Scarcity: The Context of The Christian Life

The Struggle Not Against Flesh and Blood Sure Feels Like Flesh and Blood

The first in a longer exploration of how scarcity—material, psychological, and spiritual—affects the Christian moral life. First up: what kind of abundance is creation? And where does all this scarcity come from?

Scarcity: It’s Not All Political, But It’s Not Not Political

Scarcity is, quite simply, one of the conditions which is most ordinary to life, and the one which we most frequently try to hide. In my biomedical ethics course, as we round the corner toward summer, it’s time to talk about health care systems, and particularly, why there never seems to be enough care to go around. Why is it that, when I or my family need to schedule something more than routine, there are long wait times? How can it be, when I pay out hundreds of dollars a month in premiums, that the care seems to always be one step further?

The answer is partly political choices: scarcity, as many writers have put it, is the product of making certain things priorities and not others. Societies such as the U.S. by and large make access to drinking water a universal necessity, and so, it’s rare to find a tap that doesn’t come on.¹ But politics doesn’t explain all forms of scarcity. To the example from the beginning, even if there were equitable forms of health care coverage nationally², it wouldn’t alleviate some of the distribution problems: rural, more far-flung places would still lack a baseline of health care available in many metropolitan areas.

Again, the reasons for medical scarcity are partly political: medicine remains a for-profit industry, which means physicians incur huge debt for medical school, trapping medical care within the iron logic of paying down debts.³ But even if the politics were equalized, and if the incentives for moving into rural places were there politically, desire makes for a wild card: you either want the beach or the mountains, the city or the fields, and sometimes, there are things that money can’t overcome.

So, if the goods of creation are unequally distributed, where does this come from? This gets us, through the political question, into a more basic theological question of desire, and of inequality and scarcity.

Why all this scarcity? And what does it have to do with God?