams’s “. . . conviction that darkness rather than want is the curse of poverty, is extremely rare in the literature of the modern age . . .”⁷ The rarity of Adams’s conviction may be explained by the modern age’s insouciance toward public life. A sufficiently engaged public wouldn’t stand for poverty because it needs the opinions and contributions of everyone, and poverty silences people.

Aristotle agrees with Adams, though Aristotle emphasizes that poverty silences people not through shame but through necessarily long hours of work. The poor have little or no leisure time. Consequently, Aristotle thought that the best democracies pay their poor. That way, the poor would have the leisure to participate in civic life.⁸

The Bible’s book of Ecclesiastes agrees with Adams, too. It suggests that when we deny public life to the poor, we risk destroying ourselves. The Solomon figure makes this point in a parable:

There was a little city, with few men in it; and to it came a great king, who invested it and built mighty siege works against it. Present in the city was a poor wise man who might have saved it with his wisdom, but nobody thought of that poor man. So I observed: Wisdom is better than valor, but

/ A poor man’s wisdom is scorned, / And his words are not heeded.⁹

Like this little city, we shame the poor and fail to listen to them. bell hooks explains our failure to hear or even to see the poor in terms of who gets to hold the public megaphone:

We live in a society where the poor have no public voice. No wonder it has taken so long for many citizens to recognize class—to become class conscious.¹⁰

A point well taken. But I think there’s a broader reason why we understand the plight of the poor solely in terms of want and not also in terms of invisibility: we’re almost invisible ourselves. Society at large has given over its own megaphone to political and economic rulers. We don’t cultivate public spaces where we can speak and act and see and hear one another speak and act.

As a society, we put little value on what Arendt calls “the space of appearance.” The space of appearance, where we as equals appear to one another in words and deeds, doesn’t exist in every age, Arendt says. And without the space of appearance, we are “deprived of reality”:

. . . reality, which, humanly and politically speaking, is the same as appearance. To men the reality of the world is guaranteed by the presence of others, by its appearing to all; “for what appears to all, this we call Being” . . .¹¹

Without a space of appearance—without a public world not dominated by consumerism, racism, and rulers—we lose our sense of reality. We begin to wall ourselves off from those whose wisdom and life experience could give us broader perspectives.

We begin to experience, even before death, the great gulf separating the rich man and Lazarus, who begged outside the rich man’s gate in Jesus’s parable.¹² Because we don’t appear with the poor and experience what James C. Scott calls “the infrapolitics of subordinate groups,”¹³ we may do some insensitive things. Even when we may try to address the poor’s physical needs, we may end up taking pictures like tourists.

Of course, when we take deliberate steps to make the poor even more invisible, such as threatening to arrest them and deport them, we harm our own public life. When we start disappearing our neighbors, our public life has long since disappeared.

Photo by Efe Kekikciler on Unsplash

The short footnotes below refer to the full citations in the earlier manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.

1. Luke 6:20, Hart, New Testament, 118.

2. In his book Remember the Poor: Paul, Poverty, and the Greco-Roman World, Bruce W. Longenecker cites Aristides, Lucian of Samosata, and Tertullian on specific practices toward the poor in Jesus’s assemblies. Here’s Aristides, for instance: “. . . if they hear that one of them is imprisoned or oppressed by their opponents for the sake of their Christ’s name, all of them take care of all his needs. If possible they set him free. If anyone among them is poor or comes into want while they themselves have nothing to spare, they fast two or three days for him. In this way they can supply the poor man with the food he needs.” Bruce W. Longenecker, Remember the Poor: Paul, Poverty, and the Greco-Roman World (W.B. Eerdmans Pub, 2010), 61-62.

3. 1 Corinthians 11:20-22 NNAS.

4. 1 Corinthians16:1-4; 2 Corinthians 8:1-9:15; Romans 15:14-32.

5. James 2:5-6 REB.

6. Adams, Discourses on Davila, 34-35.

7. Arendt, On Revolution, 59.

8. Aristotle, Politics, 100-1 (Book 4, Lines 1292b21-1293a12).

9. Ecclesiastes 9:14-16, Jewish Study Bible, 1613-14.

10. bell hooks, Where We Stand: Class Matters (Routledge, 2000), 5.

11. Arendt, Human Condition, 198-99, quoting Aristotle.

12. Luke 16:19-31 KJV.

13. Scott, Domination and the Arts, 183-201.