Last week I said that to “not judge” can be an excuse for cowardice rather than the practice of humility. Real tolerance, that is the liberality of mind that allows for disagreement and nonconformity is an act of humility. Real tolerance assumes that we could be wrong, that is not our job to force people into conformity, and it is a recognition that civil disagreement in which people make arguments enriches everyone – and is the best opportunity for the best ideas to win out.

However, when “not judging” means more than tolerance, things begin to go wrong. When it means to not discern or distinguish it is anti-intellectual and anti-scientific/empirical. When it means not to speak it is anti-truth, anti-learning, and anti-community. When people can no longer make reasoned public arguments, or evaluate choices and decisions – it undermines the very basis of human interaction and the assumption that choices, ideas and actions matter more than feelings. It also assumes that people are not responsible to handle their own feelings – it assumes you are responsible for my feelings, even if you are confronting me because I am wrong, selfish and foolish. In short, it is anti-reality.

I hope I have the moral courage to literally lay my life down for tolerance and real pluralism. Meaning, in words attributed to Voltaire, “I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” That is ironic, since I disagree with most of what Voltaire said about anything that has to do with God. Yet, I believe certain kinds of political correctness are terrible for any community – making terrible cowards of both speakers and hearers. Political correctness makes us emotional hearers, trained to police what can be talked about rather than to attend ourselves to the reasonability and truthfulness of what is said. The product is not only emotionally shallow cowards but intellects stunted in their ability to assess things rationally and empirically. That is, it produces, in CS Lewis’s terms – ‘men without chests’ and ‘trousered apes’.

We not only need judgment and a healthy society, but a good bit of judgmentalism. No one needs training in how to be emotionally soft or intellectually foolish. But we need much practice in how to be civil in disagreement, fair in argument, charitable in response, inquisitive in investigation, open-minded in perspective and disciplined in thought.

And what is true in society is true in the church. It is better for us to be over judged then under judged. To be under judged is to not have good feedback and to not go through the discipline of handling unjust judgment. To be over judged is to get good feedback and be strengthened and toughened by needing to sort through accurate correction, honest mistakes and self-righteous hypocrisy.

That is why I believe that people who really want to grow spiritually invite correction and offer correction- and do so both humbly and kindly. It is because dealing with correction is a good in and of itself. Simply getting criticized is itself worthwhile. Because when it is combined with faith and humility it drives us to God, Scripture, wise mentors into the discipline of considering the loving perceptions of others. It tests our humility and comforts us that others care enough to speak into our lives.

I know I have overstated this, but that was intentional so that you’ll think about it.

1 Corinthians 5:6-8
⁶ Your boasting is not good. Don’t you know that a little yeast works through the whole batch of dough? ⁷ Get rid of the old yeast that you may be a new batch without yeast– as you really are. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. ⁸ Therefore let us keep the Festival, not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and wickedness, but with bread without yeast, the bread of sincerity and truth.

Without going into the history of Passover, the obvious point here is that you don’t need much yeast to make the whole loaf of bread rise. Yeast works its way in easily and entirely – and quickly fundamentally changes the dough.

Paul is plainly claiming that sin, when unchecked, does the same. And therefore silence fertilizes sin and chokes spiritual transformation.

In a desire for political freedom numerous American movements have basically made the claim that people’s behavior doesn’t significantly affect other people’s behavior. This has been most public in relationship to debates surrounding gay marriage – that if gay marriage is legalized it will not affect the institution of heterosexual marriage and family. I have never seen any empirical data that points in either direction.

However, if I have learned anything about human behavior, the obvious fact is that people’s behavior affects the behavior of others. It may be that morally we might say it should not, but in empirically it is obvious that it does. This has little or no bearing on how we should make laws in a liberal society. It may very well be that gay marriage should be legal whether or not it affects heterosexual marriage and family numbers. That is a completely different matter.

The point made here in Scripture, is that if the church is silent when sin sticks and grows, it will affect everyone else. Human beings are fundamentally social, they are shaped by social norms, and are affected deeply by social moors.

A brief look at economic data demonstrates that almost everybody does with their time and resources what other people in their social groups do. Their economic and moral lives look very similar. Some of this may be accounted for by similar upbringings or similar beliefs. But much of it can only be accounted for by people’s spoken and unspoken interactions with their nearest neighbors.

