| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Jim Wallis | ||||
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Have you ever asked yourself whether there is any other Christian view than the viewpoint of the Religious Right? Is there no other option but to say that God completely opposes placing any limits on anything an owner may wish to do that is not clearly sinful by a very limited set of Biblical standards? If you have ever asked that question, I urge you to watch the interview above with Jim Wallis. Please note that he quotes Adam Smith, the god of uncontrolled American capitalism. Except, Except, EXCEPT, he quotes from other parts of Adam Smith in which he addresses the morality of capitalism and clearly states that a capitalism that does not follow Biblical morality is a capitalism that will inevitably devour itself.
That is, the normally quoted Adam Smith is one who appears to say that the only governing principle in capitalism is greed. There is the greed of the supplier and the greed of demand. And, those who are involved in capitalism must believe in offsetting greeds that end up providing a system of checks and balances. But, when Adam Smith is fully quoted, as in the quotes that Jim Wallis cites, one finds out that greed, by itself, will actually destroy capitalism, according to Mr. Smith. In fact, greed is insufficient to run an economic system. If there is no leaven of Christian charity, a system based only on greed is a system that is both destructive and self-destructive. And, this is what we have seen in the current economic crises.
What I have just said should not be surprising to any Christian who reads the Old and New Testaments. And, it should also not be surprising to Christians that Adam Smith says that capitalism must have the leaven of Christian charity in order to function within Biblical standards. So, here is my question for the Religious Right. Why do you focus on words such as “tyranny” and “socialism?” Where is your focus on Christian charity? Where is the focus on the words that Adam Smith spoke about a Christian worldview? I could live with a capitalism that includes a heavy dose of Christian charity. Why are you not calling for that? I am NOT a socialist. Why is the only option for a Christian, oh Religious Right, a capitalism that functions uncontrolled and guided only by a sin that is condemned by all the Church Fathers? Do you really think that God’s best system of economics a system that encourages a sin that is condemned by Scripture and Holy Tradition, without any leaven of Christian wisdom?
Michael Kruse, well read Christian economic blogger, made some interesting observations about this upon seeing a study that came out:
“The Charitable Giving and Election maps seem to correspond a little more tightly than the Church attendance maps but all three together show a pattern: High weekly church attendance, charitable giving, and voting conservative (or at least Republican) seem to cluster together….One of these variables could be driving the other two, a fourth variable could be driving all three, and there could two or more variables feeding on each other. Brooks’ book is written for popular consumption so we don’t get the level of documentation and elaboration you would get in a journal article. From his reasearch he believes the driving variable is church attendance. That would fit with a host of other things I have seen in the study of the sociology of religion over the years.”
http://krusekronicle.typepad.com/kruse_kronicle/2007/07/us-maps-worship.html
Kruse has further written on this topic, in reviewing Arthur C. Brooks book, ” Who Really Cares? American’s Charity Divide. The Suprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism.”
Kruse writes:
“What should be obvious from just the highlights I’ve given is that it is a myth that Conservative Christians don’t care about the poor. For Religious Progressives like Wallis to run around denouncing Religious Conservatives as those who do not care about the poor is disingenuous and inflammatory. The issue is that Religious Conservatives differ with Religious Progressives on the best strategies to help the poor……I tend to be sympathetic with progressives in their critic of an excessively individualistic and consumerist society. Where I part ways is with their persistent conflation of “society” with “government.” They are indistinguishable terms in the progressive parlance. Society needs to address the needs of the poor. How do we know if we are addressing the needs of the poor? Jim Wallis tells us the US budget is a moral document and the way it indicates morality is the percentage of dollars being spent on the poor. We measure aid by how much input the federal government has made….The measure of aid to the poor is not the money invested but did the plight of the poor actually change! Society is not the government. Government is one institution of society. There are other mediating institutions like family, church, neighborhood, and voluntary associations. The irony in much of the progressive agenda to help the poor, over against individualism and consumerism, is that their obsessive government orientation creates polices that actually damage mediating institutions and create more atomization in society….In fact what you have is Religious Conservatives and Religious Progressives agreeing about putting your money where your mouth is in helping the poor out of your own pocket and time. Where they disagree is on the role government should play in the equation. Religious Progressives falsely conclude that because Secular Progressives agree with them on government that Secular Progressives are also charitable. And I would add, as someone who leans toward the conservative side on this topic, that I don’t think Religious Progressives have a sound Christian anthropology on the effects that government involvement in the community has on diminishing charity and fraying social ties.”
http://krusekronicle.typepad.com/kruse_kronicle/2007/07/who-really-care.html
Sorry about being so wordy.
