“The Pinch of Poverty” by Thomas B. Kennington (1856-1916)

Like many of my generation, I grew up with parents who had stories about the Great Depression. My mother, in particular, had experienced genuine want, cold, and hunger.

There was one thing she said again and again. “We often had to wear patched clothes. But they were always clean. My mother made sure of that.”

Mom was harkening back to a social phenomenon that began in the 18th and 19th Centuries, largely (but not entirely) motivated by Christian pietism – the ideal of the Honest Poor.

Nowadays we’re so accustomed to being told that the poor are naturally virtuous that we don’t see how shocking that ideal was in its time. Jesus Christ, of course, had said “Blessed are the poor…” but the full quote is “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” a rather different thing. The disciples were expressing more conventional wisdom when they responded to Jesus’ encounter with the rich young ruler (Matthew 19). “It is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven,” He said, and His disciples “were greatly astonished,” asking, “Who then can be saved?”

The disciples were expressing what most people have believed throughout history – that wealth and virtue went hand in hand. Everyone understood that poor people sometimes had to steal to survive, but if a rich man – who could presumably afford to be honest – didn’t have an easy road to heaven, what chance did regular joes like they have?

Virtue, in other words, was a luxury only the wealthy could afford. That’s why so many of our moral terms have their origins in social class – a gentleman was a man of gentle (high) birth, while a villain was a poor man who lived in a village.

Since the great social shift of the 18th and 19th Centuries (the one I mentioned above) though, we’ve turned that around. The noble ideal of the Honest Poor has evolved into an inverted class prejudice. For us, the poor are virtuous simply by virtue of being poor. Poverty is a certificate of goodness, while the rich, obviously, have stolen their wealth from the poor, and are uniformly vile and corrupt. This misapprehension is doubtless a function of the fact (I believe it anyway) that Marxism is essentially a Christian heresy.

This is not only unfair to the wealthy (many of whom are “rich but honest”), but to the poor, who’ve lost my grandmother’s old compulsion to be respectable. Respectability, being associated with some level of wealth, has itself become suspect. To be “authentic” (that is virtuous), one needs to give in to all one’s appetites and practice no self-discipline whatever.

In the south, they used to refer to the squalid poor – whatever their race – as “trash.” Because those who don’t aspire to anything better, who don’t restrain themselves and work to improve themselves, are treating their whole lives as waste.