All societies have ways of approving and disapproving of others. And as much as we like to think of ourselves as rebels, even the social groups whose identities are based in rebellion are predictably and pervasively conforms to each other through those groups own processes of approval and disapproval. That is not because these rebellious groups are dumb hypocrites – it is because they are human beings, and human beings have complex social systems of approval and disapproval. It is simply part of being a pack, of herd, or a society. When we affect each other we affect each other.

When we are silent, we abdicate our moral responsibility and we let someone else set the standards of approval and disapproval. When we as the church to not do our own confronting, the world will confront us with its own approvals and disapproval’s until we conform to it.

The fact is, sin is never silent. It is always advertising for itself, because it is only interested in the self. It will always be loud, always brash, never civil, and usually attractive.

Proverbs 9:13-17
¹³ The woman Folly is loud; she is undisciplined and without knowledge. ¹⁴ She sits at the door of her house, on a seat at the highest point of the city, ¹⁵ calling out to those who pass by, who go straight on their way. ¹⁶ “Let all who are simple come in here!” she says to those who lack judgment. ¹⁷ “Stolen water is sweet; food eaten in secret is delicious!”

Sin has its own voice of approval and disapproval. It is always doing its own work of advertising and confronting. It is always advertising to a part of us intrigued by it – what the Bible calls “the flesh”- that is our body of desires out of discipline and out of proportion.

Sins self advocacy needs an adversary. Someone has to fight for what is right, true, good, noble, and honorable.

It is a dangerous thing to speak for godliness and holiness. It should be humbling and terrifying. We cannot be motivated by our hatred for those we must fight, but only for our love of those we wish to protect. And protect them we must – though the loud and undisciplined voice will accuse us of everything and slanderous predictably with its forked and twisted tongue.

But silence cannot be an option. Silence is to be complicit. It is to be a coward. It fertilizes sin and chokes righteousness and wisdom.

On Sunday I said before things were necessary to prepare rightly for a confrontation. You need authority, timing, motivation and practice. That is you need the right to do it in the first place; you need to do it at the right time; you need to do it for the right internal reasons, and you need to do it the right way.

So what is the right motivation?

1 Corinthians 5:1-2 It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that does not occur even among pagans: A man has his father’s wife. ² And you are proud! Shouldn’t you rather have been filled with grief and have put out of your fellowship the man who did this?

2 Corinthians 2:5-8
⁵ If anyone has caused grief, he has not so much grieved me as he has grieved all of you, to some extent– not to put it too severely. ⁶ The punishment inflicted on him by the majority is sufficient for him. ⁷ Now instead, you ought to forgive and comfort him, so that he will not be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow. ⁸ I urge you, therefore, to reaffirm your love for him.

The right feeling was not pride. This should have been sufficient indication that things were not spiritually going well. A church can’t be doing well spiritually and terrible morally. There may be a lot of people still sinning, but the overall trajectory of the churches people must be moving in a positive direction morally if good things are happening spiritually. The moral trajectory will track the spiritual trajectory.

Therefore the appropriate feeling was grief. The opposite of the pride of boasting is the pride of embarrassment. Both make the other person the grounds for your own success and self-importance or failure and rejection. Both boasting and embarrassment make you the issue rather than the other person. The right motion is grief because you are suffering at the cost of the well-being of the other person. Their personal destruction hurts you because you care about their well-being more than your own. Their self destruction scorches us as well – not our reputations, but our very hearts.

If the motivation for confrontation isn’t grief, you are almost certainly doing it for the wrong reasons. Even if you are exerting discipline to protect others, the attitude toward the person you are confronting should still be grief – or you are admitting you care only about the rest of the flock and not about them.

If their spiritual well-being is not at the heart of our hearts – not only is it wrong, but they will know it’s wrong – and it will hardly ever work.

To a cynical person this will all sound very condescending, but by that logic helping anyone always is – help comes from the assumption they cannot do it themselves. It is only truly condescending if our motivation is embarrassment or self-righteous superiority – neither of which is necessarily true, or should be true.

