When Ezra Taft Benson declared, “The Lord works from the inside out. The world works from the outside in. The world would take people out of slums. Christ takes the slums out of people,” he offered a sharp and memorable contrast. It is rhetorically powerful. It is also theologically incomplete—and pastorally dangerous when absolutized.
The problem is not the claim that Christ changes hearts. Christianity has always proclaimed inner transformation. The problem is the artificial polarity: inside versus outside, soul versus structure, character versus condition. When framed this way, the statement subtly implies that environmental reform is worldly while spiritual reform is divine; that poverty is primarily an interior deficit, and that once the heart is corrected, the rest follows.
That is not the portrait of Jesus found in the Gospels.
Jesus Does Not Moralize Poverty
In the Beatitudes, recorded in Luke 6 and Matthew 5, Jesus blesses the poor and the meek. Luke’s version is especially stark: “Blessed are you who are poor… Woe unto you who are rich.”
There is no hint that poverty is evidence of inner corruption. Quite the contrary. Jesus calls the poor “blessed.” This would have struck a dissonant chord with his audience. It is a radical claim that strips poverty of its status as evidence of spiritual decay. The Beatitudes are, in this sense, a radical act of redemption, proposing value to lives generally considered worthless. There is no suggestion that the poor must first fix themselves before relief comes. Instead, Jesus announces divine solidarity with those at the bottom of the hierarchy.
If anything, he consistently warns the wealthy of spiritual peril. The camel and the needle. The rich man and Lazarus. The rich young ruler. Wealth is treated not as a reward for righteousness but as a spiritual hazard.
If Benson’s formulation were true in the way it is often applied—that slums are primarily inside people—then Jesus’ repeated warnings toward the wealthy make little sense. He would instead diagnose poverty as a failure of interior discipline. He does not.
The Sheep and the Goats Collapses the Divide
In Matthew 25, Jesus describes the final judgment in terms that undermine the inside/outside dichotomy entirely: “I was hungry—you fed me. I was naked—you clothed me. I was imprisoned—you visited me.”
There is no prerequisite moral reform demanded of the hungry. No probationary spiritual improvement required of the naked. The burden falls on those with resources.
If “Christ changes men, who then change their environment,” the parable reverses the order: the environment of the vulnerable must be changed now by those who claim to follow Christ.
Spiritual authenticity is measured by material response.
The Early Church Did Not Wait for Inner Slums to Clear
In Acts 2 and 4, believers hold possessions in common so that “there was not any among them that lacked.” They did not preach grit to the poor. They redistributed goods.
Transformation and redistribution were not sequential. They were simultaneous.
If Christ removes “inner slums,” one visible fruit in the New Testament is economic generosity—not simply individual upward mobility.
The Western Myth Beneath the Theology
Benson’s framing resonates deeply with Western individualism. It harmonizes with a cultural narrative that celebrates self-making, meritocracy, and “personal genius.” In that philosophy, success reflects virtue, poverty reflects deficiency, structural forces are minimized, and responsibility is individualized.
When baptized in religious language, this becomes a spiritually fortified meritocracy. It produces a Jesus who rewards accumulation as evidence of righteousness and interprets prosperity as divine endorsement.
But that Jesus is far more at home in the logic of capitalism than in the proclamations of Nazareth.
The Jesus of the Gospels does not praise accumulation. He praises almsgiving. He instructs a rich ruler to sell what he has. He tells parables about barns built too large. He identifies himself not with investors but with the least of these.
To subtly reinterpret poverty as an “inner slum” aligns more closely with Enlightenment self-reliance than with prophetic solidarity.
The Psychological and Structural Reality
There is another flaw in the oversimplification: it ignores how environments shape agency.
Chronic scarcity narrows cognitive bandwidth. Trauma constricts possibility. Instability exhausts executive function. These are not moral failures; they are neurological realities.
Helping someone change their conditions is not worldly manipulation. It is often the very mercy that makes sustained inner change possible.
Jesus feeds crowds before preaching sermons. He heals bodies before delivering commands. He restores dignity before requiring discipleship.
