“The Great Divorce”
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March 23, 2025 Dr. Roger Ray
When C. S. Lewis published his novel, The Great Divorce, 80 years ago, he chose the title for his imaginative tale about people who took a bus ride from Hell to Heaven, across the vast chasm, or “divorce” between the two, to see some old friends. I am stealing the title for my message today because I belief the real gulf between heaven and hell is the huge divide between the rich and the poor. Our acceptance of this state of affairs is, in my opinion, the greatest moral failing of the modern world.
I have just returned from spending two months with my significant other in Thailand. We are waiting for her visa application to be approved for her to join me in Florida, but the process takes a year or more, so I am trying to spend as much time with her as possible in her native country. The cost of living in Thailand is quite low and one might wonder why Hui and I don’t do what so many other American and Thai couples do, which is to live in a very nice gated community near the beach in Thailand.
And, it is tempting. I live on a very modest pastor’s pension and if I moved to Thailand, I could live in a much nicer and bigger house, drive a nicer car, avail myself of the services of household help, and enjoy virtually free healthcare, enjoying a standard of living far beyond what my income provides for me in Florida. In Thailand, we stayed in a very nice beach resort for about $40 a day where as that would cost ten times as much in Miami or Ft. Lauderdale.
I know that we could enjoy a much higher standard of living in Thailand, but have you ever wondered why the standard of living in places like Thailand, or Mexico, or Belize is so much lower? Making a car or a computer to clothing costs about the same all over the world if you just look at material costs. What makes some places have a low cost of living is because wages are so low and working conditions are cruel.
You can go to a Starbucks in Thailand, and it typically is larger and nicer than any Starbucks near me in Florida. The uniforms look the same. The menu is the same. But while the barista in the USA isn’t getting rich, the young man who does the same job in Thailand works 10 to 12 hours a day and is paid less than 400 BHAT, about $10. So, if living an opulent lifestyle on a retired pastor’s income comes at the price of a hundred Thai people living in crushing poverty then I’m not going to enjoy my cappuccino or my view of the beach.
Sure, you can get an hour massage in Thailand for $10, but should you? If you pay $70 or $100 for a massage in the USA, why wouldn’t you give the Thai woman the same amount for an arguably better massage? At the end of your massage, you are obligated to pay her $10 and you may even feel obligated to tip her another $5 but if you don’t give her $50 or $75 then you are making that decision. You are choosing to support an economic system that exploits the poor. If you saw where she lived, I don’t think you would give her $10 and thank her and walk away all relaxed and happy….. though many Americans, Germans, Russians, and Aussies do just that, but, if I am honest, I don’t like those people.
The Brazilian archbishop, Dom Hélder Câmara, is famous for having said, “When I feed the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor are hungry, they call me a communist.” It is true enough that governments and corporations love to see charities filling the gaps of the social safety net, but they never like it when charities start to demand that the society become more fair.
A moral pillar for Christians, Jews, and Muslims is charity. Giving to the poor is an inherent dimension of any sincere spirituality. Most of you will remember the Moral Majority’s attack on government social services in the 1980’s when Ronald Reagan was insisting that the government get out of the business of caring for the poor to allow churches to do what churches have always done, which, he assumed, was to dole out charity.
Of course, Ronald Reagan didn’t attend church, nor did he financially donate more than a pittance to charity but that is the conservative mindset. My money is my money but you tree-hugging do-gooders out there need some place to put your money so why don’t you form the social safety net to protect people who are being impoverished by the marketplace.
Who am I to correct Archbishop Camara, but I would restate his famous quote slightly differently because the real question is not so much, “why are the poor hungry.” They real question is why are there so many poor people? Poverty, in the presence of abundance, is inexcusable.
The only reason why we still have poor people in the world is because our economic system allows a tiny fraction of people to hoard the majority of the resources.
