Liz Theoharis of the Poor People's Campaign

Liz Theoharis is the co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign. She has a new book titled “Always With Us”, a reference to Jesus’ controversial quote: the poor you have with you always. Hear what she has to say about that quote, and what a life committed to eradicating poverty looks like.

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 the host George Mason, and I'm delighted to welcome to the program today the Reverend Dr. Liz Theoharis. Liz, it's so good to have you with us today.

Liz Theoharis:
It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.

George Mason:
Let me give our viewers and listeners a brief introduction to you. You are an ordained Presbyterian minister of Presbyterian Church USA, and you also teach at Union Theological Seminary, which is the school that you graduated from also, right?

Liz Theoharis:
That's right. I got my MDiv and my PhD from Union Theological Seminary in New York.

George Mason:
Terrific. And Liz is the Director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice at Union, and also the co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign, a national call for moral renewal with the Reverend Dr. William Barber. And so well-qualified to come to this conversation as, Liz, we have been all this month of talking about the matter of poverty and doing so from a faith perspective. So the program is called Good God, and both sides of that are important to us in these conversations. That is the good, the common good, and the spiritual aspect of it as well, and how do we bring those two things together.

George Mason:
So this has really been a work that you've been up to all along, right?, I mean, in terms of your own career. Even going to school at the University of Pennsylvania, you studied urban studies. This has been a passion for you. How do you connect your spiritual journey and this work that you ended up doing?

Liz Theoharis:
So I was raised in a family that was deeply dedicated to faith and works. I was going to protests at age three. I was a deacon in my church, ordained by the age of 16. I was teaching Sunday school and Beyond Racism Day Camp at 13, right? So this is kind of a long life of seeing that our calling the world is to do justice and love kindness. But that that is a faith call.

Liz Theoharis:
So I joined a movement of poor and homeless people when I went off to college at the University of Pennsylvania and found the Union of the Homeless and the Welfare Rights Union that I was a part of at the time to basically be my church and my community. I joined a movement to abolish poverty and racism at a very young age and I've never left.

Liz Theoharis:
I've come to see that my call to organize around poverty is actually a religious one. So that looks like everything from launching a Freedom Church of the Poor modeled after what Dr. King called for in the last years of his life, that connects to a long history of justice and freedom work, liberation work in the church. But it also connects to being out in the community meeting people's needs and advocating for just policies, much like our biblical texts remind us to do.

George Mason:
Well. You speak about the biblical texts, but I'm going to give you a softball here. And that is one of the key biblical texts that people use to maybe excuse their lack of commitment to eradicating poverty is Jesus' words, which echo words from the book of Deuteronomy. And that is that the poor you have with you always. I'm going to show your book as a matter of fact, which is titled Always With Us, what Jesus really said about the poor. And this is based on your dissertation also. So if someone were to come up to you and have enough boldness to say to you, "Okay, professor, how do you handle this one? Jesus said, 'We're always going to have the poor with us.'" What do you say?

Liz Theoharis:
There has not been a week in my life for the past 25 years where somebody doesn't have that [crosstalk 00:04:51]. Sometimes that's organizers and antipoverty activists. Sometimes that's self-proclaimed atheists and scientists. Sometimes that's the head of my ordination committee when I was trying to be ordained, who use that text, that line. They pull it out of context and they say that if God wanted to end poverty, he would do so. That the only time that we'll have a world without poverty will be when we die and there's pie in the sky. And even those who are compelled to do something in the face of poverty use this text to say that charity or social services are the only credible response and that those are about band-aids not about systemic change, right?

Liz Theoharis:
So I got actually so interested. The reason I basically did a PhD, wrote a dissertation and wrote a book on this topic is that I see it as a very significant biblical roadblock obstacle to actually ending poverty, which I think is actually the instruction, the commandment we get from God. And so I see it as an obstacle to doing the work of following my Lord and savior Jesus Christ. I also see it as a roadblock to a more healthy and fruitful society for everyone.

Liz Theoharis:
One of the things that we lift up in the Poor People's Campaign is that when you lift from the bottom, everybody rises. And so that actually poverty and inequality are costing our nation, costing our world more than it costs to resolve them. And so this biblical obstacle to ending poverty is a costly one, both in the human lives and sacrifice of millions of poor people, but also in terms of resources of a society to do something about it.