Outside-in and inside-out are not opposites in the ministry of Christ. They are intertwined.
The Asymmetry of Burden
The most troubling pastoral consequence of Benson’s formulation is how it lands unevenly.
When the poor are told that Christ removes inner slums so they can rise, the burden rests on them to prove faith through discipline, sacrifice, and often tithing. When the wealthy hear the same message, it can quietly reassure them that their prosperity reflects interior righteousness.
The prophetic tradition does the opposite.
Isaiah condemns those who “add house to house.” Amos thunders against those who “trample the poor.” Micah demands justice, not increased offerings.
The moral weight in Scripture tilts upward.
The Polar Contradiction
Benson’s quote creates a polarity that Jesus collapses. It contrasts soul and structure; Jesus addresses both. It implies poverty begins inside; Jesus speaks of unjust systems. It suggests environment is secondary; Jesus commands material intervention. It risks praising accumulation; Jesus repeatedly warns against it.
The statement may have intended to elevate spiritual rebirth. But when absolutized, it drifts toward blaming the vulnerable and excusing the comfortable.
A More Faithful Framing
A Christ-centered vision would sound different:
Christ transforms hearts. Transformed hearts disrupt injustice. Disrupted injustice alters environments. Altered environments allow more hearts to flourish.
The movement is communal, not individualistic. It is reciprocal, not hierarchical. It resists both fatalism and moralized poverty.
The danger is not in affirming inner change. The danger is in using inner change as a theological shield against confronting structural inequity—or as a subtle rationalization for accumulation.
If we are to be faithful to the Jesus of Matthew 5 and 25, to Luke 6 and 19, then any theology of transformation must expand outward into tangible solidarity.
Otherwise, we risk preaching a Christ who removes slums from people while leaving people in slums—and calling that victory.
Wheat & Tares 
Wonderful thoughts. I’ve thought more recently that capitalism is the secular theology of Christianity in the US.
I am apreciative of the ideas in this post. I try to do things that align with this post’s ideas in my own sometimes limited ways. I hope that others are trying to do the same.
It’s ALWAYS easy….and so very, very tempting to simply resort to “spending other people’s money”; all under the guise of being virtuous and holy. I don’t really care what any individual does – so Todd S. please proceed to sell all that you have and give to the poor. But, please don’t attempt to demand or guilt others into doing the same.
Grizzerbear — agreed. It is always easy to spend other people’s money, and I’m not suggesting that every problem can be solved by simply throwing more money at it. My point was much narrower: I was addressing President Benson’s association of “slums” with spiritual deficiency and the implication that prosperity is necessarily the result of righteousness.
That framing seems to place the cause of poverty almost entirely within the individual and suggests that meaningful change always happens from the bottom up. I think that overlooks the ways systemic conditions can also inhibit personal progress and change.
As for “selling all that I have and giving to the poor,” you may have to take that one up with Jesus. Those aren’t my words, and I’m not arguing that wealth is inherently unrighteous or that anyone should be guilted into giving away their possessions.
I simply think there is a more complex conversation worth having about what President Benson’s statement implies about poverty, prosperity, righteousness, and the conditions people are sometimes born into. My point isn’t that we can solve every problem by spending money, but neither do I think we should assume that poverty—or “slums”—can be adequately explained as a failure of individual spirituality.
“Christ transforms hearts. Transformed hearts disrupt injustice. Disrupted injustice alters environments. Altered environments allow more hearts to flourish.
The movement is communal, not individualistic. It is reciprocal, not hierarchical. It resists both fatalism and moralized poverty.”
This is beautiful. And goes against everything Christian Nationalism stands for. Case in point: comment #3.
I have no objection to the first part of President Benson’s statement: “Christ takes the slums out of the people.” If by that he means that Christ can heal, transform, and elevate the inner life of a person regardless of their circumstances, I think that is both meaningful and true.
My concern is with what follows: “and then the people take themselves out of the slums.” At that point, the statement moves from a metaphor about the internal transformation of the individual to a claim about literal living conditions. The responsibility for escaping those conditions is placed primarily on the person, and prosperity begins to look like the natural evidence of having overcome one’s internal deficiencies. That is a dangerous and dismissive claim.
