Jason Coker on rural poverty in America

Jason Coker is the national director of a program called Together We Hope, which is a rural development coalition that addresses poverty, especially in rural areas. He discusses (you guessed it) poverty in rural America: the history, the cause and how at the end of the day, it is political.

Listen here, read the transcript below, or click here for the full video version.

George Mason:
Welcome to Good God, conversations that matter about faith and public life. I'm your host, George Mason. This is Good God, where we are focusing on the question of poverty during this series.

George Mason:
Today, my guest is Jason Coker, Dr. Jason Coker, Reverend Dr. Jason Coker, who has both been a pastor and an organizational leader. He is now the national director of a program called Together We Hope, which is a rural development coalition that addresses poverty, especially in rural areas. Jason, welcome to the program. Thank you for being on here.

Jason Coker:
Thanks so much, George. It's a pleasure to be with you. I know you have a lot of folks that listen in to you, so it really is an honor to be here, and to raise the voice of rural poverty in America. Together for Hope, we fight that every day, all day long. So thank you.

George Mason:
Well now, just as full disclosure, Jason and I go back a ways. We have worked together. For one year, he was on the staff of the church I pastor here in Dallas, Wilshire Baptist, as our missions minister. He went to become a pastor in Connecticut for a season of his life, where he also worked on his PhD at Yale University or Yale Divinity School. Which?

Jason Coker:
Well, I did my master's at Yale Div School, and then did a PhD at Drew University.

George Mason:
Thank you. I got those reversed. There you go. Okay, great. Interestingly enough, your work in the New Testament Book of James was on poverty, wasn't it, and how the faith community addresses that?

Jason Coker:
Yeah, the first book I wrote was James in Postcolonial Perspective: The Letter As Nativist Discourse. It really talked about how James and the whole letter faced down the Roman Empire in some pretty profound ways, specifically around economics and land ownership.

Jason Coker:
If you look at James chapter five, one through six, that certainly deals with land ownership. James chapter two, one through 13, deals with people in fine clothing and gold rings coming into your sanctuary, and how there was this indictment against showing partiality to the wealthy and then over against the poor. So there's a lifting up of the poor in James, for sure.

George Mason:
Now, Jason, to hear you read the Bible like that would open you to the criticism from the right that you're really a Marxist after all, aren't you? You're doing a socioeconomic reading of the Bible. I actually had someone, who is a newspaper columnist here in Dallas, say that preachers today are going to be called before the throne of judgment because they're reading the Bible in just that way.

Jason Coker:
Well, I invite those critics to actually read the Bible, and actually read the Communist Manifesto. It's worth a read. It's actually a pretty short document. I'll never forget the first time I read the manifesto. I had to reread it again, because I was waiting to read the part with the devil with horns. It's actually ... There's some good things there that's important to consider.

George Mason:
It's a utopian vision, isn't it, really?

Jason Coker:
That's absolutely [crosstalk 00:04:00]

George Mason:
Nature gets in the way of these things, but ...

Jason Coker:
Look. A good utopia's hard to find. Let's face it.

George Mason:
That's right. Exactly. All right. But let's get down in the weeds a little bit about this matter of poverty, because we are currently involved in an enormous expansion of wealth in this country, in our own country, and yet an enormous contraction of wealth at the very same time. We're moving in two different directions, aren't we?

Jason Coker:
Yeah.

George Mason:
What's your take on the state of our adequacy in terms of what people have and what they need in America today?

Jason Coker:
Two things come to my mind immediately. One is] the economic inequality in the United States of America right now is greater than it ever has been in the history of this country. That is very hard to comprehend. But during the robber baron periods, the Vanderbilts, the Carnegies, the Rockefellers, economic inequality was less than what it is today.

George Mason:
Wow.

Jason Coker:
We live in unprecedented moment of economic inequality. That economic inequality is weighted towards the wealthiest people in this country. The threshold for a family of four ... To be in the top 10% of income earners, a family of four would need to make $114,000 a year. That means 90% of the United States of America lives on less than $114,000 a year for family of four.

Jason Coker:
Now, if you're making $114,000 a year, and you have a family of four, and you're living anywhere close to a city, you know that you're not saving a lot of money. You probably have credit card debt. You certainly have student loan debt. You're living paycheck to paycheck.