Liz Theoharis:
And so if you look at this passage, when Jesus says the poor will be with you all the ways, it's in the greater context of, for one, for Christian's Holy Week, right? He and his disciples have come to Jerusalem. They have this significant kind of procession that is critiquing the Roman Imperial procession. He goes to the temple, which is the center of not just religious, but also political and economic power in his day and in the day where he turns over the tables. What we say is that that was the first Moral Monday, right? It was a Monday and he enters into the temple and he stops all the buying and selling and the oppressing of the poor.

Liz Theoharis:
Then he has to run and hide, and he hides in Bethany. Bethany is in Hebrew house of the poor. He goes and is in the house of Simon, the leper, clearly someone that has been marginalized by a healthcare system that has chosen to ostracize sick people instead of healing a society that makes them sick. And so he's there amongst his disciples and a woman comes in and anoints him, pours muron which is a holy anointing oil on his head. When she anoints him, that's actually the only thing that has to happen for him to be made Christ, to be set apart as the Messiah.

Liz Theoharis:
So this is a very important text. And the disciples, they don't get it, or they're bothered by what she's done. They don't want to think that that Jesus is about to be handed over and crucified as a revolutionary, as someone who's a rabble rouser threatening the Roman empire. And so they say, "Why did you destroy this? Why did you break this jar and waste these resources. The jar could have been sold and the proceeds could have gone to the poor." Right?

Liz Theoharis:
And so then it says in our text that Jesus was aware of this, and he responds back to the disciples who are questioning him, "Why are you harassing this woman? She's done a mitzvah. She's done a good work." And then he quotes Deuteronomy 15. He says, "The poor you will have with you always, but you will not always have me." So again, we might not be aware that he's quoting Deuteronomy 15 when he says the poor will be with you always, but his disciples would have very much been. Right? These are the Hebrew scriptures. This is what people are very aware of, they're studying.

Liz Theoharis:
And this is also what Jesus in particular has been making sure his followers are aware of, is these jubilees, these justice, these Sabbath prescriptions, these antipoverty programs that are all across our Hebrew scriptures. But so Deuteronomy 15, a couple of lines earlier than the line that he quotes, it says "There will be no needy among you if you follow the commandments that God is giving to you today." And what are those commandments?

Liz Theoharis:
So Walter Brueggemann, a famous Old Testament scholar says that actually Deuteronomy 15 is the most radical economic practice in the Bible that's basically overlooked. And it's about Shemittah. It's about release. It's about Jubilee. It's about Sabbath prescriptions. It's about forgiving debts, releasing slaves, paying workers a living wage, and lending out money even though you might never get paid back again. And instruction to nations, not just to individuals. It says that when your nation basically organizes itself around the needs of the poor and those at the bottom, that then your nation will never have to borrow. It will be a flourishing place for everybody. Right?

Liz Theoharis:
And then the Deuteronomy 15 texts continues. And it says, and this is me paraphrasing, but more or less you aren't going to listen to this because you're a greedy people. And so when you don't listen to this, the poor will never cease to be in the land. And then it goes back and says, "So open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor." Right? So when you pull out this one line, again, it sounds like a fatalism. It sounds like an inevitability of poverty when you don't have it in the bigger context which is saying God has shown us what we're supposed to do. And any poverty that exists in our society means that we're being disobedient to the commandments of God, and we know what we should do.

Liz Theoharis:
So then this is Jesus reminding his followers like he does over and over again, I've told you already what we need to do. And what we need to do is release debts, pay workers a living wage, release slaves, structure the society around everybody, not just a wealthy few. And you know what? That won't just make the wealthy few happy, it'll make the whole society better. Then you have Jesus basically passing that charge off to his disciples, because he is very aware that he's a threat and that he's going to be killed, so that others have to continue the fight.

George Mason:
Okay, Liz. There's so all of that is a terrific look at the biblical text and the context of Jesus on ministry and that particular statement, both in Israel and in Jesus' time. What I hear you saying about all of that is that whether you're drawing upon the Hebrew scriptures, or you're drawing upon the early Christian Church, there is a kind of alternative economic system that the people of God are supposed to practice in some sense as a curative to the world of empire and the economic systems that exist otherwise outside of these religious communities. Right?