Problem today is nobody understands who the poor are: “…the poor, ye who have not and yet have sufficient, that ye remain from day to day…” Mosiah 4:24. So basically, if we’re working and getting by, we are the poor. And we can help others who are that kind of poor, and we can help others like us.
We do kind of understand who those that are rich: “…rich, (those) having abundance of all things whatsoever they stood in need-an abundance of flocks,…herds…grain…gold…silver…precious things…” Alma 1:29
Bottom line, so much of our focus is how we look and what we have instead of looking outward to see what we can do individually to make our world a little better.
President Benson’s thoughts may show his American background. Yes, the American Dream has worked for many people, and the possibility of real upward mobility for the masses based on hard work and a little luck (but not on the gospel?) has seemed to work in America. However, I have traveled enough around the world to know that there is an American Privilege, too, and I have benefited from both. Sadly, in many cultures around the world, hard work is required to subsist but it often won’t take someone out of the slums.
I am glad that I was born in America, and I am mindful that our God does have expectations of me because of my blessings.
I know many Americans don’t like the word “privilege,” but it is real.
Ezra Taft Benson, in his statement, may have given cover for “capitalism is/as the secular theology of Christianity,” but do we really want to emulate Christianity as Capitalism? Christ fed the masses at the Sermon on the Mount, and he didn’t do it for money. The church may distribute emergency relief worldwide as an act of goodwill, but if you are struggling in a local ward, you better be working on being active and attempting to pay your tithing. In other words, the “welfare” from the church is conditional. Granted, there is value in work, and we should all work, but in today’s society, with the inequity in pay, all work is not valued the same, and we shouldn’t base it just because someone is from the slums that they have the slums inside them. Minimum wage will affect your standard of living, but it will not affect the amount of work you do. Most people don’t ask for help because of the lack of work they do; it’s because the work they do is not valued enough in a capitalistic society to pay a living wage. We also live in a society where it is now taking multiple incomes to even make ends meet, let alone own a home. What about the single parent or sickness/illness?
To me, the bottom line about ETB’s statement is that it is simplistic and used as cover for people to exclude helping others. Instead of looking for the light of Christ in others, we should make sure it is in ourselves when it comes to welfare.
@grizzerbear55
Rich are already doing this with your money. Whenever they have a massive failing, they spend your money on “too big to fail”. In the last 40 years, we’ve seen the largest wealth transfer towards the rich in history. And they’re just making you feeling ideologically better about it as they do it–because hey, this is “capitalism”. This is happening right before our eyes with how the SpaceX IPO has been setup. I just don’t understand the defense of the current system we have that is effectively looting you and me.
That line “they take themselves out of the slums” reminds me so much of Ayn Rand. In The Fountainhead, her protagonist Dominique Francons is a wealthy journalist who is assigned to expose New York City slumlords. She embeds herself in a “slum” living modestly, taking cold water baths in a pan and eating cheap food. She doesn’t encounter any crime or violence or discrimination in her two week experiment. She has no dependents to care for. All her fabricated struggles are thing she can personally address by making modest choices. Despite being a wealthy heiress, she expertly cleans her apartment, scrubbing floors, and peels and cooks potatoes in a shared kitchen with no prior experience or training.
After her assignment, she writes an article exposing the callous landlords whose buildings have clogged sewers and structural decay, exposing the moral bankruptcy of the wealthy class. She then meets with social workers who expect her to laud their efforts on behalf of the poor, but instead she exposes the laziness, greed, and lack of ambition of those living in the slums. She points out that both the wealthy and the poor expect unearned pity when they don’t examine their own complicity. She also exposes altruism as mostly fake and driven by the same spiritual vacuity. The social workers want to be seen as heroes and rewarded when they don’t really address anything or help others. Essentially, Dominique is cynical, nihilistic and a misanthrope, despising humanity while also seeing herself as above it. Her editor says what she should have done is given the landlords the critique of their tenants, and the social workers the critique of the landlords, and then everyone would be happy.