The emotional grief is a great overall test for us. It lets us know if our heart is connected to the heart of Christ. If we see anyone sitting, and our emotional reaction isn’t grief, there is something wrong. Somehow we see the center as different than us and outside of the circle we care about. Neither of these heart traits fit very well with the heart of the Savior.

Tolerance and confrontation require judgment – or the Christian word, discernment. Discernment is one of the only safe words still to say in relationship to judgment. When you talk about judgment, it’s probably better to use the words confrontation or discernment, the two main steps in judging.

First of all, I am referring to discernment and confrontation inside the Christian Church. The biblical doctrine of spiritual confrontation assumes that both people are self-professed Christ followers and connected by a strong commitment to Christ’s visible and local church – which is assumed to be true of any real believer in the New Testament.

The general rule of thumb is that we tolerate or refrain from judging whenever four characteristics do not converge. This does not include “soft confrontation” – where we might offer our perspective or fear for a situation or action – without claiming that it is objectively wrong and requires action. What I call “soft confrontation” would be about 97% of the confrontations I initiate. And one of the reasons is that I believe that if you engage in proper soft confrontation, and if the whole community invites soft confrontation – then you get to the need for hard confrontation much less often. Things get corrected before they get too much momentum.

Hard confrontation is necessary when for things converge: authority, timing, motivation and practice.

You cannot decently avoid a hard confrontation when you have the right authority, it is the right time, is coming from the right motivations and you have learned to use the right practices. Authority comes when the situation is ongoing, objective, unrepentant and a professing believer. First Corinthians 5 explicitly says that judging the world isn’t our business – though God will judge it. But it also says that judging the church is just as much our business as judging the world isn’t.

If a particular sin is objective and ongoing – that is it’s not a single mistake, and it is clearly written in Scripture that is wrong – then you have to discern if it’s truly unrepentant. I like to use the ancient churches three divisions in regard to send: infirmity, ignorance and presumption. Sins of infirmity are that which comes from personal sickness – either physical or psychological. That is a person knows it’s wrong, believes it’s wrong, wants to change and simply can’t find a way to do it. It is a condition of weakness and confusion. These people need to be suffered with, encouraged and if possible, help in some way that takes away their confusion. Ignorance assumes that the person’s problem is a lack of information or understanding. It are there ignorant – they don’t even know the thing is wrong. Or they lack understanding – they just don’t “get it”. And as I have said many times, I believe most American Christians simply don’t understand the gospel they believe. This is apparently the point in 1st Corinthians – since virtually the whole book is explaining the true identity of people who believe they’ve already believed in Jesus, but apparently have no idea what that means. He is trying to cure their ignorance of understanding. This step should always precede hard confrontation.

If these two are not the case, you are probably down to sins of presumption – where people presume that they can do whatever they want and God will forgive them, or that they don’t care what happens. In this case, the person either needs to concede they aren’t Christian, or they need to be removed from the gathered fellowship of believers. The church cannot continue to assure someone who has no evidence for assurance, it has to act for the good of the person presumptively setting, and for the good of the wider community that will be affected by the spreading power of sin. A lack of confrontation in this situation fertilizes sin and chokes righteousness in the community of God’s people.

Then, you need to make sure that you understand the practices of godly confrontation- the shortest workable summary would be to read the first verses of Matthew chapter 7 and most of Matthew chapter 18.

Last week I said seven main things I think are worth remembering about the Christian and interpersonal social judgment – not eternal judgment or legal judgment.

1. Judgment is a faculty that is God-given, necessary and even good
   

Aristotle called humans the rational animal. The fact that we can think, and think morally and in terms of outcomes is one of the things that makes humans interesting and powerful. The human brain is wired and the human soul designed for judgment. We make judgments involuntarily and immediately about most of the things in our lives – thousands every day. Anyone who has an ideology against judgment had better have some idea positively of what to do with this innate and completely necessary faculty. Before you can say judging is bad, you better understand how judgment is good.

1. We need to have good judgment about judging – we need to learn these things cold
   

Most people have fairly simplistic and unrealistic notions about judgment. Many think a simple legalistic prohibition will work: “don’t judge!” This is terribly naïve. The Bible has a lot to say about judgment, and you really can get an overall picture that is very helpful – and very important.

