What Will This Do for the Poor? Rebecca Blank’s Economic Theology

To twist a saying by Karl Barth, Rebecca Blank approached the great problems of the world with a Bible in one hand and a spreadsheet in the other. “I am an economist and a Christian,” Blank plainly stated in the opening essay of Is the Market Moral? (Blank and McGurn 2004, 11), a back-and-forth debate with William McGurn, then chief editorial writer of The Wall Street Journal. Then she doubled down: “I am not just a member of a Protestant church; I am culturally Protestant in habits of mind and heart that are deeply embedded in my behaviors and thoughts” (Blank and McGurn 2004, 14). Blank believed in God and markets, in Scripture and data, in the incomprehensible and the quantifiable, embracing not only the Smith ([1776] 2007) of The Wealth of Nations but also the Smith ([1759] 2010) of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which, as Sen (1992) has taken pains to point out, are not (and should not be viewed as) distinct traditions.

Blank belonged to a long line of thought leaders whose commitment to the poor was an act of Christian obedience. The towering labor organizer Eugene Debs liked to tell striking workers that if Christ walked the earth in their time, he’d be walking the picket line. Frances Perkins, the first female U.S. secretary of labor, pushed President Franklin D. Roosevelt to create a federal minimum wage based on her interpretations of the Social Gospel. Martin Luther King Jr.’s political activism against racism and poverty was fueled by a radical Christianity. In 1968, he addressed a crowd of striking sanitation workers with these words: “If America does not use her vast resources of wealth to end poverty and make it possible for all of God’s children to have the basic necessities of life, she, too, will go to hell.” And today, labor leaders like United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain and poverty advocates like Rev. William Barber, cochair of the Poor People’s Campaign, draw inspiration and strength from biblical teachings (Barber 2024; Carter 2023).

Rare indeed, however, is the scholar who identifies the wellspring of her intellectual questions and ethical convictions by pointing to her faith. Today, we are used to academics looking inward when justifying their pursuits, with references to personal experience, but Blank looked outward. “We have choice,” she wrote, “in deciding what issues we work on, what programs we support, and how we pursue economic justice in our own lives. We have, however, no choice in whether or not we should care about these issues. That is a tenet of our faith” (Blank 1992, 125). To be a Christian required a deep concern for the poor. Because the God that Blank worshiped hated poverty and economic injustice, Blank felt she must as well. Were she a moral philosopher, Blank would be aligned with thinkers such as Frankfurt (2015) and Parfit (2000), thinkers more concerned with “sufficiency”—making sure poverty does not deny people an adequate standard of living—than those, like Scanlon (2018), who take issue with inequality in and of itself.

But Blank was an economist and a Christian. As far as I can tell, she didn’t find philosophy all that useful to the poverty debate. And she had no patience for unserious, seminar-style dismissals of economic realities, political constraints, or “capitalism,” a word she strenuously avoided. She did not believe poverty, either in America or the developing world, could be eradicated in her lifetime, but she did believe the lives of the poor could be drastically improved. She was interested neither in utopian daydreaming nor in political purity. In the poverty debate, she considered herself “a pragmatist and a moderate” (Blank 1997, vxi). She wanted to find tractable, realistic solutions to real-world problems. And she looked skeptically on all “efforts to romanticize earlier economic communities,” like those based on subsistence farming. “I cannot find much to admire about involuntary rural poverty, which was the economic reality for most individuals before markets brought about economic growth” (Blank and McGurn 2004, 38). If asked what date she would have chosen if she could travel back in time, Blank would have undoubtedly answered, like all good historians do, knowing full well the cruelties and sufferings of the past: “Yesterday.”

* * *

The economist’s worldview does not always (or even often) comport seamlessly with Christian teachings. Tensions and puzzles emerge, and much of Blank’s work involves searching for ways to harmonize the two perspectives. Take economic growth. Rather than evaluating growth by referencing conventional measures like a nation’s gross domestic product (GDP), Blank investigated if growth translated into broad economic uplift by consulting indicators of extreme poverty, educational access, and health (Blank and McGurn 2004, 41). This led her to question why the economic expansions of the 1980s and 1990s had not resulted in significant poverty reductions. When the economy grew rapidly between 1960 and 1974, poverty plummeted, but in the years that followed, the economy continued to flourish while the poverty rate remained flat and, in some years, even increased. Blank (1997, 54) called this “one of the most discouraging facts for American social policy” and concluded that although poor Americans were working longer and harder, their wages fell as productivity rose. Subsequent work has shown that the decline of union power and globalization were two major factors behind the persistent wage stagnation and growing income inequality of the late 20th century (Farber et al. 2021; Western and Rosenfeld 2011).