Basically, Benson is on the side of the landlords here without examining the larger problems or their complicity and callousness. He wasn’t so much speaking as a prophet as he was speaking as a John Bircher. Like Ayn Rand, he’s presenting some very two-dimensional fantasies and ignoring the complexities.
That aphorism from Benson has never sat right with me and you eloquently explained the prosperity gospel thinking that it promotes. Jesus showed so much kindness and concern for the poor. The way society blames them for their own suffering is cruel.
And while grizzerbear assumes it’s all about ‘spending other peoples money’ it really isn’t. To help people out of the slums, they need to earn a living wage and wages have not kept up with inflation. Any company making high profits is shorting their employees, essentially keeping the wealth generated by their employees. Companies are spending other peoples’ money. Slumlords need to be regulated into making repairs and providing decent living conditions. A slumlord should find Jesus and this will change his heart so that he voluntarily transforms his slums into nice apartments.
I really liked the way you phrased this line: “The danger is not in affirming inner change. The danger is in using inner change as a theological shield against confronting structural inequity—or as a subtle rationalization for accumulation.”
Hawkgrrrl – Great reference to Ayn Rand. I wish we could marry together classic literature, and philosophy to provide texture and depth to scriptural accounts.
President Nelson also provided a doozy a few years back while traveling on the African continent.
“We preach tithing to the poor people of the world because the poor people of the world have had cycles of poverty, generation after generation. That same poverty continues from generation to another, until people pay their tithing. It is living the law of tithing that will break the cycle of poverty. Those who live this law will join the millions of faithful members of the Church who bear solemn and joyous testimony that the Lord keeps His promises to those who love Him and keep His commandments.”
I honestly wonder whether, if he could step outside of his own theological assumptions and hear this statement as an independent observer, he might recognize how psychologically burdensome it is.
This is not simply the claim that tithing brings blessings, or that faith and obedience can transform an individual’s life. The statement makes a much more direct connection between obedience to the modern law of tithing and material poverty. Generational poverty, we are told, continues “until people pay their tithing,” and it is tithing that will “break the cycle of poverty.”
In other words, the burden of poverty is once again placed, at least in significant part, upon those who are already without resources.
The irony is that the principle of tithing has become so detached from much of its scriptural context that the modern interpretation can be presented as a cure for poverty. Yet tithing in the Old Testament served several specific communal and religious purposes, including provision for those in need. The broader context of Malachi is not simply an individual prosperity formula in which poor people are promised escape from poverty if they give a portion of their limited resources to the religious institution. It is also a condemnation of corrupt religious leadership and a discussion about the proper administration and use of what was being brought into the storehouse.
Todd,
You make an interesting but flawed argument. You shift moral responsibility away from the individual and assign blame to “structural inequity”. But you don’t explore why structural inequity exists or how it is actually corrected. And you discount the power individuals have to overcome challenges that are “structural”. And you ignore gospel teachings, even the words of Jesus, that emphasize personal accountability.
First off, you assign your own, materialistic definition to the word “slum” used by President Benson. While the word is used to describe a destitute community, we understand communities are broken for reasons more than just financial poverty. President Benson is using the word in the broad sense that a slum is an ugly place – ugly for its spiritual darkness as well as its broken status.
You then use this focus on financial poverty to frame much of your essay. This allows you to attack the “Prosperity Gospel” which I admit is an easy target. But in doing this you are making a strawman argument. It is you who has decided President Benson is teaching the “Prosperity Gospel” and so it is you who rides in as the hero to slay that villain.
In the telling of Jesus’s visit to the Nephite, the Beatitude “Blessed are the poor” adds the qualifiers “in spirit who come unto me”. The poor are not special simply for being poor. Being in poverty does not in and of itself make one saintly. Poverty is a condition and almost always an undesirable condition. We should not romanticize poverty. For almost all people in poverty, it sucks.
That Jesus does not reward poverty is seen in the parable of the talents. In the Book of Mormon, the poor Zoramites are admonished to not feel sorry for themselves but to humble themselves before God. There is no indication anywhere in scripture that the poor are better off because they are poor and every indication that it sucks to be poor and that God wants people to not live in material poverty or in spiritual poverty.