1. Judging is regulated, not forbidden – and we usually regulate good and important things – not bad things we are trying to get rid of.
   

Sometimes regulations are designed to make things impossible to do. It is the passive aggressive way to forbid something. If you don’t want somebody to hunt for example, instead of outlawing it, you could just make the license $50,000.

But that is not how we normally use regulation. We regulate good things that must be kept but that are also powerful and potent. Whenever good things have the ability to cause dramatic pain, we tend to regulate them. The fact that judging is highly regulated in the Bible is probably greater evidence that it is important and good – than that it is something that should be constantly forbidden.

1. It’s God’s judgment that matters – not others judgment of us, our judgment of others, or even our judgment of ourselves.
   

The main point of the first verses of 1st Corinthians chapter 4 is that the judgment of others doesn’t matter nearly as much as God’s judgment. That is not to say the judgment of others or ourselves has no importance whatsoever. It’s just to say that in comparison to how we should view the centrality of God’s judgment, the judgment of others is a very small thing and if we think we ourselves are innocent – we need to know that we could be very much mistaken.

This means that when we think about the judgment of others or ourselves we have an obvious question to ask – does God agree or disagree with this judgment? Would God judge me the way I’m judging myself? What in the judgment of others would God agree with – even if he would say it the way they do?

1. Sometimes it’s wrong to judge, sometimes to not judge – what does love require? What would God have you do for redemptive purposes?
   

Ecclesiastes chapter 3 says there is a time in the season for everything under heaven. Only a fool could say that is always right to judge or always wrong. Both a fool or a wise person could believe that sometimes you should judge and sometimes not. But only a wise person, someone who is spiritually mature, can really know when to confront and when not to. It takes wisdom to know the right timing and season – even if you have the authority to confront.

1. Sometimes to not judge is an excuse for cowardice

Although refraining from judgment is often the wise and loving thing to do, I believe one of the reasons refraining from judgment is so culturally accepted his cowardice. We are afraid to be confronted and we are afraid to confront. Both cost us something dear – our illusion that we are good, and our safety from being slandered.

Although refraining from judgment has its merits, we have to be very careful with it, or it will become an abdication from every responsibility to be socially brave even down to our marriages and our parenting. And almost nothing would create so predictable and unmitigated social disaster.

1. Judgment Bible passages need to be read in their context – or you’ll get the wrong idea
   

Don’t trust Bible quotations when people throw them in your face. Go read them in their context – they often mean nothing like or the exact opposite of what the person who quoted them said they meant. For example in Matthew 7 where it says “don’t judge” Jesus demands we confront one another. Don’t be gullible, and read the Bible for yourself in context.

1. The judgment process: look for it in you, help your brother, don’t confront a fool right now
   

Matthew chapter 7 and 18 are the simplest and clearest process for confrontation. In Matthew 7 the process is to look for the sin in yourself first, then help your brother or sister. This helps you see your own sin and diminishes hypocrisy as much is possible – helping to people rather than none.

In Matthew 18 the process starts from private and escalates to public – using the least amount of social force necessary. And it starts with going to the person alone. This outlaws gossip and slander, while requiring the courage to go and talk to someone directly. And I have experienced over and over again the wisdom of this biblical command. When people know that you are not slandering and gossiping about them, but will go directly to them out of love, having looked first at yourself, and out of the motivation to truly help – you will be surprised how often people love you for it. But, it’s not every time for sure.

What do modern marriage and divorce rates mean for American Society? I read this blog while studying for my sermon. The following was my comment:

Gist of that Blog: All these numbers mean are that people are freer and aren’t forced into bad marriages. Divorce rates are falling so don’t get so angry about high divorce rates and gay marriage!

My Comment:

Some big problems in this analysis unless it only exists to debunk moral or Political ‘conservatism’. For example, divorce rates are down because marriage and fertility rates are down. Is that good? It just means fewer people fail at marriage because fewer people try. If marriage is bad, that’s good, if it’s good, then that’s bad.