This economic puzzle and its resolution would not have presented themselves if Blank had reflexively accepted GDP growth as a good-enough signal of economic health. The resounding question she returned to over and again was, “What will this do for the poor?” (Blank 1992, 87). How will this global trade agreement, this zoning ordinance, this war, this hurricane season affect the lives of the most vulnerable?

Viewing the economy as a Christian and reading the Scriptures as an economist, Blank confronted more personal ethical dilemmas along the way as well. Perhaps none was more fundamental than considering if the neoclassical model based on selfish gain violated her sacred creed. “If we accept an economic model that assumes that appropriate choices are made when individuals are self-interested, individualistic, and focused on the acquisition of more things, is doing so a validation of our worst natures and a turning away from Christian attributes” (Blank and McGurn 2004, 22)? Blank found the economic model elegant and powerful, yet also incomplete and corrupt. To correct for its shortcomings, she thought “virtue must be built into the institutional structures of the economy” (94). That is, the market should be judged, not simply on the basis of quarterly reports and job numbers—to say the least of stock returns—but by how well it lives up to its promises and benefits the most disadvantaged.

Articulating the characteristics of a virtuous economy is an act of imagination, not evaluation. Following the pragmatist’s habit of forming an “end-in-view” that can guide action (Dewey 1938), this effort is not itself empirical but directs all subsequent empirical analysis by setting value standards by which economic outcomes can be judged and, at a deeper level, by determining what is noticed in the first place. With strikingly few exceptions (e.g., Travis, Western, and Redburn 2014, ch. 12), most social scientists skip over this step and dive straight into the data. But not every policy question can be resolved by cold appeals to the evidence, and on further consideration, the available evidence is not so value-neutral after all. This is not because social scientists neglect to take care with the design and curation of data (we do), or because even the best data sets are designed to reflect a certain political outlook (they aren’t), but because all data possess an epistemological point of view. They invite certain kinds of inquiry and silence others.

In laying out the basic standards for economic justice, normative goals provide researchers and policymakers with proactive criteria for assessing the economy in a more holistic light. By describing the characteristics of a just economy, Blank elevated the importance of values in social-scientific work, allowing them to transparently guide empirical inquiry. “A just economy gives all persons access to the basic material necessities of life,” Blank (1992, 46–48) wrote. It “enhances human communities of dignity and well-being.” It “is inclusive,” “encourages creativity, skill, and diligence,” “acknowledges the dignity of human beings,” and “reflects God’s passion for the poor and disadvantaged.” These positions, and others, were adopted by the United Church of Christ at the 1989 General Synod, as captured in the Pronouncement on Christian Faith: Economic Life and Justice, a document Blank helped to author.

* * *

Blank argued that people of faith are called to be “other-interested,” not self-interested. This perspective recognized that our lives are connected to and reliant on people near and far. And “this interconnected economic web generates interconnected responsibilities to poor families and workers throughout the world” (Blank and McGurn 2004, 50). Blank, then, subscribed to a relational view of poverty and inequality (e.g., Anderson 1999; Desmond 2023), one that understood that it is often the case that some win because others lose, that some profit because others are impoverished, that some indulge because others are denied. Tolstoy ([1886] 1991), another Christian thinker committed to social justice, arrived at the same conclusion. “The cause of . . . poverty,” he wrote (55), “is our wealth.” Decades later, the economist Galbraith ([1958] 1998, 64) concurred: “The miserable consumption of the poor is partly the result of the ostentatious demands of the rich.”

Blank’s relational perspective on poverty required that she eschew politically safe but ultimately disingenuous win-win arguments and admit that the poor will not be fully liberated without the rich accepting some losses. “A commitment to economic justice,” she wrote, “confronts an extremely difficult dilemma: if we are to make the world a more equitable and more just place, some of us will have less than we do now” (Blank 1992, 141). Sensible tax reform focused on strengthening enforcement and ending corporate tax evasion would be an effective means to this end (Desmond 2023; Piketty, Saez, and Zucman 2023). Blank did not specify the precise ways she believed such rebalancing might occur. But she did make a pitch to the comfortable. “In a world of great inequality,” she wrote, “both those who are poor and those who are rich are at risk of becoming spiritually impoverished” (Blank 1992, 42). Great adversity and great affluence, Blank saw, can disfigure our humanity. Writers from Tolstoy ([1886] 1991) to Baldwin (2021) have recognized this profound truth, and perhaps it’s time more social scientists did too. This might entail revising our conventional indicators of success and social mobility to better measure joy, contentment, and social cohesion, and it might require that we do a better job documenting the isolation, fear, and empty consumerism of many affluent Americans today.