“The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly – John 10:10”
So how is the condition of poverty fixed? You argue it is through correcting “structural inequity”. You argue the system is at fault and so the focus should be on fixing the system, on correcting the environment. But then you fail to explain how this is done. You give examples of temporary relief – of Jesus feeding the thousands and of the early saints sharing their goods in common. But in the case of Jesus feeding the people, this was a one time event. Structural inequity wasn’t fixed in any way.
As for the case of the early church sharing goods in common, this action takes place among people who have had their hearts changed! By the account given, the change of heart preceded their willingness to give. And the account is given in the story of persons participating in this “common good” whose hearts were deceitful and these people were struck down dead.
The ever constant teaching of the scriptures is that a change of heart precedes a change of behavior, and that it is a personal responsibility to change.
Jesus clearly recognized the importance of personal responsibility to be born unto God. This was his counsel to Nicodemus – that a man must be “born again”. This rebirth is wholly an individual affair. No one can do it for us, only we, through the power of God, can do it for ourselves.
Jesus gave the parable of the wise man and foolish man. Each man made choices. The wise man prospered. The foolish man lost his house. This is clearly a moral judgment that assigns accountability to individuals for the choices they make.
Jesus gave the parable of the prodigal son. This son made choices that lead him to be living and eating with pigs. This son then “came to himself” and made the choice to return to his father’s home and beg mercy. This parable is about the love of the father and also the decision of the son to recognize his awful situation and to change his ways.
In the Book of Mormon, the Lamanites had an awful system of theft and thuggery. When the king’s sheep were stolen, the king would punish his own shepherds! When the father king disagreed with his son king, the father king was prepared to murder his son. How was this system corrected? It was by the conversion of Lamanites to the Gospel of Christ. Hearts being changes resulted in behaviors changing.
The slogan “It takes a village to raise a child” assumes the village is made up of responsible persons. How do you realize a village of responsible persons? How do you build a structure or system that rewards good behavior and discourages bad behavior? Seems to me you can only do this if you hold people personally accountable for their behaviors, with good behavior rewarded and bad behavior punished.
And how do you motivate people to want to do good? Behavior can be coerced, but to truly “be good” a person must act willingly and voluntarily. The power to be good must source from the agency of the person! The “structure” or “system” must encourage and reward good behavior, however, the choice to be good must source from the individual.
Your argument dismisses the importance of personal agency. I argue that structural inequality cannot be fixed without a recognition of personal agency and implementing a system that respects that agency. If you feel differently, please explain and show how a broken community is fixed primarily with external, top down, inputs. I can give many examples of failed top-down efforts. Can you provide an example of success?
A Disciple: I’ll take your challenge to show how broken communities can be fixed through primarily top-down efforts (while agreeing with you that there are also many examples of failed efforts to do so):
– China’s Poverty Alleviation initiative in 2013. They tracked poor families individually, sent government workers to build new roads in poor villages, improve water sanitation, and fix power lines. They moved millions of citizens from dangerous mountain areas into new towns with jobs. Nearly 100 million people living in extreme poverty were lifted out of deprivation by 2020.
– South Korea’s New Village Movement. In the 1970s, they launched a campaign to modernize farming communities by providing raw materials like cement and steel. The villages were encouraged to work together to build bridges, pave roads, and replace thatched roofs with modern materials like tin and tile. This raised rural incomes and closed the widening economic gap between city and country dwellers.
But maybe you only wanted to examine U.S. examples, because I agree with you that it’s tougher to accomplish in many ways in a two-party democratic society where leadership frequently changes between two opposing worldviews.
– The 1960s War on Poverty. LBJ launched several legislative acts that expanded Social Security benefits, creating Medicare and Medicaid in 1965. Senior poverty plummeted from 30% to less than 10%.
– The 1993 Earned Income Tax Credit Expansion. This provided a refundable tax credit to low-to-moderate income individuals and families, particularly with dependents. The requirements created a huge incentive to work, dramatically reducing unemployment rates among single mothers (hello, latchkey kids!) But it also lifted families out of poverty.
– Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, aka food stamps) and housing vouchers. Data shows that without these programs, the US poverty rate would be three times higher than it is today.
Mixed results:
– Utah’s “Housing First” initiative to give homeless people housing, no strings attached, with rents that capped at 30% of their income. This saved the state over $12K per homeless person per year in emergency room visits, jail time, and policing costs (instead providing a permanent apartment and a case worker). During the first 10 years from 2005 to 2015, Utah saw a 91% reduction in homelessness, but rising housing costs after this time frame created problems in sustainability of the program. Other places like Houston adapted Utah’s initiative. The current policy debate is over “housing first” or “treatment first.”
I am not dismissive of the difficulty of creating initiatives that work long-term, and I agree that solutions have to include buy-in (e.g. paying 30% of your income for housing or helping to build the roads and re-roof the houses in the examples above) so that people have the dignity of earning their way, even if it’s at a reduced cost vs. the inflated so-called free market. It looks like those appear to be commonly held good faith arguments.
ETB was doing nothing more or less than (unwittingly) justifying early 19th century Social Darwinism. No statement captures the core of this philosophy and it’s influence on modern conservative thought like “survival of the fittest.” Conservatism is terrified that the state will allow the weakest and “unfit” to not only survive, but actually thrive… and vote. Any such action must be marginalized, usually with the old red scare tactic of labeling it as “socialism” or even “communism.” Even if that action springs from Christianity itself, it will be downplayed, and if it is a government program, the funding will be cut. Don’t want those poor kids doing as well as the wealthy, White, Protestant kids, do we?
Hawkgrrrl,
There are many examples of positive government infrastructure projects that have lifted people up. The rural electrification program supported by FDR is a perfect example. Through this program tens of millions of people gained access to electricity and this improved their lives and their communities.
ETB is not talking about public infrastructure. The talk “Born of God (1985)” is focused on human nature and how human nature is changed. The quote Todd references is made in the context of changing human nature. This is made clear when one reads the talk and considers all the statements that precede and follow the “slums” quote.
It is absolutely true that people are more receptive to learn and change when they are not overwhelmed with pain and chaos. A social safety net matters. ETB is not saying there shouldn’t be public aid and no opinion is offered in the talk about that. What he is teaching is the power of personal, spiritual change. Society changes according to the change that takes place in individuals.
A perfect test of the thesis is in the question of crime. How does one reduce criminal activity? On one end there is the idea of deterrence via arrest, prosecution and jail. On the other end is the idea of “no police” and that by not criminalizing “mischief” a community can prevent labeling individuals criminals. There are a range of “outside” solutions to crime. But there is one solution that works extremely well to reduce crime. It is the “inside” solution of persons choosing for themselves to keep the law and to respect the property of others.
Society can spend endless amounts of money trying to fix human nature. The most powerful fix is free. This fix is the individual being born of God and choosing for himself to live an honest life. This is the point of the quote and of the talk. This point is emphasized by the scripture referenced by ETB concerning those who heard the preaching of king Benjamin, who then declared:
“The Spirit of the Lord … has wrought a mighty change in us, or in our hearts, that we have no more disposition to do evil, but to do good continually.” – Mosiah 5:2
“Chronic scarcity narrows cognitive bandwidth. Trauma constricts possibility. Instability exhausts executive function. These are not moral failures; they are neurological realities.”
This statement from the OP gets to the crux of why so many people struggle in this world. And I do believe Jesus’s teachings in the synoptic gospels continue to offer wisdom worth drawing on, whatever a person’s financial situation. Thank you for this post, Todd.
Ezra Taft Benson was opposed to desegregation and used words like “hoodlum,” “jungle,” and “primitive.” He referred to the Civil Rights Movement as a communist plot.
That said, I have often wondered why all the other OECD countries have resorted to social spending to prevent and cure poverty, but the US has been so resistant to it. The answer is race. FDR implemented the welfare program. But could only do so by winning the vote of white southern segregationists who supported welfare only the condition that agriculturalists and domestic servants, almost sixty percent of whom were black, were excluded from it. Opposition to welfare increased particularly by whites the more it included non-whites.