George Mason:
So here we are in the year 2020, and we live in the United States of America, and there is a dominant economic system called capitalism. Right? In this system, we have a tremendous increase of wealth generally that is inequitably distributed in terms of the broader population. So we have enormous poverty on the one hand, and we have enormous wealth on the other hand. But when people of faith hear what you're saying, it seems like in the conversations that happen publicly, there really is a limited imagination about how to address politically these economic challenges.

George Mason:
That is we either retain the current system that we have and increase our charitable impulses to address poverty, because that's the nature of things and this is how capitalism flourishes, and it increases the sense individuals and faith communities sense of responsibility for the poor to be charitable. Or we recreate our entire economic system along more Marxist lines and we become a more socialist, and some would say communist, sort of system, which the argument goes hasn't worked and is devoid of spiritual intent and is materialistically based and all those sorts of things. Right?

George Mason:
So I think what people would love to hear from you is how do we get past this sort of incredible binary we find ourselves in in terms of political rhetoric, where we have you're either for the dominant system of capitalism that continues to keep people poor, or you're for an alternative system that will impoverish more people or limit people's wealth creation in the name of a more just society for people at the bottom. So how do you answer people who see things in that binary way?

Liz Theoharis:
So those are not terms that we in the Kairos Center or, or the Poor People's Campaign use. I mean, I hear the conversation. I hear the debate. What I know is I follow the words of Rev. Dr. King, who launched a poor people's campaign in the last years of his life. And he said the poor and dispossessed live in a cruelly unjust society. They must organize against that injustice, not against the people, but against a system which has the means, which are at hand and have been called for, to lift the load of poverty. He says, "If poor people can take action together, they will do so with a freedom and a power that will be a new and unsettling force and our complacent national life."

Liz Theoharis:
I read that text every morning. Right? When I pair Dr. King's... He continues and he says so that's why then we're calling for thousands of poor people to come to DC to engage in non-violent civil disobedience, and why we're calling for an intergenerational non-violent army of the poor, a freedom church of the poor. Right? He continues to put out some kind of programmatic ideas there. But when I read that text and I read, whether it's the manna in Exodus or the Deuteronomic code, or woe to you who legislate evil, who deprive the poor of their rights, making women and homeless children their prey, in Isaiah. Or when I read, the Beatitudes and "blessed are those who are poor." Again, the Greek here says poor in breath or poor who are calling out "We can't breathe"-

George Mason:
There's a phrase.

Liz Theoharis:
... for there is the empire of God. Right? Because again, [foreign language 00:18:06], we've made it into kind of European royalty when it's really taking on the Roman empire system of domination, economic power, exploitation. Jesus's thing. Right. It continues that you can't serve God and mammon, if we just kind of keep it going. And then we get to Revelation, right, and you get the cargo list of the merchants of the earth are weeping because nobody's buying their stuff anymore. And what is their stuff? It's fine linens, and it's luxury items, and it's the bodies and souls of human beings. Right? And so just from Genesis to Revelation in the Bible, and in King and in other social justice prophets of the US throughout history, you have this arc of saying when you organize society around poor people, when poor people get together and propose solutions to their issue.

Liz Theoharis:
Not ideological systems. We're not talking about left and right here. When folks who are in pain propose the kinds of solutions to their pain, when you lift from the bottom. When you forgive debts that doesn't just help those with the debts. When you increase living wages that doesn't just help those with higher wages. Right? I mean we've done a bunch of work. It shows that for every dollar that we invest in early childhood programs, we save $7. If we were to immediately raise the minimum wage to living wages, that would bring $300 million into the economy immediately that would be distributed to make small businesses run.

Liz Theoharis:
This is what would be healthy for everybody. So the conversation that I'm in, and the response that I have, is let's look at the Bible and let's look at social justice leaders throughout history and the kind of empirical solutions and data coming out of poor people's struggles today. Let's do that. And so-

George Mason:
So two questions to follow. I understand what you're saying. Let's find solutions within the context in which we find ourselves that are innovative, and that might actually work because currently the solutions we have, like trickle-down economics for instance has never really trickled down. Right? So I think two things I want you to address.

George Mason:
Number one is you said asking poor people what their solutions are. I mean, I think that could easily slip by people, okay, but part of what you're up to is to actually say, "Could we actually consult the people who are in their own pain and not have solutions coming from outside?" The second thing is though, why would you want to consult people who are poor if you're blaming them for poverty? Right? So I want you to address the question of individual versus systemic poverty, the individual poor versus systemic poverty. So could you connect those two dots for us?