You have heard the saying that possession is 9/10 of the law but that should not come as a surprise to anyone who knows who writes the laws. There are lobbyists for the corporations that make military hardware, for pharmaceutical companies, for oil and gas companies, but there are no lobbyists for the minimum wage workers at McDonalds, or for the aids caring for our aging relatives in nursing homes.
In fact, no one less than the Harvard economist, John Kenneth Galbraith, said: "The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness." The obvious irony is that there is no moral justification for the levels of greed that exist in our society when there is no real reason for poverty except for the fact that the rich control the government and the police.
Ever since the ancient Phoenicians invented money, we have had a way of distributing wealth but the way that we have inherited in our day, and mind you, our economic system is always evolving … economics today is not what it was even 50 years ago… our present system is dramatically skewed towards giving more and more to the wealthy and less and less to those who produce wealth.
It has been broadly reported that: The three richest Americans have the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of the U.S. population. And 82% of the global wealth generated last year went to just 1% of the world's population.
There is no plausible defense for that kind of distribution of wealth. It is a moral crisis!
Taxation is a form of redistribution of wealth. The super wealthy could have their own water and power sources, in fact, until a century ago, they did. Taxes build roads, bridges, water systems, schools, and municipal services of police, fire departments, highway maintenance, and medical services.
But cutting taxes is always a popular political idea and it is sold to the poor as if that was going to somehow help them. The truth is, as in the original Trump major tax cut, the cuts put more money in the hands of the already rich and it took services away from the poor and middle class.
I was still full time with the church when Trump first cut taxes. My own income is on the lower side of middle-class incomes and the Trump tax cut resulted in a $1000 increase in my Federal Taxes and cuts to Affordable Healthcare subsidies added between $2000 and $3000 to my premiums. So, the much heralded middle class tax cut cost me $3000 or $4000 and if it hit me that hard then it must have hit most others in my income level about the same way.
People are seduced by the sound of promised tax cuts but, as much as we hate paying taxes, we must soberly remember that taxes fund the things that it takes for us to have a civilization.
You may remember when Obama got in trouble for saying in a campaign speech in 2012 that successful small business owners didn’t build their wealth all on their own. Many people were deeply offended by this but what Obama was talking about was and is 100% true. You can’t use your own money to open a coffee shop and run a successful business unless there is a social structure that makes it possible…. There have to be roads and sewers, electricity and clean water. You will need to hire employees who can read and write and you will need the protection of a police and fire department.
You may have a wildly successful coffee shop for which you deserve a lot of credit but, factually, you couldn’t have done it without the services provided by tax dollars. So, when you want to cut taxes, what are you going to cut? Most federal tax dollars go to the military, social security, Medicare, and the debt service on our federal debt. Most municipal taxes go to schools, street maintenance, utilities, police and fire services, and trash hauling. So what do you want less of? What do you want to cut?
I have always suggested that we cut our military spending by 80% but given the current wars in Ukraine and Gaza and the threat of war in Taiwan and Syria, even I couldn’t give full-throated support to be a big cut in military spending.
Schools are already dramatically underfunded, and a lot of our infrastructure is showing signs of horrible neglect. I wish you could have seen the airports that I have seen in the past week, starting in Bangkok, going to Doha, and then Miami. Based on the Miami airport, you would think that the USA is the third world country compared with the amazing and beautiful airports in much of the rest of the world. Ride a subway in Paris and then use the subway system in New York.
I’m telling you, Americans are not overtaxed and in many ways, it is evident that we are not taxed enough. We have invented an economic system in which it is possible for a person to become very wealthy, sometimes obscenely wealthy, while the services that make civilization possible are often so dramatically under funded that they are falling apart. This not only creates poverty but it undermines the support structure that makes it possible for capitalism to be successful.
The greatest American advocate for the poor in the 20th century had to be Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker movement. A reporter caught her in an unguarded moment when she expressed herself rather succinctly: Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system. What is somewhat ironic is that she said that in the 1950’s when, while she certainly wasn’t wrong, the system was not yet as filthy and rotten as it would become over the next half century.