Benson’s disdain for social spending is rooted in his disdain for black people. Of course, he couldn’t say black people. For after WWII, it became increasingly taboo for public figures to directly insult blacks or talk of how they had an irrational phobia and hatred of them. So you had to talk about it indirectly. It therefore became kosher to demonize the poor and blame them for “stealing” our money through welfare, which they didn’t deserve.
Disciple, while I disagree, I appreciate your thoughtful comments. I would like to comment on this paragraph that you wrote:
“How does one reduce criminal activity? On one end there is the idea of deterrence via arrest, prosecution and jail. On the other end is the idea of “no police” and that by not criminalizing “mischief” a community can prevent labeling individuals criminals. There are a range of “outside” solutions to crime. But there is one solution that works extremely well to reduce crime. It is the “inside” solution of persons choosing for themselves to keep the law and to respect the property of others.”
Your last sentence is optimistic and I wish it was preached to a broader audience. I’m going to take it a different direction than you probably intended and talk about the need for rich people to choose for themselves to keep the (moral) law and respect the property of others.
The largest amount of theft by dollar amount in the USA is wage theft. Billions and billions of wages are illegally withheld from paychecks every year. Surely some of those wage theft victims are living in slums. When the government prosecutes wage theft, the only penalty is the company has to pay the wages, sometimes with interest. If the company’s management was arrested, jailed, tried in court and labeled criminals forever after, perhaps that would deter wage theft. I would support harsh criminal penalties for companies that deliberately commit wage theft. Their victims are poor and hopeless and commonly don’t know how to enforce their rights against their employer.
I work in the finance industry, focusing on individuals and companies in financial distress. Something I’ve noticed is that con artists are already rich. Many cons are within the law, meaning the con man is just very clever about getting people to voluntarily give him their money. It isn’t even theft. Sometimes it’s fraud. Sometimes the con man didn’t even commit a legal crime, even though he committed a moral crime. (That elderly widow who lost her house to a con artist and there was NOTHING that any of us trained in financial crimes could do about it because the con man didn’t break any laws.)
Wealthy criminals don’t live in slums; they live prosperous lives. They even donate to worthy causes. I despise them because they are polished, educated, have social skills, and already have a good standard of living. They could easily earn their living honestly. They don’t respect the humanity and the property rights of the people they steal from. Conning people out of their retirement savings is pretty popular.
I wish with all my heart that the Church and society would preach respect for property rights to rich people. I wish the individuals who decided to withhold wages from their employees were prosecuted as harshly as an individual who robs a convenience store. I wish a rich person who cheats on his taxes was treated as strictly as a woman I knew from my ward who got unemployment benefits for two months longer than she should have and had to repay every penny with interest.
Rich people commit more crimes against property than any low income person could ever dream of.
A Disciple
First, thank you for taking the time to respond thoughtfully. One of the more obvious problems with modern discourse, though certainly not unique to our era, is how quickly disagreement becomes a contest to prove who is right rather than an opportunity to understand what the other person is actually saying. So let me begin with something I agree with: my argument is flawed, in the sense that it is partial, incomplete, and human. I suspect the same is true of yours. You raise several important issues that deserve discussion on their own terms: accountability, agency, motivation, justice, the role of institutions, and how God works in the world.
But I think we may be talking past one another on the central point of my post.
My argument was not that change comes primarily from the outside in, nor was I attempting to shift moral responsibility away from individuals and onto institutions. My concern was with the artificial polarity created by Benson’s statement, particularly when it is repeated in isolation and absolutized.
I tried to define that concern in the opening:
The problem is not the claim that Christ changes hearts. Christianity has always proclaimed inner transformation. The problem is the artificial polarity: inside versus outside, soul versus structure, character versus condition.
That is the argument I was making.
I do not deny personal responsibility. I do not deny agency. I do not deny that people make destructive choices or that transformation requires an individual response. In fact, I would agree with much of what you wrote about the necessity of changed hearts. Where I disagree is with the assumption that affirming the formative power of external conditions somehow diminishes personal agency.
I think the opposite can often be true.
