Christianism and poverty: a theoretical-methodological approach

This article explores the forms of relationship between religious beliefs about poverty and perceptions of inequality. To do so, it recovers the concepts of Max Weber's comprehensive sociology of elective affinities and ideal (or pure) types. In this way, exemplifying with certain typical-ideal representative, it identifies three answers of Christianity to the question of why there are poor people and what should be done with poverty: poverty as an object of curse, as an object of charity and the poor as a subject of rights; and he points out their coincidences and parallels with the causal attributions for poverty: individualistic (meritocratic), fatalistic and structural, respectively. However, in no way does it suggest that the relationship is deterministic or unidirectional. Rather, it gives the idea that the presence of the former may influence the consolidation of the latter in the believer (which may have secular foundations) and vice versa. Finally, the results of the research are proposed as a theoretical framework for further empirical study of the relationship between religious beliefs and perceptions of inequality.