5  HOW NOT TO BE A MILLIONAIRE

I LISTENED TO A POPULAR CHRISTIAN FINANCIAL PODCAST the other day. The man who runs the program is famous to many Christians. In many ways I agree with him and appreciate the work he has done. His tireless rants against debt soothe my little activist soul, and the frugal person in me rejoices at the constant talk of learning to simplify, to refuse to give in to consumeristic or materialistic impulses. But when I look at them in the larger context of American society—a capitalistic society that is increasingly becoming more and more unequal, with more and more people falling into poverty—the popular messages spread far and wide to the faithful Christians disturb me more and more.

The episode I listened to the other day was about how anyone can become a millionaire (this wasn’t an outlier either—this company regularly hosts conferences and events revolving around the idea of “everyday millionaires”). This guru espouses a basic approach over and over again: work hard, pay off your debts starting with the smallest to the largest, live within your means, and then enjoy the fruit of your labors. (And don’t forget to be generous!)

This program works for many people, which is why it’s so successful. People need encouragement and incentive to learn how to budget, how to tell wants from needs, to make clear connections between what they earn and what they spend. The program is part advice column, part celebrating those people who have done it, who have achieved the American Dream of being debt free, of paying off their mortgage, of being a millionaire.

The only problem is, being financially safe and secure isn’t a major theme of Scripture—but unjust economic practices are. I want to see predatory lending end as much as anybody, and I long to see my neighbors and myself freed from consumerism. But I need and want a bigger dream than the idea of becoming a millionaire. I need a dream that encompasses God’s dream for the world: that everyone would flourish, that everyone would have what they need to thrive as the image bearers they are.

My husband and I convened a group of people from our church to talk about money: our money, their money, and what we were supposed to do about it in the light of global and local poverty. We used a curriculum called Lazarus at the Gate, which was put together by several scholars, theologians, and Christian ethicists.1 It was deliciously awkward and felt slightly transgressive to be so upfront about money in a community. We asked each other to write out a household budget and share it, and be held accountable for living a life of more generosity.

The more we met and talked about money, the easier it got. It became normalized to bring to light the discomfort we often felt in the corners of our minds as we navigated how we made and spent our money. At the end of the curriculum we pooled some of our money together and brainstormed people and places to give it to. The Lazarus at the Gate curriculum centers on the biblical concepts of living gratefully, justly, simply, and generously. It was the first concept that was most difficult for me: one of the suggested ways to practice gratitude was to say a prayer of thanksgiving every time you paid for groceries or any other purchase. I felt supremely silly at Safeway muttering, “Thank you, God, for your provision,” as I swiped my credit card. But I did that every day for a week, and it broke loose something in me that was trying desperately to keep my money and how I spent it separate from how I related to God.

We talked about shame and discomfort, and we dreamed up ways we could live more simply and in a spirit of reciprocity to both creation and our vulnerable neighbors. We conspired together ways to be able to bless other people, to take joy and delight in what we had been given. Slowly I felt both my heart and my fingers opening up; I realized how necessary and vital it is to be in a community of people who can remind us of our call to care for each other, to listen for the voice of the Spirit of God who surprises us continually with ways to bless others if we only have the courage to ask.

Some days I dream about starting my own radio show about money. Instead of highlighting all the success stories of families who have eaten beans and rice for five years in order to pay off their mortgage, I would only take calls from people who had tried very hard to follow the six easy steps to be a millionaire and who were thwarted by both systems and policies that punish large portions of our society: people who have experienced job losses or who have prison records or crippling health bills or have family members who desperately need financial help; people who experience racism and sexism and xenophobia, who don’t have equal access to opportunity. I would let them come on my show and pour out their stories of heartbreak, of failure, of not making it. I am almost positive nobody would want to listen, but I wish they would. Because when well-meaning, well-intentioned privileged people hear only the financial success stories, they are being discipled in how to judge and belittle all of those who fail in the landscape of the American Dream.

