religions Article
Politics, Poverty and the Church in an ‘Age of Austerity’ Chris Shannahan * and Stephanie Denning Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations, Coventry University, Coventry CV1 2TL, UK * Correspondence: ac0971@coventry.ac.uk
Abstract: The ‘Age of Austerity’ has ruptured the social fabric of contemporary Britain. Arising from our three-year Life on the Breadline project, this article represents the first fieldwork-led analysis of the multidimensional nature of austerity-age poverty by academic theologians in the UK. The article analyses the impact that austerity has had on Christian responses to poverty and inequality in the UK. We draw on our six ethnographic case studies and interview responses from over 120 national and regional Church leaders to exemplify the four approaches to the Christian engagement with poverty that we identified during our research: ‘caring’, ‘campaigning and advocacy’, ‘enterprise’ and ‘community building’. We argue that the Church needs to grasp the systemic, multidimensional and violent nature of poverty in order to realise the potential embedded in its extensive social capital and fulfil its goal of ‘transforming structural injustice’. The paper shows that the Church remains nervous of moving beyond welfare-based responses to poverty and suggests that none of the existing approaches can force poverty into retreat until the Church re-imagines itself as a liberative movement that embodies God’s preferential option for the poor in every aspect of its life and practice. Keywords: austerity; inequality; Christianity; Church; poverty; political theology; social action
1. Introduction
Citation: Shannahan, Chris, and Stephanie Denning. 2023. Politics, Poverty and the Church in an ‘Age of Austerity’. Religions 14: 59. https:// doi.org/10.3390/rel14010059 Academic Editor: Jeffrey Haynes Received: 25 September 2022 Revised: 21 December 2022 Accepted: 22 December 2022 Published: 29 December 2022
Copyright: © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).
Following the 2010 UK General Election Prime Minister David Cameron insisted that austerity was an economic necessity. Everyone needed to make sacrifices. However, the austerity policies that the Cameron-led Coalition Government introduced were largely targeted at people who were already left out or left behind. The role that faith groups have played in responding to austerity age poverty has been extensively analysed within the social sciences but rarely explored within theology. Theologians have engaged widely with poverty and inequality in different times and places, as seen, for example, in the emergence of liberation theology in Latin America but, to date, there have been no extensive or empirically based theological analyses of the multidimensional nature of poverty and the unequal impact of austerity policies in the UK since the 2008 global financial crash. The perfect storm of structural injustice, the unequal impact of austerity, the COVID-19 pandemic and the current ‘cost of living crisis’ raises crucial questions about the role of theology in an era characterised by deepening poverty and growing inequality. This paper provides an example of the interdisciplinary contextual theology of poverty we argue is needed in the face of seemingly unending austerity. Drawing on primary data from our Life on the Breadline research project, we argue that theologians in the UK need to develop a more nuanced understanding of the multidimensional and systemic nature of poverty. We recognise the long history of Christian responses to urban poverty in the UK stretching back to the Christian Socialist movement in the nineteenth century (Bradstock and Rowland 2002). Furthermore, we acknowledge the historic experience of austerity amongst Black and Brown Britons (Beckford 2004) and the roots of the contemporary experience of poverty and inequality in the Thatcher years of the early 1980s (Whiteside 2016). However, in this paper, we limit our analysis to Christian action on poverty during the ‘Age of Austerity’ that followed the 2008 global financial crisis, as evidenced in our Life on the Breadline research. We suggest that the Church needs
Religions 2023, 14, 59. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel14010059
https://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions