At Home We Are Equals

Because of the Sermon on the Mount and a few parables shared by Jesus, our Christ-haunted culture inherits a suspicion of the wealthy and powerful, along with a certain conviction that God reserves something special for the poor, that he sees in them a dignity that the worldly don’t recognize. This spiritual impulse has been occasionally plugged in, hijacked, or transmogrified into modern political ideologies that seek to organize our hatreds and justify our violent impulses. That’s how it came to be that Luigi Mangione’s alleged wanton murder of a health-insurance CEO, which redistributed nothing but a father’s body into a graveyard, came to be romanticized and admiringly joked about.

And that same impulse has sparked some of the uglier reactions to the wildfires of California. The fires have consumed some of the most desirable neighborhoods in America. Many of these single-family homes were built at the zenith of American residential architecture and craftsmanship. They were occupied by members of the upper middle class of Los Angeles, many of whom had purchased them before real estate inflation turned them into million-dollar properties. Some were occupied by truly wealthy celebrities. I’ve seen “screw ’em” sentiments justified by every ideological flavor. Christians who hate immoral Hollywood. Climate obsessives on Reddit’s r/collapse board exulting in the destruction of Mel Gibson’s home because he denies their preferred climate models. Progressives denigrating the undeserving rich. Conservatives gleefully telling Californians, “This is what you voted for.”