Follow Up on Being Kingdom-centered with My Finances
About a month ago, Alinn@ had an interesting conversation with another Christian person about the Kingdom and personal finances. After the conversation, Alinn@ had a lot of food for thought and of course, asked me what I thought about it.
The other person’s stance was this: The way that Americans (both Christian and not I’m assuming) spend their money is evil.
Not just misguided but evil. And I think I mostly agree… at least so far.
Here’s why. I think most Christians would say that human slavery is evil. Yet we spend our money on things that further promote human slavery. Most of us don’t buy slaves, but we do buy things that are reliant upon slaves. It’s a few steps removed, but we often spend money in ways that support the slavery industry. We buy clothes most probably made in sweatshops, jewelry coming from regions of conflict, and food from regions and farmers who aren’t given a fair wage. Just the other day, I was browsing the baby section of Target and I saw a onesie that had the triangular recycle emblem and the words “Green Baby” on it front and center. I looked at the tag and it was selling for $1.50. Here’s the irony, it said it was “Made in Bangladesh”.
Since that discussion, Alinn@ and I are starting to make some changes. With regard to clothes, we’re trying to exclusively buy things that are “Made in the USA” (not foolproof from a human slavery standpoint, but safer) or buy/borrow used clothing from friends/Craigslist/eBay (to not further feed the slavery machine with our money).
For jewelry, well, with Alinn@’s engagement ring it’s too late, but we decided that we would probably offer to pass it down to our kids when it’s their time. For what it’s worth, I have a Christian friend who consciously did not buy a diamond engagement ring because of the social ramifications. Instead, he bought a ring with a semi-precious stone that was certified to have come from a non-conflict area. Need I say that I felt extremely guilty after watching the movie “Blood Diamond” with Leonardo DiCaprio?
And for food, I think Alinn@’s food politics are pretty widely known now. We buy most of our groceries at the farmer’s market where we give money directly to local farmers. We also buy our year’s supply of beef from a local rancher on a single day in June. S@m’s milk comes from a local dairy farm. My coffee is fair trade.
Thoughts? Comments? Corrections?
December 2nd, 2009 at 3:16 pm
I 100% agree with trying to do the right thing. But I think we often oversimplify what the right thing is, when in truth it’s really complex. And the right thing in regards to the sweatshop / local food issue is really complex.
Kristof gives an interesting counter-perspective on sweatshops – http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/15/opinion/15kristof.html and http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/20000924mag-sweatshops.html. He’s no right-wing wacko; he’s best known for shining light on human rights abuses around the world. For example, one of his passions is bringing greater awareness of human trafficking. He honestly and deeply cares about the poor.
His main point is that yes, sweatshops absolutely suck, but they are still better than the alternative for those who work there, and they offer a way out of poverty. 50 years ago, Taiwan, South Korea and India were at similar economic levels. T and SK accepted sweatshops as a necessary, sucky price of development, and they were lifted out of poverty. India always resisted sweatshops, and today, 3.1 million Indian children die every year before the age of 5.
No one is saying the conditions in sweatshops are good. And we should care about that. But we should also care about poverty and death, and just outright opposing sweatshops can doom the people who work there to that. What will they do if we don’t buy their products? Without their jobs, where will they go? That they’re working in such horrible conditions shows that their options are severely limited.
I respect the heart behind buying USA, but again, it’s complicated – doing that rewards workers who are, in the grand scheme, relatively well off, while dooming the poorest of the poor workers.
I like Kristof’s suggestion – sweatshop monitors can play a useful role in improving safety and calling attention to their effect on the environment, both things that directly harm the workers there. But as he says, “refusing to buy sweatshop products risks making Americans feel good while harming those we are trying to help.”
The local food thing and fair trade is also exceedingly complex. Worthy goals, good things, just not simple. Just looking at fair trade coffee, the Organic Consumers Association site (as you might guess, a pro-organic site) links to a fair article that lists the pros and cons (http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_4738.cfm). It’s just not simple.