James 5:1-6 (ESV):
Come now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you. Your riches have rotted and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have corroded, and their corrosion will be evidence against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure in the last days. Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, are crying out against you, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. You have lived on the earth in luxury andin self-indulgence. You have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter. You have condemned and murdered the righteous person. He does not resist you.
“Have you ever asked yourself whether there is any other Christian view than the viewpoint of the Religious Right?”
I know that there is.
I’m a Lutheran.
“Have you ever asked yourself whether there is any other Christian view than the viewpoint of the Religious Right? I know that there is. I’m a Lutheran.”
LOL
Me too, me too.
Government largess is touted by some as THE way to “help the poor.” In my lifetime, I have watched such government money raise generations of folks who feel entitled to government money. In some neighborhoods where I have lived and worked, there is no such thing as what I would call a work ethic or sense of responsibility for self and others that was inculcated in the youth of my generation or those before me. Many of the young people in areas where the government hand out has become a way of life have decried the wisdom of their elders that hard work, education and faith, hope and charity make for a better life and more hope for the future. They feel entitled to “free” government bread and circuses and know how to use a badly damaged system to get it. Their feeling is that they are owed and that because they are (black/poor/Hispanic/fill in the blank of some minority) they should not have to do the work that others do as a matter of course.
I have been at the funerals of young people whose great-grandmothers scrubbed floors and walked hundreds of miles to have the opportunity for an education and whose strength was their faith and their love. These young folks laughed at the idea that hard work and great struggle to get an education was the way to go when they saw their friends getting “free” money and their other friends finding that in the short run anyway, crime DID pay–and more than their grandfather’s steady job.
My youngest daughter who is of mixed racial heritage ran into these sorts of things growing up all the time. She graduated high school with scholarships and a GPA that has entitled her to go to college where she is on the dean’s list and is graduating this spring. Many of her peers in junior high and high school would whine and moan that they were failing because they were black and poor. My daughter would point out to them that she was black and not well off and was managing to make A’s. Her speech went something like this. “My mother is a single disabled mom. I bought my school clothes at Goodwill. Nobody in the world would mistake me as anything but of African heritage. What is the difference between you and me? We sat in the same classrooms and had the same teachers. You got F’s and I got A’s. The difference is that I worked my butt off to get A’s. I have a library card and I use it. I have a job and save my money so I can go to college. I don’t do drugs and I don’t drink and I don’t spend my money on ‘bling’. If you sold that gold around your neck and went to a thrift store, you could probably find a second hand computer to do your homework on–or use the one in the library.” Of course, the rant went on and on as the peer bemoaned his/her fate and blames everyone but himself or herself for it and the answers did as well. This is a kid who also volunteered at charitable organizations and gave part of her hard earned money to charitable causes.
I have also had the great advantage of living other places and seeing real poverty. I came to realize at a pretty young age that to many in a lot of those other places, what we might call poor here in the USA is very very rich indeed. I have the great fortune to have a decent disability pension and the opportunity to work a little here and there at things my body allows me to do and make a little extra. I have access to the medicine that enables me to keep breathing in and out and slow the progression of a chronic crippling disease. I have a little house and a deep well with clean water and the electricity to pump that clean water into my house where I have a flush toilet. I even have a little car. I have shoes and more than one dress. I have access to basics like soap and toothpaste and a hair brush. How blessed I am!!
To me helping the poor is more than throwing a check or a handful of bills at them. It is working with individual people in love to help them find a way to not only earn those checks for themselves, but have pride enough in self to WANT to. This is why I was Girl Scout leader in an area where there were folks who didn’t have the wherewithal within themselves for whatever reason to teach their girls how to be self-sufficient, and skillful and full of pride in achievement and sure enough in themselves to choose for themselves positive expressions of their young adulthood and enough self-esteem to make positive choices to develop their minds and care for their bodies and also find great love in helping others. That is why I am a nurse and spent years working in Mental Health and Substance Abuse in a deteriorating urban city and later at a VA Hospital in a inner city. That is why I have been a Sunday School teacher, a summer camp counselor, a suicide hot line volunteer…..etc etc…..( Incidently, I also learned early on that I get more and learn more and am blessed more by the folks I come into contact in these settings than anything I could ever really give. The joy of seeing a young Girl Scout accomplish the task of earning her First Aid Badge for instance or learning about computers or horses or you name it is beyond compare. And maybe I am paying back just a little those women who taught me sparked the interest in what later became my profession. You see, I have been given much and I owe those who gifted me down through the years and so I try to pay it forward.)