You have to assume some unspoken premises here. If your supposed ‘good’ is personal freedom, then this is all probably good news. People have more choices and there are more ‘scripts’ made possible by birth control, co-habitation, no fault divorce, abortion and so on. This should naturally make the percentages of marriages that break fewer, since those marrying are more given to the arrangement. But that doesn’t mean we are becoming a more stable, committing and familialy and civicly self-sufficient society producing more able children that suffer less under abuse and poverty. These numbers equate to much more single parenting, and therefore childhood and female poverty, fewer younger men in the workforce and a fertility rate that is below replacement (2.2), meaning racial and cultural extinction. If these trends continue we’ll have more children born out of marriage than in it, and that is with more children being aborted than born in some place, like NYC.

If you’re after ‘social capital’- the ability of families and communities to take care of themselves without a welfare state (needed in both the Liberal (so it’s sustainable) and Conservative (because it’s also desirable) social vision), then this is all quite bad. And it is especially bad for the disadvantaged when you break it down socioeconomically- marriage rates are still 85% among the new upper class and only 45-48% (i can’t remember) among the new lower classes. these family scripts are feeding into major and long term class divisions that had not broadly existed previously in America- leading to Liberally abhorrent income inequalities that will last for generations.

If you just want to attack conservative religious people by means of persuasion, then this is a clever post, but if you’re trying to demonstrate that these realities are good for either a Conservative or Liberal moral vision- I think this post missed what these studies really tell us.

Another troubling thing in this graph is that we are apparently meant to think that divorce rates are not out of control because the 1940 trend line comes up to about where our actual divorce numbers are coming down to. That is a very deceiving notion. If I were a doctor and I told you that when you had X% of cancer in your body you’d die, and that in our last test it was only Y%, would this comfort you if you were still above trend to die pretty soon? the divorce rate line will only be encouraging when it get back down to well under the trend line and even that will only matter if the marriage line starts trending back up. If you want to complete the picture you’d have to track informal families and their levels of breakup too, since that is the new norm in a number of sub cultural groups. And it is these arrangements that are creating many of the social ills that we should be concerned about.

One of the clearest fact’s in the American church is the church planting usually fails. At one point failure rates were over 80%. This is why most church planting networks have come up with fairly advanced methods of church planting candidate assessment. This makes sense given the high rates of failure and demanding financial investment of every church plant. Church planting is a mom the highest stress jobs in ministry, in one of the hardest on marriages and family.

In the last week I have talked to two young man who are going into pastoral ministry, who are planning on church planting, and who are getting married this year. It may be wise to allow for other church planters to chime in here, but I think it is extremely ill advised in virtually every situation for a couple to attend a church plant, in any church lending model, in the first year or two of their marriage.

I am glad that church planting has become accepted in seminaries and in ministry circles as an important endeavor. This was not true even a decade ago when I was cutting my teeth in ministry. However, church planting cannot become the default act of ministry for young men and women. Most people going into ministry are extremely ill-suited for this work, and it can be either the response of someone who has not found in excepting church, or the outworking of a wider frustration with church – and a desire to start one truly their own, “as it should be”.

I am an enormous fan of seminary education. It was perhaps the most formative years of my ministry preparation. But I am also a huge fan of apprenticeship, and for young men and women to get to try ministry and learn about being in ministry before they are under the pressures of being a point person for any particular organization. I am a beneficiary of someone give him responsibility at a fairly young age. However, I think it to be very unhealthy to think most 23 to 25-year-olds will make good lead pastors for any kind of church, especially if they have not gone through an apprenticeship in a church with a more seasoned pastor. There is as much that can’t be taught in seminary as that can only be taught in seminary.

The heart of this problem goes back to our system of empowering young ministers – whether is to help them to an off ramp away from ministry, or to help them prepare for point leadership in a ministry. Presently, I know of only a handful of churches that have pastoral internships or a apprenticeships or residencies designed to prepare and empower young pastors. Many would say that twentysomethings don’t want to apprentice with established leaders – that they believe they know better and want to strike out on their own. I disagree. If they are really involved in ministry, get to actually try things, and have wide access to the inner workings of the church and decision-making – I have found they are very engaged and are willing to serve as junior staff or interns.