When Dorothy Day described our economic system as being filthy and rotten, the tax structure was such that a single laborer could earn enough in a manufacturing job to buy a house and a car, support a spouse and children, and to retire with modest comfort. Little by little, however, the tax structure that created the middle class and made America the greatest nation in the world, has been eroded, shifting more and more of the wealth of our nation into the hands of fewer and fewer people and making it almost impossible for unskilled labor to make a decent living.
I have traveled a lot in very poor countries. I have personally witnessed what huge income and capital disparity does to nations like Nicaragua, Mexico, Belize, Jordan, Egypt, and Thailand. And I can see how the USA is headed in that direction. The irony here is that we have somehow persuaded the poor to vote for the tax policies that keep them poor.
It has now been more than 25 years since Thomas Frank published this excellent book, What’s the Matter with Kansas, describing in detail how states that were formerly quite progressive were, over a century, seduced into consistently voting against their own interests. It is almost amazing to see how stakes like Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Kentucky, and Tennessee, which are largely populated with lower income people, can be duped into voting the cut taxes on the wealthy and thereby, cut their own throats by having their necessary services taken from them.
In Oklahoma, the teachers went on strike only when the state, unwilling to pay them more, cut the school week down to 4 days, sacrificing their own children’s education to keep taxes lower.
I don’t want to throw shade on Oklahoma this morning, but I have had reason to be in Oklahoma quite a bit over the past few years and I don’t see any problems there that less education would help…. If you catch my drift.
But for some reason, the poor and the middle class just keep going along with totally absurd tax structures until things get to these absolutely desperate circumstances.
A few years ago the French economist, Thomas Piketty, published this book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. It was on the New York Times best seller list because it is a terribly important book but it set records for being one of the most often purchased and least often read because it is about a million pages long and impossibly dull to read.
I read enough to summarize it for you this way: First, you must understand that there is a huge difference between income and capital. Income is what we worry about the most in terms of a minimum wage or a living wage or even a guaranteed basic income, but Piketty wants us to think in terms of capital, what you own. The equity in your home, the value of your stocks, savings, and pension funds, or any land you may own, that is capital.
The second thing to know about Piketty’s book is that he says that way too few people own way too much of the capital in the world and if we don’t redistribute it we’ll never defeat poverty by just tinkering around with income. He also acknowledges that even though the future of civilization depends upon a redistribution of capital that probably no nation will actually do it. Rich people put up a lot of resistance to the idea of sharing their wealth.
As President John Kennedy said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable.”
What I want to leave you with today is the contrast between the ideal community we have all imagined where there is no poverty and where people share resources equally, and the reality we now live in where the ranks of the poor are growing rapidly because of a radical shift of capital into the hands of the already rich. I do, in large part, blame the rich and the powerful for creating and defending an economic system that creates so much suffering and poverty and hunger. But even more I blame the indifferent masses who have apathetically allowed it to happen.
As Dorothy Day said, we have accepted a filthy, rotten, system and we never should have. If you, like me, do not want to see a violent revolution take place either in our country or in other democracies, then we have to stop playing along with things like ending inheritance taxes that allow capital to keep flowing into the hands of a few super wealthy people. We have to stop quietly acquiescing to cutting healthcare, education, and pension benefits to the majority of the population.
And, folks, I would remind you that the crucial point of most of the Civil Rights movement had to do with voter registration and participation. The one thing we must do is vote, and, frankly, I believe that registering voters might be the one thing that progressive churches should get involved with in a very big way, along with making voting count more by fighting against Gerrymandering and voter suppression whether that comes in the form of fewer voting places or higher demands of photo IDs for voting.
We need to help people to get involved in voting and what we want to do every week, is to help to inform people of how they have been tricked in the past into voting against their own best interests. I am not ready to give up on democracy yet but if we are not going to give up on it, we really must figure out how to make it work for the good of all of the people.