A relational view also recasts the old argument that redistributive policy infringes on people’s liberty—at least the liberty of the affluent—because it acknowledges that vast inequalities allow those at the top to severely constrict the liberty of those at the bottom (Scanlon 2018; Stiglitz 2024). So, whose freedom should we preserve? Cox (1948) put a fine point on the matter when he distinguished between the freedom to exploit and the freedom to end the means of exploitation. “Under capitalism,” he wrote, “a profit maker is free to exploit the human and natural resources of the people in his own interest; a slum dweller is free to live and die in filth. . . . The people in a democracy may decide without hindrance both that the slums should be cleared and that the individual who makes a profit from slums should give up that right. There is a loss of one kind of freedom and a gain of another; we cannot have both” (238). Or at least we cannot have both in equal measure.

As Cox saw, a relational theory of poverty that centers power, ownership, and profit-making leads naturally to a consideration of exploitation in its many guises. Social scientists—and sociologists of class and labor economists, in particular (e.g., Reich, Gordon, and Edwards 1973; Wright 1997)—have a long tradition of documenting exploitation in the workforce. Blank did not draw on this work. Instead, she believed that, whereas Christianity brought the poor out of the shadows, the market ignored them (Blank and McGurn 2004, 26). But one can make a case that in fact the opposite is true, that certain market actors take special notice of the poor because their vulnerability and exclusion can turn a handsome profit. This is particularly true when it comes to consumption-based exploitation: overcharging marginalized families for housing, credit, food, and household goods (Caplovitz 1967; Satter 2009).

On the one hand, that Blank did not center exploitation is not surprising in the least, as over the past several decades researchers have tended to explain poverty through individualistic or structural models focused on poor people and poor places (Desmond and Wilmers 2019). (Stinchcombe [1972] called these explanations “curiously benign.”) On the other hand, it is curious indeed, not only because her relational view of inequality rests on the reality of exploitation, but also because the Bible over and again presents poverty as the result of a taking. The prophet Ezekiel (22:29) declared that “the people of the land have practiced extortion and committed robbery. They have oppressed the poor and needy.” The book of Proverbs (29:7) observes that “a righteous man knows the rights of the poor; a wicked man does not understand such knowledge.” And James (5:4–5), the half-brother of Jesus, condemned the rich for living “on the earth in luxury and in self-indulgence” by defrauding “the laborers who mowed your fields.” If God took pains to emphasize God’s love for the poor, it was because they were so often denied it by their well-heeled neighbors. To quote an old VISTA poster, “They say the poor have it hard. Well, the hardest thing they have is us.”

* * *

A beautiful feature of Blank’s intellectual legacy is that in commingling theology and economics, it holds lessons for both social science and personal ethics as well as for the church and public policy. For scholars, Blank’s work contains specific provocations and insights aplenty, but it is her general approach to poverty that I’d like to emphasize, an approach that involved regularly leaving her office and cultivating authentic relationships with poor people. “The most effective way of ‘seeing’ economic injustice in our world is to observe the world through the eyes of those who have been excluded from the economic abundance received by middle- and upper-income Americans,” Blank (1992, 12) wrote. “It is difficult to understand problems of hunger, poverty, or discrimination without listening to those who have experienced them first-hand” (Blank 1992, 95).

