Faith and Money- One Immigrant’s Perspective
I am a 35-year old Pakistani American woman with a mundane job and a comfortable life. I attend a great church. Yet, I cannot say that I have ever thoughtfully or thoroughly considered faith and money, together. Though, I’ve put my money where my faith is many times, giving to causes and people that align with my values and religion, as I perceive them. I have also put a lot of stock in the power of money to ward off trouble and to provide for my needs and wants.
If I’m honest, sometimes there’s an undercurrent of selfishness in this seemingly altruistic behavior. My desire to ignore hardship and poverty comes masked as a compulsion to help in a hurry and at my convenience. I give out the spare change from my purse at traffic lights and drive on. I dutifully press the Click to Donate buttons for instances of hardship and tragedy.
Why do I want to look away from it all, to avert my gaze before I even fully take things in? There is just too much hardship! Poverty, well, it looks desperate and rough, the cardboard sign fraying, the shoes worn out. Poverty hustles hard. I hear that it games the system. It is defiant. It is disrespectful to this world order and its higher ups. It demands adequate food, clothing, shelter and dignity. So, I look away quickly. For if I linger, I risk realizing that these are all the things I need in life and want for myself. If I don’t keep it moving, maybe I will see myself in the person holding the cardboard sign. For surely, other things aside, isn’t the “bottom line” difference between an impoverished person and I, simply, their lack of money?
This degree of separation is scary. Like me, if you grew up barely middle-class, you may remember that scarcity was not a memory in your house. It had been the lived experience of your parents and grandparents, who aspired to make your world larger than theirs had been. If you are an immigrant to the United States from a “developing country,” like I am, the collective poverty of your home country is what you escaped. I have carried this generational, middle class, wealth-aspirational, fear of scarcity. It is as if, years ago, it got on a plane and migrated with me to this land of opportunity.
The fear lies at the root of my belief in the goodness of money - its inherent magic to secure food, clothing, and shelter. I am a driven immigrant working hard to acquire and consume the best of these. For if I’m well fed, look good, and have a nice place to lay my head - all the markers of a decent existence - I’m good, literally. Right? And there it is! From this point, it is not a big leap to accept the idea that money is a signifier of all that is good. Not only that, it is easy to slip into the fallacy that the converse is also true - those that are not good are the ones that do not have money (or enough of it); they are poor.
Who are these poor? The plotline that an individual works hard in the pursuit of happiness and is rewarded, with either money and/or its equivalent in fame or comfort, is very enticing. Even more alluring is the belief that, in our society, all of us have the freedom to thrive in this way. American exceptionalism markets these ideas as its defining traits. Yet, the lives (and deaths) of the native peoples of this land and the people stolen, brought and enslaved here, prove the opposite. Their trauma is the backdrop for the success of American capitalism. Their children's children are the face of American poverty today (no matter the fact that the majority of Americans who receive government assistance are white).
This country will never discourage me from looking down on people poorer than me. Capitalism and its accompanying myths of a free market and an even playing field have been far too profitable for the middle class and the rich. In turn, my own fear of scarcity has led me to believe that my worth lies in the ability to secure my needs and satisfy my wants. With a self-image defined in terms of money, I too, am complicit. I chose to place my faith in the idea that money confers dignity. This is another reason why I want to look away from it all. For if I look closely, my worldview will be brought face to face with my own privilege. If I linger, I will be truly humbled with the realization that dignity is inherent in our shared humanity. No amount of money will add a shred to my humanity and a person’s lack of money will not detract from theirs. We are all truly equal.
I can continue to place my faith in the power of money to provide for my needs and wants. It is a different choice altogether to believe in the culture of money and capitalism. The alternative is to place my faith in people, and to consider my own true worth, but not in terms of money or its equivalents. I am called to give of myself - mind, body and spirit - in creating a world that restores my humanity and yours.