Jason Coker:
All that to say that 90% of this country lives on less than that. That's the kind of country we live in right now. It's very hard economically to survive in the United States of America, much less thrive. So economic inequality comes to mind.

Jason Coker:
The other one is the movement away from the narrative of poverty from an individualist perspective to a systemic perspective. When you look at poverty from a systemic perspective, you automatically have to pay attention to policy.

Jason Coker:
Poverty in America is not an individual problem. Poverty in America is a policy problem. Since 1980, we've been walking away from the New Deal and dismantling tax structures that supported the social safety net for 40 years, most of my life. Right now, we do not care for the poor in this country. We actually blame them for being poor. Policies like NAFTA may have been good for business, but they were terrible for American laborers. When China entered into the ... Oh my goodness, what's the ...

George Mason:
World Trade Organization?

Jason Coker:
World Trade Organization, WTO, that was a huge issue in rural America. Our farmers, and not just the farmers, the land owners, but the laborers who worked for them, all of a sudden had to compete against China and things of that nature, on a global level. So even in rural space, there was a loss of jobs, and those jobs became devalued from a labor perspective through national policy.

Jason Coker:
So policy creates the massive poverty that we have. We do not live in a country that full of lazy people. We are still one of the most hardworking countries in the world. Our people just don't have the jobs, because those jobs aren't in America anymore. That's a real thing.

George Mason:
Now, let's stop there for a moment and consider the irony that the very people you're talking about, who are in more rural settings, and who are hardworking people, and who have been most deeply affected negatively by globalization and by policy, are yet people who have conservative values, and politically are voting against their own interests. Do you have a sense of why that is?

Jason Coker:
I think there is, to a certain degree, there are ... Rural spaces are more conservative in general. In Together for Hope, we look at those 301 counties of persistent, rural poverty in America. Persistent, rural poverty means it's a rural county. It has 20% or more of that population living below the federal poverty line for the last 30 years.

George Mason:
Wow.

Jason Coker:
There's 301 of those counties. Now those counties, if you look at a map, cluster into what we call five ethnogeographies of persistent, rural poverty. You have Appalachia. You have the Mississippi River Delta. You have the Black Belt, which goes from Alabama to Southern Virginia. You have the Rio Grande Valley, which is the Texas Mexico border. Then you have native lands, which are mostly Native Americans. Persistent, rural poverty in America is white, it's black, it's brown and it's native.

Jason Coker:
Those regions suffer from economic deprivation not because people are lazy, but if you look at those areas, you talk about the movement away from coal, that's a collapse of an entire industry. You have the mechanization of labor in the Delta, Black Belt and Rio Grande Valley. That is a devaluation of human labor, a movement away from human labor.

Jason Coker:
So most of the regions or policy, with NAFTA and the manufacturing jobs moving offshore and out of country, in every one of those regions, you've had industry that has abandoned labor. That is exactly the cause of the kind of unemployment that exists there. It's called rural overpopulation. Doesn't mean there's too many people that live there. It just means that the people who do live there, there aren't enough jobs for them. They're literally abandoned by industry and are stuck.

George Mason:
What's the answer to that, because we pride ourselves on having a free market, an approach that basically says, "If a company can't make money here, they can take their business elsewhere, if they need cheaper labor or whatever." Then there's a kind of breaking of the sort of covenant of community that existed at one time between, say, that factory or that farm and that particular community in a rural place, or that mine, say.

George Mason:
Now, in a more managed economy, which in its more extreme form would be, say, China, there is a deliberate attempt to manipulate how the marketplace operates, and take care of what happens when you're going to shift priorities in the market.

George Mason:
But in our culture, government is not supposed to do that directly. That's left to the private sector to do. Any time government starts to get into that, we are concerned about, again, a more socialist incursion into our model. How do we live between those two models in a way that's constructive and that addresses this persistent problem of poverty?

Jason Coker:
Well, I think history is a great example of that. If you look at the economy of the United States after the Great Depression, and the movement, the work of the New Deal with FDR, you had the breaking up of monopolies, the move to the heavy taxation on the wealthiest people in this country. It basically took money from the top and invested it in the people of this country. It immediately rose the bottom. The people who were at the very bottom began to move into a middle-class. That period between the beginning of the New Deal in 1978 and 1980 was some of the greatest economic production this country's ever had.