Throwing money at it isn’t enough–you have to have money but you have to have love and care as well. I am a fairly conservative person. I am a fairly religious person. I also am a person who sees it as my duty as a human being and a member of this society to reach out to the suffering not only with treasure but also with time and talent. It isn’t big reaching out. I am a gimpy old lady with a disability annuity. I don’t have millions and my body defies any efforts I might want to make to run over to Haiti or India or Darfur or wherever the latest horrific tragedy is. I go back again and again to that old Sunday School song. “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine. ” My light is pretty little in the scheme of things–and yours might be little too, but if all of us let our little lights shine–it is a pretty powerful beacon of hope for a sick and suffering world. (Government money isn’t lit with love. It is lifeless and degrading. Sharing love with another human being who shares theirs with me and we both gain oh so very much in the transaction changes the world.)
But the question of the day is whether to give government handouts to the rich, not to the poor.
If I could edit your first two sentences, they would read like this: “Government largess is touted by some as THE way to ‘help the [rich].’ In my lifetime, I have watched such government money raise generations of [bankers and CEOs] who feel entitled to government money.”
Otherwise your points are reasonable, but we need to ask where our money is really going and why we allow it to go there. And to the question of why there are poor in the first place, let’s ask why there are rich, richer and richest; and we will have the answer to the first question.
I suppose I should have said that it is not the government’s job to give “free” money to anyone. Great government giveaways are not really constitutional. Any species in the wild will flock around to get the free food usually to their great detriment. Why does big government give money to big business? Because they are in the same incestuous family. I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine. It is back room politics on an ever larger and larger scale. And let the poor eat cake. I see small businesses here in my town going under despite hard work and determination while the big guys get money they really don’t need. What can I do about it? Well, I can buy local, support local businesses, vote ( sometimes I think we should vot ANY incumbant out and start all over again!!) and in whatever way I can make my voice heard.
And as to why there are poor in the first place, my answer is that there are too many reasons to count. Some folks are not well either mentally or physically, some are lazy, some are not bright, some are disadvantaged for other reasons–but a big reason is that a whole lot of other folks think that their goal in life is to be ever more wealthy and damn the consequences. This does not mean that the government is the one who should fix it. I don’t think the government can fix it. There is something to the foundations of the USA in that one of our primary documents starts with WE, the people…..We, the people have to fix it. We have to demand that those we elect to represent us actually do so. We have to stand and offer the hand up out of poverty not throw a penny or two down to ease our guilt.
Alix
Alix
Well said. And I know what you mean about any species flocking for a handout. I’m around seagulls an awful lot of the time.
Yes, the post about the poor comes all too close to saying that it is only the poor’s fault that they are poor. But, as the quote from Saint James–in an earlier comment–shows, Saint James certainly thought that a good part of the fault for poverty and oppression belongs to the rich. “Behold the wages of the laborers . . . which you kept back by fraud are crying out against you. . .” Let me point out that it is God in both Old and New Testament who points to those rich who function only on the basis of greed as being partially responsible for poverty. It is the Religious Right that points to the poor as being the guilty parties.
When you look at the Old and New Testament here is the difference between them and the Religious Right. Both Old and New Testament point to lazy INDIVIDUALS. But when it comes to explaining systemic poverty they point to the rulers and the rich. The Religious Right points to lazy individuals and exonerates the rulers and the rich.
Father, bless-
You know me better than that!! I just irks me to see people who HAVE opportunities offered to them who make the decisions not to take them and then blame others for their own failures. It especially irks me when they stand there and call my child who has taken them out of her name because she HAS taken those opportunities. Doessystemic poverty exist–you bet your boots, it does–but there are lots of folks who ignore the opportunities they DO have for stupid reasons. Both my step-son who is mixed and my daughter who is mixed were called out of their names by other Black kids because they were working hard to get the grades that would get them the scholarships to get them into college and into a better life in the mainstream of society. If they talked standard English, they were persecuted–not teased mind you–for my step-son it was actual physical violence and for my daughter–harsh name calling and rumor spreading–see if you speak standard English, you are too white and if you get good grades you are too white and if you dress like a respectable person and not like a gang banger from the hood, you are too white. If you get a job or volunteer, you are too white. This from kids some of whose grandparents I knew who had scrubbed floors and worked in the tobacco fields and other physical labor to save up for a little house and try and make a better life for their children and grandchildren. These were kids who actually looked down on their forebears who had walked miles to what are now the traditional black colleges to get an education. Now both my step-son and my daughter can speak in dialect–they just did not elect to in English or History or Biology or in a job interview. That put them outside the pale.
