Last night while guest hosting the “Albert Mohler Program” on the radio, I had an interesting and convicting question from a woman in, I believe, New York, who wondered about the morality of Christian businessmen owning pawnshops, check-cashing and title-loan businesses and the like. Apparently, someone in her congregation owns one of these businesses, and this woman wondered whether the issue was one of church discipline or even of moral inquiry at all.
Her question is complicated, precisely because I know there are pawnshop owners who run fair businesses that glorify Christ and help the communities in which they live. My first inclination was to encourage this woman not to judge this businessman at all. After all, we all know Christians in businesses everyone assumes are shady, simply on the basis of caricature and personal anecdote. I remember how frustrated I was as a child to see the stereotypical “car salesman” on television, knowing that my father, an honest man, managed a car dealership. I’m sure there are Christian pawnshop owners in the same situation.
On the other hand, the woman seemed to be less anxious to judge a brother, than to sort out her own sense of moral ambiguity. Is her church standing by while the poor are oppressed, and allowing a brother to corrupt his own soul? Or, is this a morally neutral issue? It is difficult not to see a real moral dilemma in “title loan” shops, for instance, that spring up in impoverished neighborhoods charging skyrocketing interest rates to the poor, with the title to their automobiles as collateral. It is difficult not to see a moral quandary with a business that, by design, seeks to manipulate the poor into a debt from which they cannot ever extricate themselves. As one who has ministered in a casino town, I was immediately struck by the pawnshops and title-loan businesses that sprung up just after “gaming” was approved in our county. And I remember visiting families who had nothing because the father had pawned everything away to play the slots on the beach.
I didn’t have a simple answer for this woman on the radio. But I do commend her for thinking about a Christian corporate witness to the poor in a way that is so easy to forget. Too many Christians articulate “responsibility to the poor” only in terms of, at best, a revived Great Society and, at worst, a global version of Sandinista-led Nicaragua. It seems to me the biblical focus on the poor is often much more local, and thus much more complicated. The prophets, for instance, hammer away at the covenant community of Israel for turning a blind eye to those who “grind the faces” of the poor (Isa 3:15), as though there is no Judge. The Mosaic Law speaks of poverty in big cosmic terms, but more often in smaller, more practical acts of kindness, such as the provision for gleaning that sustained Ruth and, thus, the line of our Lord Jesus. James calls employers to task for unjust wages (James 5:1-6), and he rebukes local congregations for something as seemingly inconsequential as seating poorer people in the back during gathered worship (James 2:1-6).
In the latest issue of Touchstone, Frederica Mathews-Green pens a moving article on our tendency to see “The Poor” as an almost inhuman category, a cause rather than real people who sin and need Christ. I think, in the same way, we often see “Poverty” as an issue rather as a real problem of individual and corporate sanctification. This doesn’t mean we’ll always have easy answers. And I still don’t have a 3-second answer to the question of a Christian title-loan shop owner. But the question itself is a good place to start.