George Mason:
Right.

Jason Coker:
I really do think it's the nostalgia of that period that is the power behind Make America Great Again. There really was less economic inequality there, in spite of the fact that it was much more systemic ... Well, I don't say more systemic racism, but the racism was more blatant. It was during Jim Crow era. Yet the economy functioned better even within minority communities. You look at post Jim Crow, and the dismantling of black businesses and black HBCUs, black institutions in general have suffered since the dismantling of Jim Crow because of racism.

Jason Coker:
But all that to be said, during the time of our greatest social safety net, this country had the greatest amount of economic production it's ever had. When we started dismantling that, and rolling back New Deal tax cuts to the wealthiest, we began to literally pull America to the extremes, from the high poverty, high wealth. Now we live in that space of economic inequality.

Jason Coker:
We're being challenged now by a China and a Russia that is hyper capitalist, and is forcing ... And we feel that pressure to even be more deregulated and free market driven, but we don't factor into real costs to things. That, ecologically, it's destroying the world.

Jason Coker:
So we do need more regulations to make sure we don't have unfettered capitalism. Even a Harvard business professor, there's a new book out, it's sitting right over there, Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire. She talks about how to calculate real costs and things of that nature. When you have free market, tends to manipulate prices too to the benefit of those who are wealthy.

Jason Coker:
It's certainly complex, but like I said, poverty is an issue of policy, and it will take policy to change it. George, we have only passed one federal policy since 1980 whose purpose was to help the most vulnerable in the society. It was the Affordable Care Act. Look at what we've done ...

George Mason:
Obamacare.

Jason Coker:
Yeah, [crosstalk 00:15:57] Look at what we've tried to do to that since it's become the law of the land.

George Mason:
Okay. Jason, for those who are listening to what you're saying and who would say, "That's fine if you want to work on that in a nonprofit and all of that, but you're getting out of your lane if you're talking about what religious communities ought to be doing. The church, the synagogue, the mosque, the religious community should pay attention to the spiritual lives of people, and not get into economic policy and politics and policy and all these sorts of things, because now we can't be experts in that. We have to leave that to economists. We have to leave that to business people, because that's their sphere of expertise."

George Mason:
What do you say to those who would make critique of religious communities, and people like you and me, we get this all the time [crosstalk 00:17:01]? But I think articulating why we're talking about this, and why we think we might have something to offer, is worth part of the conversation here.

Jason Coker:
I would argue up and down that, yes, this is political. If people of ethics, people with morals, don't speak into the political, what should we expect from the political? It demands that. It is a moral issue.

Jason Coker:
There is a little book in the New Testament called James. In that book, and I'll go back to it, because I've spent almost 20 years of my life on those five chapters, there's a section that says, "What good is your faith if you say to somebody who's hungry and naked, 'Be clothed and well fed. Go in peace.'"

Jason Coker:
That is faith without works. According to that little book of the Bible, that is dead. It's not just dead because it's a dead faith, it's dead because it leads that person who is hungry and naked to their death.

George Mason:
Well, let's go back to the Hebrew scriptures as well, because ... Israel was born, as a people, out of slavery in Egypt. They were brought out of an economic situation where they were being oppressed economically. They were not personally profiting. They were profiting only their owners, so to speak.

George Mason:
Then when they leave Egypt, they are given bread, and manna in the wilderness, and quail to eat, and water from the rock as a sign of God's provision for them. But they are also instructed that they are supposed to take care of one another, that they are not supposed to abuse laborers, that they're supposed to pay for their work. They are to create a model of a civilization of a people that would teach others not to be like Egypt. "Don't abuse your workers, but treat them fairly."

George Mason:
All through the book of Proverbs, the wisdom literature, and even in the Psalms, there is this commitment to righteousness and justice and to fairness for laborers and those sorts of things. This is not something we are making up because we want to be critical of one party, or somehow call our own country into question as if we're being unpatriotic. This is really a deeply spiritual matter, isn't it?

Jason Coker:
It absolutely is. Look. Since 1980, we've had a couple of Democratic presidents. In spite of that, Democrat, Republican, whatnot, there's only been one federal policy for the most vulnerable. All the other federal policies that have been passed have benefited the wealthiest people in this country. That is a fact. So it's a bipartisan attempt to make the wealthiest the wealthiest.