Liz Theoharis:
Yeah, no. I really appreciate this question because I think, again, when we think about people who are poor and why people are poor and who is poor, I think we so often actually have misconstrued what the real reality in this nation and in this world is. Right? There's 140 million people who are poor and low income, just according to the US Census Supplemental Poverty Measure. Right? That's close to half of the US population, and that was before COVID-19, and this economic crisis and this rise in homelessness and healthcare loss. Right?

Liz Theoharis:
So any society that has half of its people experiencing poverty or deprivation of some sort, it's not that half of this nation is too lazy. It's not that half of this nation is having too many kids. It's not that half of this nation is just seasonally unemployed and they're going to be able to pick things up. It shows that poverty is structured into the very society that we're living in, and that these policies over decades of trickle down, of basically forgiving taxes of the rich and thinking that that's going to basically lift the boats of everybody. It's not happening. It's not true. It's not an accurate understanding of the problem of poverty and who is poor. Right?

Liz Theoharis:
In raw numbers the majority of people in this country who are poor are white folks, are educated. Right? The average age of a homeless person in this country is a child, is nine-years-old. Right? And so we have all of these stereotypes. We have all of these conceptions about who is poor and what people did to get themselves to it. And they're not right.

Liz Theoharis:
Now, of course, there's examples in any economic bracket of people messing things up. I'm not saying that people, you know. But the reality is that poverty is a structural problem. So a structural problem requires a structural solution. Right? It's not going to be just job training programs. It's not going to just be emergency food programs that are going to actually be able to address a structural problem. So then that does bring us back to why it is that we're suggesting that we need a movement, and that that movement needs to be led, not only involved but led, by those who are most impacted. Right?

Liz Theoharis:
If we look at the nation's history, whether it's women's suffrage or whether it's abolition, whether it's civil rights, whether it's workers' rights, it's been when movements have developed and those movements have been led by those most impacted. Right? And again, have to involve everybody. I mean, for big transformation to happen, we need people from every geography, every racial, ethnic background, every income bracket, I mean every age. And, again, to kind of follow Frederick Douglass, he says, "Those in pain know when their pain is relieved. Those who would be free must strike the first blow."

Liz Theoharis:
And so what we have is examples out of poor communities of water affordability programs in Michigan that are a model that were come up with a solution by poor people, by people whose water, they had the highest water rates in the country. Folks were basically having their water shut off when the Nestle Corporation, one of the largest corporations in the world, was getting to bottle that same water for a hundred dollars a year. But a family that couldn't pay a $700, $800 a month water bill was not just having their water shut off, their home was being taken away. Their children were being seized. Right?

Liz Theoharis:
And so poor people, folks without water in Detroit organized and put forward a solution working with researchers. That's what I'm trying to talk about, is some of these solutions are out there. Those who are impacted by these problems are having to take life-saving, bold, visionary action. And again, if we look at history, this is how change has happened. It's when people are compelled to organize and build a nonviolent movement from the bottom up that then [crosstalk 00:26:39].

George Mason:
Let's just take some very simple examples of What structural changes would represent. So for instance, if the minimum wage had grown from 1968 to the present day simply indexed according to CPI, instead of being $7, and what is it now? Seven. Yeah. What would it be today, Liz?

Liz Theoharis:
It'd be more than $20 an hour.

George Mason:
Exactly. Okay. And we are fighting locally in Dallas to get up to $15 an hour for city employees, and we have all these cities who are trying to do, because we won't do it at the federal level because it's a job killer program if we increase the minimum wage. Now that's a systemic issue though. Right? So if instead of seven and a quarter, you're at $22, right, think about that. That's three times the current minimum wage. What would a hard-working 40-hour work week person be able to do with three times the current income? How would that buying power change? How would that change the economy? All those sorts of things. What would happen, of course, is that that businesses would be able to earn a little bit less so that their employees could earn more. But on the other hand, in the long run, those same businesses have customers now that can buy their products. Right?

Liz Theoharis:
No, that's right. Exactly. So, I mean, wages is a really important one, and therefore also union rights. Right? By raising the minimum wage, and by ensuring that people have the right to organize and have good working conditions, paid sick leave. Right? I mean, there's a whole host of things that surround wages, but even that alone can raise the standard of living. Again, not just for those low wage workers, who are not a small percentage, right, there's 64 million people in the United States who are working at less than a living wage. Right? That's a huge percentage of our workforce.

