Mosiah 4: The Poor

 

The opening of Mosiah, Chapter 4 extols the principle of grace (a topic I will address in several entries). Yet verse 24—"I would that ye say in your hearts that: I give not because I have not, but if I had I would give”—returns to what people do with their beliefs.

I have been in Sunday School classes where verse 24 was used to discuss whether or not people should give money to panhandlers. People in favor of the loose change theory of charity spoke up and darted judgmental glances at others. They could glare at me all they wanted--I rarely have cash on me--but I happened to know that one of the recipients of those judgmental glances has, over his lifetime, donated considerable amounts of money to charitable programs in America and other countries. At the time, I was considerably irritated.

Such judgmental members clearly missed the point. The verse rests on a state of mind as much as an act. Previous verses address assumptions made about those in need and conclude, "Are we not all beggars?" (Mosiah 4:19). The one-road-to-charity folks are actually guilty of the very thing the speaker, King Benjamin, is preaching against. You can’t judge someone else’s circumstances based on what you see or assume.

In our social media-obsessed world of labels and insta-judgments, I think this lesson often gets lost.

More importantly, for the purpose of these posts, the world has changed. 

Nearly the entire history of the world is the history of people trying not to starve to death. Big Brother’s game-based control over the refrigerator is more accurate to the human condition than perhaps appreciated. Historical exceptions such as Ancient Egypt (trustworthy harvests; major works projects) are the exceptions that prove the rule.  

It is notable and touching that even in poverty-stricken circumstances, human beings are capable of great nobility and compassion. An examination of Anglo-Saxon skeletons indicates that elderly peasants who could no longer work were still cared for by somebody.

A descendant of the original soup kitchens.

That "somebody" would have belonged to the family/community. From the ancient world to the early nineteenth century, the number of aid organizations to which one could contribute was far less than now by a magnitude of a thousand+. 

Regarding the nineteenth century specifically, charity organizations in the urban environment flourished as the urban environment took hold (there's no indication that poor people before urbanization were any better off; they were simply more invisible). The YMCA began in the mid-1800s, the Salvation Army also in the mid-1800s. Soup kitchens came and went but weren’t going strong as regular city institutions until the mid-1800s.

Most charity for most of history was local and church-based. And brought about almost entirely by face-to-face/door-to-door requests. Such efforts did great work! But the fail-safes that modern people take for granted—something as basic as not being sent to jail for debt—didn’t exist. Most people were one harvest away from not being able to feed their families. There is a reason that Pa Ingalls spent a large amount of Laura’s childhood not at home (no, the reality wasn’t like the television show). When a bunch of locusts eat your wheat, you have to go work on the railroad instead. 

And there's a reason that the agricultural poor, despite D.H. Lawrence, went to work in mines and factories when the Industrial Revolution rolled in. Despite the incredible dangers of those places, they were better than working on farms. 

Factory workers at Amoskeag, who were working 12-hour days, still considered that they had gained advantages, such as more free time in the evenings. And they joined social organizations, a pattern of civic engagement that took off in the nineteenth century. 

In the 1830s, however, most people were still laborers or farmers, which means that most people were poor laborers or farmers. Even the “wealthy” people who helped out Joseph Smith were not what we moderns would necessarily deem wealthy (though Martin Harris did pay $3,000 for The Book of Mormon's printing of 5000 volumes, which cost is close to $100,000 today--the calculation is confused by certain things being less expensive and other things being more expensive, and printing was steadily becoming less expensive; it was nevertheless a great deal of money). 

In the 1830s, many aid organizations associated with urban environments were still in their infancy. Consequently, one of the best survival mechanisms at the time was to be a member of a functional social community, such as a religious community. See King Benjamin's citizens, nineteenth-century experimental communities like Oneida, and, eventually, Joseph Smith’s Nauvoo.

Nineteenth-century readers were well-aware of the benefits of such communities. And well-aware of the daily risks they otherwise faced. The reminder to hold one’s fire regarding another person’s circumstances would have hit home.