The system is not ideal in any way–but acting like an idiot does not help make it any better. You work inside the system to be in a position to have a chance to begin to change the system. Speaking in dialect and wearing your pants down around your knees like you just got out of jail and forgot to put on your belt does not change a damn thing. Helping your grandmother make dinners and bake cakes for the church dinner bake sale that raises money for the church scholarship fund and then doing your best to be eligible for that scholarship goes a lot further to being prepared to help change the system. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. educated himself and worked hard and fought the good fight in more ways than one and by golly, he helped to change the system. If he spoke in dialect and wore gang colors, I don’t think it would have done a blasted thing to change things.
Having worked and been a part for years of the Black Community in Washington DC, I saw things from an interesting angle. I saw people who were working class and middle class African-Americans who had struggled to have a little part of the American dream who were losing a whole generation of children and I saw some of those same children slap the hands of their elders who reached out to them out of their own self-sacrifice to help them have a better life. Who is to blame, I am not sure–I guess I am just as angry myself at lost opportunities–and angry at those who find fault with those who deliberately ignored or even dissed those opportunities when they came to them.
In the end, I do what little I can do and pray a lot.
Alix
that is find fault with those who have NOT ignored—sigh
Maybe their Personal LORD And Savior is named Ayn Rand instead of Jesus Christ?
Our local newspaper where I am describes itself as “proudly Libertarian”. Its editorial page has the following characteristics:
1) Gushing over Ayn Rand as though she were a God.
2) Holding up 1830s England as the example of the Perfect “Free Market Economy” they gushed about.
Libertarians tend to be, well, fill in the blanks…!
RE: “Have you ever asked yourself whether there is any other Christian view than the viewpoint of the Religious Right?”
No, I have never asked this because I know very well that there are many other Christian views than that.
This is rather predictable junk. Alix calls a spade a spade and is met with being ignored. Sure, the rich get off here, buit so do “the poor.” Do you honestly think too many people here qualify for what Jesus thought of as poor. People here live in paradise by ancient standards. Minority complaints are not wholly off, just spiritually off. Be grateful for what you have. Work hard. Life is difficult.
I teach at an HBCU. Kids there assume government’s job is not make life fair. Good luck with that. The Religious Right, whoever that is, BTW, is attractive not because of its economics, but because people intuitively realize that despite everything it is far closer to truth than the hedonistic paganism of Jon Stewart. “The Daily Show”? Tell you what. I would rather see my kids on welfare than fans of that toxin.
Hmm, actually Alix attends my parish, which gives me an unfair advantage. I get to talk to her! 😉
The problem is that I will tend to talk to her there and forget to post here. But, I can assure you that I do not ignore Alix. :0
I am not a system. I don’t have much input into the system. I cannot harness the energy of the system in any way whatsoever. I don’t even really understand who the system is or how it works or why it is even a system. I can see symptoms of what the system is up to–whether it is healthy or ill perhaps, but I cannot go to a place or a person and point to “THE SYSTEM.”
I am an individual. I can work with another individual. I can share my experience, strength and hope. I can share my faith. I can share my time and talent and treasure. I can run my mouth here and in other places–not that said mouth-running changes anything. I try to be the boy on the beach with the starfish. I work to try and help one starfish at a time as God gives me strength. I am simply one gimpy senior citizen bending over ever so gingerly, grasping one small starfish with a crippled hand and putting it gently back into the ocean. It is up to the starfish at some point to swim away toward opportunity and adventure and freedom. Some of the starfish for whatever reason migrate back to the beach. I pick them up again and try again. I could stand at the beach and yell at whatever system landed the starfish on the beach. I could raise my fist toward whatever impersonal force stranded the starfish in the first place. That doesn’t help one single starfish. So instead of standing there yelling at the wind, I bend down again–slowly as I don’t bend too easily–and gently try to get a grip on another starfish and take it to the water. (If you have done it for the least of my brothers….)
Alix
Seeing this discussion makes me think that it would be wise of me to do a post because to answer some of your comments would make for a too big post comment. However, I will probably assign that post to Father Orthoduck. I will try to make sure that he has something up the day after tomorrow to follow up from this ongoing discussion.