Proverbs 22:1–2, 8–9, 22–23 and James 2:1–17
This week’s lectionary passages from Proverbs and James focus on God’s justice for the poor:
“Do not rob the poor because they are poor, or crush the afflicted at the gate; for the LORD pleads their cause and despoils of life those who despoil them” (Provers 22:22–23).
The rich and the poor have this in common: the LORD is the maker of them all” (Proverbs 22:2).
“My brothers and sisters, do you with your acts of favoritism really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ?…You do well if you really fulfill the royal law according to the scripture, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ But if you show partiality, you commit sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors” (James 2:1, 8–9).
These passages condemn partiality against the poor, and reiterate that impartial justice, justice which avoids favoritism toward the rich, must look first to the needs of the poor. The reason that the church must live out a “preferential option for the poor” (in the terms of the Latin-American liberation theologians), is because the status quo, the system as it currently works, is stacked against the poor. Seeking impartial justice requires recognizing that the current power dynamics of our society will always treat the rich preferentially, and so nothing less than an option for the poor can avoid favoritism and truly treat rich and poor on equal terms.
This favoritism is evident in our criminal legal system. As Bryan Stevenson puts it, “We have a system of justice that treats you better if you’re rich and guilty than if you’re poor and innocent.” Mass incarceration is driven by what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “organized abandonment followed by organized violence”: first, the “organized abandonment” of poor communities, in which the interests of state and capital collude to disinvest in those communities, “robbing the poor because they are poor and despoiling them at the gate.” Then, “organized violence” in the form of policing and prisons, which disproportionately target individuals in poor and marginalized communities, usually along racial lines. (This is what Chris Hayes describes as “a colony in a nation” in his book of the same name.) In other words, the “organized violence” of policing and prisons, targeted against poor communities, is the sort of “favoritism” and “partiality” the author of James condemns.
What these passages remind us is that the prison-industrial complex is not separable from (racial) capitalism — a connection made heartbreakingly clear this week as Hurricane Ida took out power in southern Louisiana and city governments and police rushed to prevent “looting,” protecting property, rather than meeting the needs of those affected by the disaster. This is what police are FOR. Abolition requires the questioning and restructuring of the ways our society is built to disenfranchise and disempower the poor.
Ada María Isasi-Díaz insists that the church’s option for the poor must not be described as “preferential” because “a preferential option is an oxymoron, for to prefer is not the same as to opt: the two are mutually exclusive.…When the moment of option comes, one opts for this, and in doing so one opts not for that. The option for the oppressed, as is true of all options, cannot be qualified…To claim to have a preferential option is a way of rejecting the demands of what it really means to opt for the oppressed and the impoverished” (in Decolonizing Epistemologies, 57).
What does it look like for us as a church to opt for the oppressed and impoverished? What does it look like to resist, fully and wholeheartedly, the organized abandonment and organized violence of policing and prisons? The author of James tells us: anything less than such an unqualified option for the poor is a failure to obey the law to love our neighbors as ourselves. We are complicit in the partiality to the rich which forms the status quo.
Hannah Bowman is the founder and director of Christians for Abolition.