Our environment does not eliminate agency, but it can profoundly shape the range of choices available to us and our capacity to exercise them. Hunger, trauma, addiction, instability, violence, poverty, and chronic scarcity do not make people morally incapable of choosing differently. But neither are they morally neutral conditions through which everyone passes with equal resources.
This is where I think the phrase, “The Lord works from the inside out; the world works from the outside in,” becomes problematic. It creates a contrast that I do not believe Jesus himself maintained. Why must changing a person’s environment be categorized as worldly, while changing their heart is categorized as divine? Why can’t both be part of the same redemptive work?
You also suggest that I impose a strictly material definition on the word “slum.” I don’t think that is quite what I am doing. I understand Benson is using “slum” metaphorically to describe spiritual darkness or degradation. My concern is that the metaphor does not exist in a vacuum. Benson contrasts what is inside people with people being taken out of slums. The rhetorical structure depends upon both meanings. There is an inner slum and an outer slum, and the implication is that the latter is secondary to the former.
That is precisely the polarity I am questioning.
Because once the statement is used to suggest that external conditions are fundamentally downstream from individual righteousness, it becomes possible to moralize poverty without ever explicitly saying, “Poor people are poor because they are bad.”
That is the concern.
And to be clear, I am not arguing that poverty makes a person virtuous. I agree completely that poverty is not inherently ennobling, that the poor are not automatically more righteous, and that poverty itself is generally a terrible condition. But those things are not the same as saying that poverty reflects an interior defect or that changing material conditions is somehow less spiritually significant than changing hearts.
I think one of the most interesting examples here is the debate over how we approach homelessness and addiction.
The question is often framed as follows: Do we require people to change before helping them, or do we provide enough stability that meaningful change becomes more possible?
The Housing First model proceeds from the recognition that it is extraordinarily difficult to address addiction, employment, or other destructive behaviors when a person’s environment is radically unstable. A person living in constant insecurity is not simply facing a moral challenge; they are operating under conditions that can make sustained change substantially more difficult.
Providing housing does not remove agency. It does not make a person sober. It does not make them responsible, honest, hardworking, or spiritually transformed.
What it can do is create enough stability for those things to become more possible.
That is the distinction I think your argument misses.
Sometimes the external intervention is not a substitute for personal transformation. Sometimes it is the condition that makes personal transformation more sustainable.
And this brings me back to the Gospel. Yes, changed hearts produce changed behavior. I agree. But Scripture does not consistently present transformation as a strictly individual process in which people first become righteous internally and only then receive material or communal help.
Jesus fed people. He healed people. He restored people to communities from which they had been excluded. The early Christians changed their economic behavior precisely because their changed hearts had social consequences. Their conversion did not remain inside them.
That is important to me because it means we do not have to choose between agency and structure.
A changed heart can change a system.
But a changed system can also relieve burdens that make it easier for hearts to change.
Those things can be reciprocal.
I think perhaps our deepest disagreement is that you appear to see personal agency and structural reform as competing explanations. If the problem is structural, individual responsibility is diminished. If the problem is individual, structural reform is unnecessary or secondary.
I don’t see it that way.
A person can be responsible for their choices and be constrained by circumstances they did not create.
A community can have destructive cultural patterns and be shaped by historical, economic, and institutional realities.
A person can need to change and need help.
And, perhaps most importantly, those of us with resources can recognize another person’s agency without making assistance contingent upon their first proving themselves worthy of it.
So no, I am not arguing that broken communities are fixed primarily through top-down intervention. Nor am I arguing that people should simply wait for institutions to save them.
I am arguing something much less absolute:
There is no reason to place inner transformation and external transformation in opposition to one another.
Christ changes people. People change communities. Communities shape the people who live within them. Changed conditions can create space for changed lives. Changed lives can create more just conditions.
That seems to me much closer to the pattern we actually encounter in the Gospel than either extreme.
The danger in Benson’s statement, at least as I see it, is not that it affirms the importance of changing hearts. The danger comes when that affirmation is used to imply that changing conditions is somehow secondary, worldly, or even spiritually suspect.
I don’t believe Jesus maintained that distinction.
And I don’t think we should either.