George Mason:
But it is also true that capitalism creates wealth in a way that no other system has ever accomplished. In that sense, Bill Gates will repeatedly say that we have virtually stamped out abject poverty worldwide in our generation, which is an extraordinary achievement.

Jason Coker:
It's true.

George Mason:
But it is not only capitalism that has done that. It is also humanitarianism. It is also the efforts of people of faith. So now I want to take you even more so into this role of religious communities, faith communities, because there are a lot of people who would say, "Taking care of the poor is really the work of the church. We get tax deductions for contributions to our religious communities, churches, synagogues, mosques, religious non-profits. They're the ones that should be doing this work, not the government."

George Mason:
Because the government has a kind of coercive tax system that forces you to pay for something, but this is voluntary. When it's voluntary, you have a tendency to be able to motivate people in a way that you can't necessarily if it's just coming from the government.

George Mason:
But the scale of this challenge is the thing that I think people do not realize fully. There's a role for the faith community, but there's a role for government too. Can you talk about how the faith community can become a best practice modeling that then can be scaled on a larger basis?

Jason Coker:
You have the social contract, which is the people of the country or the labor, business and the government. There's a balance in the social contract where the government has a responsibility to business and to people; labor has a responsibility to business and government; business has a responsibility to government and people. When any of that gets out of whack, it doesn't work right.

George Mason:
Right.

Jason Coker:
We're talking about how to manage that social contract almost in a utilitarian sense, for the greatest amount of good for the greatest amount of people. That's the first thing that comes to mind, George, about how to structure that.

Jason Coker:
But the faith community as a model, I would say that every religion that I know of has deep moral convictions about how you care for the most vulnerable. You talked about the Hebrew Bible. The Jewish community has deep convictions, scriptural convictions about how to care for the orphan and the widow. Our own Christian tradition has the same. Islam, one of the five pillars of Islam is alms giving. Strict Buddhists don't eat meat because they don't want to harm another living being.

Jason Coker:
So there is deep moral conviction and religious conviction around how we treat each other in this world, and it comes from the way we understand God. So I do think there's something deeply important about being human, and understanding your role and responsibility towards another human being, and on an individual basis, but also on a systemic basis.

Jason Coker:
You belong to a larger group. You have responsibilities to that larger group. That larger group has responsibilities to you. We play that out in religious communities every weekend, for sure. If we're really good, we play that out every day. If you extend that to the larger community, beyond the doors of your religious entity, then you really do care for everybody. Then you ask the question, "What's best for all of us and for the world in which we live?" That is not a bad way to begin a form of governing, rules of the community of how we interact with each other.

George Mason:
You mentioned the way churches say operate, religious communities as well. In all of our faith traditions, we try not to favor the rich over the poor. In fact, that's part of the argument that we have all the time organizationally. Is the chair of the finance committee the biggest giver? Are you just letting the deacon chair or the president of the congregation be wealthy? Are they dictated ... Or are we actually treating one another as equals, regardless of our economic status or our educational status? Those sorts of things is something we strive, in our religious communities, to do.

George Mason:
Then what's ironic to me is how often the minute we leave the doors of the faith buildings, we argue privileges. We argue that we live in a Darwinian society essentially, and that it's winner take all, and that we have no responsibility to include our neighbor in the safety net, or on ladders of opportunity. We want to keep our taxes low so that we profit and somebody else doesn't get a handout. It's like we're bifurcated in our ...

Jason Coker:
Yeah. Part of that, George, comes to ... Raj Chetty is an economist out of Stanford University, did his education at Harvard, smart guy, right? Raj came up with, he leveraged some big data going way back to kids growing up, and then followed them into adulthood, looking at their tax returns and things of that nature.

George Mason:
Interesting.

Jason Coker:
It's this longitudinal study. Basically, out of that came up like five indicators for poverty in America. The number one indicator was segregation.

George Mason:
Wow.

Jason Coker:
Somebody in Dallas, Texas, or in Jackson, Mississippi, when we hear segregation, we automatically think of race.

George Mason:
Yes.

Jason Coker:
Well, that's not the kind of segregation Chetty's work talks about. It's economic segregation.

