It’s Past Times for Churches to Cut Ties with Dave Ramsey
Dave Ramsey is in the national news this past week. This time for dismissing those whose lives could be improved with stimulus checks. He has said that if they are dependent on those checks, they must be pretty messed up already. Of course this just a pattern that Ramsey has shown of blaming the poor, praising the rich, and missing the heart of the message of Jesus on economics while claiming to be an expert on a Biblical view of finance.
Obviously, everything he has to say is not bad. Frugality is a good thing and getting into deep debt is obviously not something to aim for. However, the real problem is that he claims to be an expert on the Biblical view on money while living in a multimillion dollar mansion. From what I have heard from him, he is good at taking certain passages out of context, but actually wrestling with the real implications of the teachings of Jesus who said that the poor are blessed and said woe to the rich are not present in his ideas. In his worldview, the wealthy are wise, and the poor are only in that situation for their own foolishness.
In the end that is his biggest problem. Wealth or poverty is all on the individual. Certainly, there is an element of personal responsibility and individual decisions that play a role in economic health, but it is much more complex than that. And Ramsey is consistently against any structural changes whether it is minimum wage increases, government assistance, etc. that would actually lead to some of that structural change. On a side note, he also shown quite troubling xenophobic views.
Ramsey has missed the heart of the economic message of Jesus while somehow making a fortune on a biblical view of money. It is time for churches to stop directly giving him money or giving money to him indirectly through their congregants. I am sure that there are other financial programs they can look at from Christian leaders who do not shame the poor, praise the rich, and miss the revolutionary message of Jesus. We need to learn individual responsibility with our finances but we cannot due that at the expense of also looking at structural change.