When I was growing up I always strove to “live within my means.” This is sound financial advice for the middle class, especially for those prone to self-righteousness like myself. I have always been frugal with money and have worked at least part-time since I was a junior in high school. I scrimped and saved to pay my college tuition and to take out as little debt as possible. I did not attend prestigious or fancy schools. I ate ramen and peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches and little else for years. I did all of this, and I felt extra virtuous. I felt spiritual, even. I felt secure in knowing I was doing what was right with my money, and as a result I felt free to judge all of those who I felt were doing it wrong, who I felt were spending beyond their means. And it quickly veered from silently judging my peers who bought expensive cocktails at restaurants or drank $5 cappuccinos to questioning why a lower-income family would own a flat screen TV.

The problem with easy dominant culture mantras like “live within your means” is that they give the privileged more ammunition to judge those who aren’t making it while at the same time it makes no moral demands on those who make more than enough. If living within your means becomes one of your mantras, then who’s to say it’s wrong to buy a second or third beach home if you can afford it? It gives those with wealth permission to spend without constraint.

Eventually, something changed in me: I started to hear the nonsuccess stories and let them sink in. I didn’t realize how much I had changed until a member of my husband’s family, who worked at a grocery store, told me once how disgusted they were to find a woman buying dozens of packages of hot dogs and buns with her food stamps. “Can you imagine?” this person said incredulously. “Using her food stamps to buy food for a party?” I could, actually, imagine this scenario. I myself had been fed by people who used what little they had to invite others into celebration. I knew many different people who do not make a living wage in the United States and who supplemented their income with food stamps. These friends used what they had been given to bless others. I saw the generosity in this gesture while others only saw excess. We’ve been trained to be angry at the “excess” of using government aid to feed people, instead of working to end a system that pays people poverty wages. I wonder why that is?

One of my heroes is Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker Movement. She, along with her cofounder, Peter Maurin, was obsessed with the idea of helping create a world where it was easier to do good. Dorothy was a convert to Catholicism in her thirties and saw a clear connection between the social teachings of the Catholic Church and social action. Day and Maurin started houses of hospitality where the desperate could come and eat and sleep and talk about the issues of the day. The early days of the Catholic Worker Movement were filled with homeless men crowding her apartment and the weekly newspaper she banged out on her typewriter and sold for a penny a copy that highlighted the stories of injustice and the work of the Church. It was chaotic, it was difficult, it was aspirational.

Dorothy was fond of telling people not to call her a saint, saying it made her actual thoughts and teachings too easily dismissed. She truly believed that we all had a responsibility to each other, especially the poor. She believed the works of mercy were the hallmarks of Christian discipleship: feed the hungry, water the thirsty, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, visit the sick and the prisoner, and bury the dead. She had many reasons to despair at the way the world was going in the midst of the Great Depression—the thousands of men in line for bread, the abject poverty in the city, the corruption in the Church. But in her private journals she often took the time not to write about the great injustices but instead the simple pleasures that delighted her: a piece of pie and a cup of coffee. Rereading a favorite Dostoevsky novel. Listening to classical music in a chair by the fire. She declared these small moments were vital to her long-term work. She called them her duties of delight.2

Dorothy Day is a failure in the eyes of the world, including Christians who strive to be millionaires, who think the best way to change the world is to influence it on its own terms. I think about her, how she was able to live in true solidarity with the poor and the sick and the sad for so many years. I also want to experience the duty of despair and the duty of delight. I want to live in the tension of the idea that God might want us to be a part of righting the wrongs in the world, that we might be called to give up what we have hoarded and learn how to be open and generous. It might be awkward. It might get uncomfortable. It might feel too small in light of the magnitude of the inequality of the world. But as Dorothy Day wrote, “We can throw our pebble in the pond and be confident that its ever widening circle will reach around the world. We repeat, there is nothing we can do but love, and, dear God, please enlarge our hearts to love each other, to love our neighbor, to love our enemy as our friend.”3

Dorothy Day knew she would never be held up as financial success; her work was often either mocked or put on a pedestal, neither of which were comfortable spots. But she didn’t care. “We confess to being fools and wish that we were more so,” she wrote in an editorial for the Catholic Worker in 1946. “What we would like to do is change the world—make it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe and shelter themselves as God intended them to do.”4 If we should choose to live so foolishly like Jesus, we will be rewarded not so much with earthly pleasures but with the imagination like Dorothy had to hope another world could be possible. That we can live simply, justly, generously, and most of all gratefully: both for the blessings of our money and for the blessings of our neighbors who teach us how costly wealth can be to our souls.