The biggest issue here is clearance. Many internships to not allow interns into staff meetings, board meetings, and the most sensitive situations in church life. Conversely, these are exactly the situations young leaders must be and if they are going to be prepared for the work of leadership. Some leaders look at this as a Catch-22 – what they have to give is exactly what they can’t give. But I disagree with this notion. It means you have to select interns more carefully, and that you may even need a written clearance system for each intern, delineating what level of sensitivity they are cleared for or trained for – but I do not believe interns are inherently less careful than anyone else. Confidentiality and sensitivity are things people need training in – and are among the most important skills, the least trainable in seminary contexts, and yet very transferable in mentoring contexts.

I believe the American church needs a revolution in interning and apprenticing if we want the work of God among our twenty-somethings to effect the American local church. At High Point we are trying to do our part. This year we have had three interns, and the class for next year maybe somewhere around five. It takes time and effort, but these young people add a lot of idealism, and make all the rest of the established staff better – because none of us want to disappoint them as their mentors. It makes me a little less lazy, a little more careful, and a little more inspired. The same motivation from my children that makes me want to be a better husband, is the same motivation that comes from my interns that makes me want to be a better pastor. People who are in the position of being an example want to be a good example – especially if they know someone is watching them.

If you get the right interns, organize the program well, treat them well and let them try things – internships and apprenticeships can be enormously enriching for the church. And if you can get the people of the church to buy into it so that you can offer interns free housing and food, the programs can become much more cost-effective than you previously imagined. And getting the church interested is probably less difficult than you might imagine. Everyone wants to be part of a teaching church – everyone wants to feel like their church is worth something and accomplishing something. In our first formal year of offering our internship we have more open homes than we have interns to put in them – at a ratio of about 2 to 1.

Screwtape Letter #14: Here

Audio Book: C.J. Mahaney Humility: True Greatness

Recommended Talks: The One to Whom I Will Look and True Greatness Talk

Sermon Section: 

Intro: distortion- review: pride freezes spiritual growth – it disturbs the gospel like cold on seeds  humility is the heat needed for germination (germination in the tray that was in the cold – germination in the tray that was in the upstairs bedroom) one has grown less over a longer period, all the other has grown more over a shorter period – and the seeds, white, soil, water, containers – have all been the same gospel – seed soil – person ministry – water humility – heat and light

Pride and humility set the boundaries for the advance of biblical holiness in us.  

Definition of Pride: self-bias- negative or positive

Screwtape Letter 14:

1. Get him to believe humility is thinking less of himself – we will get him to try to believe a lie to live the truth

- we will get him to focus more on himself

- and less on his neighbor

Both are the opposite of humility: which is- seeing the truth without bias, and thinking less of ourselves and more of God and our neighbor. “The Enemy wants to bring the man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in the, fact, without being any more (or less) or otherwise glad at having done it than he would be if it had been done by another. The Enemy wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favor that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbor’s talents.”

Humility is to see and rejoice in things for what they are- rather than what they are in relation to us.

That is: to see our own accomplishments for what they are in relation to God and our neighbor (glorifying and pleasing to the one, and helpful and enriching to the other), rather than what they do to our standing with ourselves or others. It is to be fully concerned with what a thing we do IS rather than how it LOOKS FOR US. ILL: Bowling last night – I was excited to get a strike and get the prize for myself – I was unhappy to see someone else get a strike and get the same prize. The thing I like about my strike was that I had gotten it. The more this humility exists- the more rapidly we can see the truth about God and everything else and grow into all he has created us and redeemed us to be. The less is exists, the more pride makes clarity, truth and love stunted in their spiritual germination. Result of pride: Distortion ? Delusion ? Dysfunctionpride leads to:

• Distortion – our vision of the Truth is distorted
• Delusion – our view of Ourselves is deluded
• Dysfunction- our view of other people is Dysfunctional

Pride’s distortion leads to personal delusion and social dysfunction  Pride always leads to Social Dysfunction- to a tear in the community, not to a mended net- with no seems and no weak spots.  humility brings clarity, tells us the truth, and teaches us how to love – all by my message of Christ’s life death and resurrection.

^NIV 1 Corinthians 1:10 I appeal to you, brothers, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another so that there may be no divisions among you and that you may be perfectly united in mind and thought.

“schism”- lit. “Tear”

“Mended”- stitched or woven together so there is no hold and no weak seem- completely mended.

Pride always leads from a diustroted view of truth, to a delusional view about ourselves, leading to dysfunction among our neighbors and our relation to God.

