Food For Thought is a public theology & Bible advocacy blog for Eternity from Sophia Think Tank’s David Wilson, who gathers top Christian thinkers to take a closer look at how the Christian faith addresses matters in society at large every week.

An article in ‘The Punch’ a couple of weeks ago proposed, with tongue firmly in cheek, that we should have a ‘beauty tax’ where a ‘fixed, lump sum, annual tax’ would be levied on the beautiful in our society. This suggestion was triggered by some research that Australian academics Andrew Leigh and Jeff Borland released in early January that found a great inequality in the workplace between those considered to be attractive and those who are not generously endowed. Among the findings were the following:

• Attractive people get hired first
• They earn more
• They are more likely to be married, and
• They are married to richer spouses

The hourly wages of more attractive people are around 20% higher than ‘their appearance-challenged’ contemporaries, resulting in some cases in a gap of around $30,000 a year income. Adam Creighton, the author of The Punch article, suggests that in the name of social justice there needs to be action that ‘will level the playing field’. He says that the new tax he is proposing has both moral and economic arguments in its favour and that it ‘would improve the efficiency of the tax system’ and lead to ‘windfall economic gains for everyone’. In good news for attractive older people he says ‘At age 50, say, by which time gravity has typically eroded any looks premium, the Tax would no longer apply’.

While Creighton’s idea of a beauty tax brings a smile to the face and the manner in which he has written is a clever piece of satire the problem of inequality in our society is no laughing matter. The findings of the research that Leigh and Borland carried out paint a picture of favouritism that has no rightful place in an egalitarian society.  These findings are backed up my many other pieces of research. I remember one piece that found children in kindergarten who were considered cuter than others were treated very differently in that environment, often unbeknown to the teachers and staff who were responding in this manner.

The values of the Bible are also very clear on this. Favouritism that leads to discrimination is seen as something that should be avoided at all times.  James, one of Jesus’ brothers, wrote in a letter to a group of churches in the 1^st Century …don’t show favouritism. Suppose a man comes into your meeting wearing a gold ring and fine clothes, and a poor man in shabby clothes also comes in. If you show special attention to the man wearing fine clothes and say, “Here’s a good seat for you,” but say to the poor man, “You stand there” or “Sit on the floor by my feet,”  have you not discriminated among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts (James 2:1-3)?

Paul the Apostle also addressed the issue in his famous passage that he wrote to the church in Corinth declaring that all people are of equal worth and value no matter who they are or what they can do. We could easily add ‘or what they look like’.  He used the human body as an analogy of differences and value. Human body parts are all different from each other but are of value and worth within the Body for it to be a functioning whole (I Corinthians 12). The same could be said of society.

In some research that I was involved in last year it was discovered that a sense of social exclusion was a common theme in many youth suicides.  Feeling included in a social group is very important for the mental health of the individual and a society that tends to exclude certain people, whether it be on physical attractiveness, race, gender, age, wealth, fame or popularity (just to name a few possibilities) is a dysfunctional society and its wellbeing will be held in abeyance.

Favouritism leads exclusion. Over the last few days of an Australia Day extended weekend there has been much debate over what it is to be uniquely Australian. A lot of ideas have come forward but one of the traditional characteristics is egalitarianism. Even though the idea of a great Australian egalitarian spirit is probably more myth than reality it’s certainly something we like to think we have and it’s also something that is good to strive for.  But we’ll never get there if we continue to treat some people as more valuable than others.

Taxing the beautiful won’t work, for in reality that’s just another form of discrimination.  But all of us deciding that we’ll treat each other equally?  Now there’s an idea…

Food for thought.