I 100% agree with the goal of being Kingdom-centered with your finances. But to be blunt, I 100% disagree with the attitude of your friend who suggests that people who don’t follow what he thinks are simple guidelines are doing evil. He’s being judgmental based on formulaic solutions that are at best, too simple to address the real complex problems, and at worst, misguided and even counter-productive. I object to every aspect of it – the judgmental attitude (“evil” is a really strong word), the oversimplification, and the misguidedness.
I want to do the right thing also and try to figure out what that is. And on some issues (maybe the diamond thing) it’s more clear. But on others, it’s really complex and I think that needs to be acknowledged. Based on my current knowledge, I actually think it’s better to buy products made in poor countries, possibly in sweatshops. I think America buying tons of products made in terrible sweatshops in Taiwan and South Korea years ago gave those workers a better life than they would have had otherwise and, more importantly, helped lift millions of people out of poverty. And poverty is something that Christians should care about. I hope and pray that the same would happen for the people of Bangladesh.
In general, I think with finances, the obvious thing is more easily discernible with things like materialism and consumerism than social justice. Not that we shouldn’t think about the latter – we should. But we should deal with the obvious things first.
December 2nd, 2009 at 4:06 pm
> In general, I think with finances, the obvious thing is more easily discernible with things like materialism and consumerism than social justice. Not that we shouldn’t think about the latter – we should. But we should deal with the obvious things first.
Which, of course, you did in your last entry.
December 3rd, 2009 at 1:29 pm
I’ve been wrestling with these issues for awhile. One thing that really helped me was when M said that we just have to ask Jesus and follow what He tells us on all of this. It reminded me that He has all of these things near to His heart, and would also know our desires to follow Him in them. AMEN, M!
Still haven’t at all figured it out. As of now, we’re committed to buying more things used, borrowing, or doing without in some instances. Love to hear more opinions on all of it.
December 13th, 2009 at 9:34 pm
Thanks Marcia and dchai for the food for thought.
dchai, I agree with you that the more obvious thing when it comes to finances is materialism and consumerism than social justice. Materialism and consumerism probably has a greater stranglehold on America and the American church than anybody in America realizes. Come to think of it, I don’t know if I’ve heard a sermon or participated in a study that really exposed the depth by which consumerism has infected our view of our relationship with God, ourselves, and other people. The closest that I know of would probably be Piper’s “Don’t Waste Your Life” sermon.
That said, I would like to talk more about this topic of social justice and it’s relation to our finances. I’ve already learned a lot from the responses and I’d like to keep the dialogue going so that I can be even more informed on the subject.
Thank you, by the way, for the fair-trade article. I had actually heard from my coffee vendor that there are incredible bureaucracies that prevent farmers from becoming fair-trade certified, but I didn’t investigate further on the matter. As a side note, what I should have written was that my coffee does not carry the fair trade label but adheres to the spirit of fair trade because the coffee buyers have a direct relationship with the growers and pay them a fair wage. At least so I’m told. As the article indicated toward the end, I’m taking my vendor at their word that they are doing what they’re telling me they are doing.
Regarding the Kristof articles, while I have no real right to do so because he’s lived in those countries and I haven’t, I’m inclined to disagree with him for two reasons so far.
As a Christian, (which I realize that he is not) I have a hard time with reasoning that essentially states that the ends justify the means. The opening of 1 Corinthians 13 immediately comes to mind.
And I feel that Kristof makes the false assumption that for the people of these nations, the only way out of poverty is through sweatshops run by largely Western companies. In addition to the growing area of microlending (which admittedly has its problems too, though I would argue are small in comparison to sweatshops), there’s sustainable foreign aid and development by NGOs and Christian missionaries, and also migration. This is to make no mention of how (and here’s my politically liberal bent comes in) Western companies have in some cases perpetuated the poverty of a country by simultaneously extracting that country’s resources or damaging that country’s land so that the land becomes in effect, useless (the Ecuador v. Chevron-Texaco case seems to have been getting some press recently
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/23/business/texaco-goes-on-trial-in-ecuador-pollution-case.html).
Thanks too for the point that these are complex issues. They are complex and for that reason should be discussed more. I look forward to hearing more!