Liz Theoharis:
And so what happens, like you're saying, when folks can earn more money, then folks can both save a little bit of money so that then when emergencies, when storms, when fires, when public health crises come, then they're able to weather those storms. But also folks are able to buy goods and services and participate more in the economy. So wages are surely a really big one.

Liz Theoharis:
We also kind of put out that we need a fair taxation system. If those who could really afford it, less than the 1%, were to have a taxation rate that we've had in this country's history, right, that would bring an influx of resources where we wouldn't have to have in a pandemic education cuts, because none of these states are willing to tax the rich just a little bit more. Just a little bit, right? And so a fair taxation system where wealthy people could pay their fair share and not pay actually less than most poor people and more middle income people pay in taxes.

Liz Theoharis:
We also could shift the military budget. Right? Basically we spend more than 53 cents of every discretionary dollar in this country on the military. And that isn't paying our veterans. It's not paying our service workers. The majority of that money goes to military contractors. Right? Just one contract with Lockheed Martin for just one weapons system, just one. I mean, one of thousands of millions of contracts, right, that one alone, the money spent on it could expand Medicaid in 14 States. Right? So we have these bloated military budgets that do not make our nation safer. Right? If we cut our military budget in half, we would still a larger military budget than 150 countries combined. We'd still have a bigger military budget than Iran and China and Russia, and all of the folks that we talk about that we're worried about, all combined. Right? And yet we keep on sinking more and more money into the military. At 53 cents for the military, it's less than 15 cents for education, healthcare, living, wage jobs, and anti-poverty programs combined.

Liz Theoharis:
And a budget is a moral document. It shows what a nation values. And it's very clear that this nation, the richest country in human history, does not value children, does not value workers, does not value those that are doing the essential jobs to keep our society running, and does not value the overall health of our society. And so we could better and it doesn't have to be this way.

George Mason:
Well, Liz, I can't thank you enough for challenging us with your prophetic voice and your incredible experiences and learning. This has been just drinking from a fire hose as they say. Right? And I hope that it's been something that those of us who listen and watch this program will be motivated beyond this moment to become more involved. The Poor People's Campaign is one way to do that. Anything you would say to someone in closing about, "Okay, I want you to do something. How do I get started?"

Liz Theoharis:
So, we're trying to build a movement and that movement needs to be massive and mighty. The Poor People's Campaign, a national call for moral revival, is organized in 45 States, including Texas. We would love for folks, if you're not already involved, to join. You can do so by texting the word moral, M-O-R-A-L to the number 90975. You can go to poorpeoplescampaign.org and click on a map to see where people are doing actions and pulling together work in your locale.

Liz Theoharis:
There's also the Kairos Center, one of the anchor organizations of the Poor People's Campaign that I direct, and Repairers of the Breach, the one that Reverend Barber is the president of. We're also doing work. The Kairos Center is putting on a policy conference. We have a weekly Freedom Church of the Poor worship service that folks can join online. There's lots of ways to get involved. So you can go to kairoscenter.org, or you can go to poorpeoplescampaign.org.

Liz Theoharis:
These are times when we need to be involved. We need to be connected to other people that care about justice and care about God. And so please join us.

George Mason:
And I'll tag on to that, that you can also go to our website at faithcommons.org and Rabbi Nancy Kasten and Imam Omar Suleiman and I are working here in the Dallas area, especially with other advocates. We would love to connect you to other things happening here. So Liz, on behalf of Good God, thank you so much for being with us. Thank you for all the work that you're doing, and may God bless you in it.

Liz Theoharis:
Thank you so much. God bless.

George Mason:
Okay. Take care.

Speaker 3:
Thank you for tuning into Good God. We're grateful to provide this for you during this time of COVID-19 isolation, and we hope that it is a consolation to you during this time. There have to be lots of ways that we reach each other, and 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.

Speaker 4:
Good God is created by Dr. George Mason produced and directed by Jim White. Social media coordination by Cameron Vickrey. Good God, conversations with George Mason, is the podcast devoted to bringing you ideas about God, and faith, and the common good. All material copyright 2020 by Faith Commons.