Conversely, humility always decreases distortion, and begins to allow the seed of the Gospel a more powerful and effectual germination.

There has been quite a bit of talk in the last couple of years as to whether or not the middle-class is disappearing. Here in Wisconsin, this has been a big debate since unions are seen as a holding the middle-class and governors got Walker is seen as hurting unions- and that’s true of at least the public ones. But this is one of those tragic areas where politics and economics is much more complex than most people would like to admit. Is the middle-class really disappearing? Some are arguing that is all but disappearing. Others have shown that many of the historic middle class people have moved into the upper class.

One might argue, “surely there is data on this.” That’s a great observation. You’d think there would be great and incontrovertible evidence about this. The problem is, when seeking economic definitions, how we frame things in terms of math and criteria make an enormous difference.

For example, look at table 1. This table comes from Richard Burkhauser of Cornell University. He recently published a paper in which he disputed the findings of Piketty and Saez. Piketty and Saez found in their study of the middle class and incomes that the increase in living standards from 1979 to 2007 had increased only 3.2%. This is not anywhere near the growth rate of the upper classes, and therefore would demonstrate the middle last phone behind. 3.2% growth over 30 years is virtually no growth at all.

Now it’s important to note that Burkhauser concedes that Piketty and Saez are right given the math that they did. If you look at people’s pretax pre-transfer reported income as individual tax units, then it the growth rate does come to 3.2%. His argument is that if you measured in number of other ways living standards of people have risen dramatically. For example if you take the bottom category of post-tax income post transfer of other income related benefits and included the growth of health insurance which has appeared and increase traumatically over the last 30 years, then even if you only take a single tax units, the middle-class has experienced and 18.2% rate.

Even more drastic, is if one recognizes that most people exist in households. When we look at peoples living standards we have to look at their ability to consume wealth. There’s an old saying, “one can live as cheaply as to”. The fact is that if two people live together even if their income were to decrease their ability to consume goods would increase. That is because what economists call the household multiplier – that shared expenses increase a person’s ability to consume goods. So if you look at the bottom right-hand corner of this table it demonstrates that if you include post-taxed post transfer was health insurance, and you do the math for size adjusted households then the living standards of the bill last have increased tenfold over Piketty and Saez’s findings.

Now remember, I’m not saying this means that any particular political ideology is right or wrong. But Piketty and Saez’s 3.2% number has been used by a number of liberal political pundits to claim that the wealthy in this country are obliterating the middle-class. It simply doesn’t appear that that is actually the case. And of these kinds of pundits rarely discuss the decrease consuming power of single parenthood which is the result of a dissolving nuclear family. The dissolution of the middle-class has more to do with the dissolution and instability of marriage that of the economic well-being of people in their jobs. This is of course a much more personal and uncomfortable fact for individuals to face, and so as a group we tend to like to blame other people who are not ourselves – that is the rich.

Dorothy Sayers, who was no political conservative, used to refer to this as the politics of envy. There is something to that. And however you choose to look at this data, it should do something to both people on the political left and the right. From the left one might still argue that slightly over 1% a year growth of the middle-class is still insufficient. However people on the left should also recognize that 3.2% over 30 years is artificially and unreasonably small. The fact is, that common sense dictates to most of us that we are virtually all living better. Most of us can look back toward childhood and see that we are living better than our parents did or that we did when living at home. Money might be tight, but we are probably driving a more efficient and reliable vehicle, sending out calls and texts are smart phone, eating a larger variety of foods, entertaining ourselves more frequently with videos and games, with more access to more advanced medical procedures for health and so on.

Economics is a tricky business, and whenever you hear someone quoting economic statistics that offend you toward an emotional reaction, I think the first reaction is to check yourself and consider whether or not this is a good time to disbelieve the speaker. Seeking an emotional reaction in us is an attempt by the speaker to draw us into their confidence – but if we are wise, it is often precisely the moment in which they should fall out of our confidence.

P.S.- here is the spreadsheet put out by Piketty and Saez

Here is more on the themes of 1 Corinthians 1-4. In this sermon I cover the anatomy of factionalism and favoritism, it’s signs and how to escape it. I think it’s really important material.

Favoritism and Factionalism from Nic Gibson on Vimeo.