I asked a young Uber driver in Accra why he liked Uber. He responded: “Because it’s professional.”

In his culture, status and shame matter a lot. I could tell by his lack of mastery of English that he doesn’t have much education. So he has low status. But now he is part of something professional. He likes the status. He never did mention money, but he did mention specifics related to status and shame, including that he doesn’t get hassled at places where taxis (which have low status) get hassled.

You might find his ideas strange. But note that we Westerners tend to follow materialism – the idea that matter is all that matters (pun intended). So we would rate Uber based on its economic impact, whereas my Ghanaian Uber driver’s used an evaluation based on the non-material concept of human dignity.

That fits his culture. It also matches the findings of a World Bank report entitled Voices of the Poor which is a study of poverty based on interviews with 60,000 poor people in more than 50 countries. In it the poor often defined their poverty in non-material terms such lack of social connections and lack of respect.

Some Westerners are so stuck in their mindset of materialism that they criticize translating the Bible for the poor because that doesn’t meet material needs. But the poor people in question often support the translation. Why? Because they have a much more holistic view of their situation and its solutions than critics trapped in their western cultural materialism.

It is central to Christian faith that God’s care for us extends way beyond our material needs; our salvation is the example par excellence, but salvation does not stand alone. In the Beatitudes, Jesus presents an outline of human blessedness that relegates the material to its rightful niche.

We translate the Bible for the poor in part because the poor say it helps and it does, the objections of materialism notwithstanding.