George Mason:
Wow.

Jason Coker:
The greatest segregation in this country is based on the fact that rich people live in rich neighborhoods, poor people live in poor neighborhoods, and middle-class people live in middle-class neighborhoods. Rich people never actually go into another neighborhood besides rich people's. The lower, the people who live in poor or middle-class neighborhoods end up getting into those neighborhoods sometimes, but it's usually as laborers.

Jason Coker:
So the wealthiest people in this country are truly isolated from the majority of this country. They do not know how bad it is in America. The people who do are living towards the bottom. That is a radical issue that we're facing in the United States.

Jason Coker:
As policy continues to create a country of haves and have nots, the only thing right now that's separating the United States of America from a country that would be considered a third world country is infrastructure. The economics is already there. It's the infrastructure that's left, and it's crumbling. When our infrastructure crumbles, and it's in the process of crumbling right now, there's no difference between the United States of America and a developing country in the world.

George Mason:
When you talk infrastructure, you're not just talking about roads and railroads and things of that nature. You're talking about public schools. You're talking about health, access to health care. You're talking about all the kinds of things, access to healthy foods and things like that, right?

Jason Coker:
Absolutely. Access to food and healthy food is one of the biggest issues in rural space. A lot of our places live in food deserts, where they have to go 10 to 15 miles to get a fresh leaf of anything. In a city, I think it's three miles because of public transportation.

Jason Coker:
There's banking deserts where places don't have access to capital. Then the capital that they do have the access to is payday lending and predatory lending. So there's banking deserts. This is a real problem in the United States. Again, we don't see it because we are so segregated based on our neighborhoods and economics.

George Mason:
Well, I know you grew up in the Delta of Mississippi, and our church takes mission trips and has a relationship with the people there in Shaw, Mississippi, and in your home region there.

George Mason:
In the very few minutes we have left, Jason, can you give us some hope? You work for Together for Hope. What are the signs of hope you see, and the directions of hope that grow out of these kind of projects?

Jason Coker:
I'll say this. My grandmother was an illiterate sharecropper. When she was 12, 13 years old, her dad said he would give her a quarter if she could pick 300 pounds of cotton in a day. That's about what a full grown man could pick. It's a quarter acre of land. She picked it. He said, "Here's your quarter. Now that you know you can do it, go do it every day." That's how ...

Jason Coker:
She never went to school. She was born and raised in cotton fields. She died poor. That was the hardest working woman I've ever met in my life. My whole family worked like that, and we were always poor. We could never get ahead. So the idea that you can work and make it, that is a myth. That really doesn't exist in this country like it once did.

Jason Coker:
I don't want to leave with like give us some hope, with that story. But I do want to say, in that same vein, when I go across America and rural space, we focus on asset-based community development. We go into towns and say, "What do you have?" It reorients the town, and they always leave going, "We have more than we thought we did." Then we say, "All right. Now, you're the reframing ambassadors for your town. Whenever somebody talks bad about your town, say, 'Hey, but we have XYZ.'"

Jason Coker:
That is a powerful thing, because no matter how bad it is, or how economically poor, or how much of a poverty of hope or a poverty of trust or a poverty of love exists, as long as you have people, you have assets. People are the greatest assets of these small towns.

George Mason:
There we go.

Jason Coker:
I think, as from a religious standpoint, it's because you have all these images of God walking around caring for each other, loving each other, in the midst of the pain and suffering. There is always hope. There's always assets if you have people.

George Mason:
Well, there couldn't be a better place to put a period on this conversation, and maybe even an exclamation point. Jason, you have really brought together the good and the God for this Good God conversation. Thank you for the hope you've given us, for the good analysis, and for lots to chew on as we think about how we're part of the solution, not just part of the problem. Jason Coker, thanks for being with us.

Jason Coker:
Thanks, George.

George Mason:
Okay.

George Mason:
Thank you for tuning into Good God. We're grateful to provide this for you during this time of COVID-19 isolation. We hope that it is a consolation to you during this time.

George Mason:
There have to be lots of ways that we reach each other. Even though we can't be in a studio, as we normally are producing these, we're finding the technology, using Zoom and communicating it to you through this programming, we hope that you'll find it to be encouraging to you as we make our way through these difficult days.