It is—and yet this way of operating has become normalized in the academy. Social scientists know poverty mainly through trend lines and statistical models, not through the smell of a migrant’s trailer in the morning, the hardened silence of a mother trying to hush her baby in the welfare office, or the nauseating slosh of opiate withdrawal. Scientific expertise is, of course, needed if we are to fully grasp the causes of and solutions to poverty, but there is something lost when that expertise becomes disconnected from the flesh-and-blood realities of the issue. Scholars should make themselves accountable to the people their work most concerns. This can be accomplished through the research endeavor itself, but Blank took an alternative approach, placing herself in proximity to the problem that haunted her. She advocated for affordable housing at zoning board meetings, pushed her city council to fund homeless shelters, and sat at lunch counters with mothers receiving welfare (Blank 1992, 116). Her poverty advocacy was not simply a research agenda; it was a regular religious observance. I believe this afforded Blank’s work a kind of familiarity with poverty, a rootedness, that informed her own trend lines and statistical models. Blank’s advice to fellow social scientists who wish to understand poverty—particularly to those who were raised in, and who remain protected by, privilege—is this: Go outside. Go entwine your lives with the lives of the marginalized.

Blank’s work also holds implications for everyone seeking to contribute in their own way to the fight against poverty. Individual acts of morality—like making efforts to purchase union-made goods or divesting from exploitative companies—are sometimes derided by liberals who argue that what is really needed is systematic reform. No one would argue with that, but do we believe that structural change will simply fall from the sky? Acting in solidarity with the poor in our everyday decisions not only reminds us of the ways that the “interconnected economic web generates interconnected responsibilities”; it also can be contagious, with individual acts fanning out into collective action. For example, if enough affluent Americans refused to take impossible-to-justify tax deductions and called for their abolition (Desmond 2024), that could empower Congress to act. The philosopher Cohen (2000) once remarked that “the rich egalitarian wants the state to press the tax button” (26). But instead of waiting for the government to make us pay up, perhaps we must begin pressing that tax button ourselves.

I once gave a talk that showed how little the federal government invested in affordable housing, compared to how much it gives to affluent homeowners through tax subsidies. After the talk, a woman approached me and expressed feeling guilty about drawing the mortgage interest deduction, which is expected to result in $100 billion in lost annual revenue by 2027. “Should I stop doing so?” she asked.

“No,” an older gentleman beside her replied. “Don’t deny yourself. Vote!”

This struck me as strange logic, something akin to an environmentalist telling you that it doesn’t matter what food you eat or what kind of car you drive as long as you support the right climate change policies. But it does matter what we eat and what cars we drive, not only because expressions of integrity have value in their own right, but also because all those small acts can combine into a political force that puts upward pressure on corporations and governments. Wilde ([1891] 2001) once mused that “socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others.” Today, those of us committed to the abolition of poverty continue to confront that sordid necessity. This entails living out our commitments to economic justice, not solely in the political realm, but in our intimate lives as well.

Blank believed that if any institution should stand as a model for economic justice, it should be the church. Condemning exploitation and oppression was the very least Christians could do. “For the church to have credibility when it speaks against economic injustice, it must address inequalities and injustices within its own institutional structure. It must structure itself as a role model to secular society” (Blank 1992, 108). That is, churches should pay living wages to all their employees, conduct themselves in a way that upholds human dignity, and limit their purchases to businesses doing likewise. Churches have also confronted poverty beyond their walls by, for example, undercutting the payday lending industry with low-interest loans and establishing homeless shelters.

Blank believed that civic and religious institutions should work alongside government programs to promote human flourishing, while never losing sight of the fact that there is no substitute for the state. “Public assistance programs to the poor,” she wrote, “fulfill the primary role of society, which is to respect human value and avoid wasted human lives” (Blank 1997, 196). Blank (1992, 68–69) advocated for “greater government involvement in economic decision making.” This included expanding domestic programs—Blank (1997) argued that the Child Tax Credit should be fully refundable long before the American Rescue Plan (2021) temporarily made it so, a policy tweak that helped to cut child poverty by 44 percent in just six months (Parolin 2023)—and relieving debt that cripples developing countries.

When it came to addressing poverty in America, Blank (1997) favored targeted programs on pragmatic grounds. She didn’t believe universal or broad-based initiatives had a realistic chance of getting through Congress. However, in both her theological and academic writings, she also made a strong case for economic rights in the Rooseveltian mold (Sunstein [2004] 2006). This idea was rooted in the Scriptures—which carve out specific rights for the poor, the stranger, the widow, and the orphan—and it included the right to housing, education, food, health care, and fair employment. Such rights could only be fulfilled through an ambitious policy agenda. The Pronouncement on Christian Faith even championed the idea of “economic democracy” (Blank 1992, 175), which entailed “wider participation in ownership,” industrial policy, and empowering the poor. These reforms would target poverty at its root, and to that end I say: Amen.