I am of the opinion that the evangelicals community had better come up with a better response to poverty and need than simply loving the poor. The real issue is the best way to love the poor. I am beginning more and more to believe that the best way to love the poor is for evangelicals to return to politics with a capitalistic message and with a passion that has been reserved for anti-abortion rallies. The failure of capitalism will also be be the failure of many of the moral virtues – courage, self-reliance, hard-work, frugality, and love of neighbor. Yes, love of neighbor. Love is increasingly being relegated to a function of the state with its ability to tax. Such a society can become very cold.
The fact is that free market capitalism has done more to relieve human suffering than the charity of the church and the charity of the unchurched. If we don’t support those economic systems which allow a household the means of living, soon we will find what real suffering means.
We don’t have to return to Ayn Rand for ruthless and cold capitalism. But her message of positive and healthy self-interest is game. You can see some of her stuff restated in John Piper, who has had a long-time appreciation of her contribution, according to his own account, but with some significant differences. It is not a sin to seek our own happiness. It is in seeking our own happiness that we get on the path that leads to true happiness. As CS Lewis makes so clear, our problem is that we do not want enough to be happy. We are too easily pleased.
I have written my congressmen at the federal level and legislators at the state level and asked them to put on their websites a statement on their view of free market capitalism. In the midst of all the love being expressed for those who cannot pay mortgates, have lost life savings, go without medical care, etc., I want from them not just a statement of concern. I want to know that they will not compromise our economic system as a sign of that love – for that is not love at all but foolish sentimentality.
deTocueville in his analysis of the American system prophesied that our way of life would fall when two things became true. First, when we became irreligious. In other words, democracy does not make us good. It only allows us to have our own way. If we become bad men, democracy will only allow us to express our avarice and greed. (In this he expressed the concern of Socrates in ancient Greece, who saw as the chief enemy of his day democratic politics with no virtue). Second, when the poor so outnumber the rich that they will simply vote for themselves the goods of those who are wealthier than themselves. Both of these things are becoming true. When you find that 1% of New Yorkers give over 50% of all tax money to support the city government, then you have all the proof you need that we are a nation of Robbing Hoods. Mayor Blomberg of NYC recently commented that NYC cannot afford to lose any more rich people by raising their taxes. The same kind of statistics apply at the national level as well. In fact, we have reached the point that if we took all the money of the top 1 to 2% of wage earners, that would not pay for the deficits. Where is the money going to come from? Our government is going to have to reach lower and lower into the ranks of the middle class.
If we love as we should, we will not let this happen. I think many Christians are moving away from politics as a solution simply because it has all been about abortion and homosexuality. The larger battle is about economics. Economics is about life and love.
It’s interesting that just at the time when Christians are being called upon by the new generations of evangelicals to abandon politics and to sacrifice personally for the poor, the government is taking away tax deductions for charitable giving (which has already been done in MA) and is refusing faith-based organizations who take federal funding the right to hire those of like-faith. We can only do charity when it is not done in the name of religion!!!
Perhaps the good side of this economic collapse we are facing is the challenge to a sleeping church that thinks morality is only about our sex organs and not about our wallets. Write your congressmen and ask for a statement on their website in support of free market capitalism. Private property is at the root of our spirituality – thou shalt not steal. To take what rightfully belongs to another is to destroy the man, not just physically but soulishly.
Americans are amazingly generous and kind. But we cannot afford to be sentimental. We must scrape off the barnicles on the ship of state and renew our vision for an ethos of hope based on individualism, hard work, sacrifice and determination. The trillions of dollars of social spending since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society has only whetted the appetite for more. The number of American families that have to sacrifice their family to support this tax structure is killing the family. It is our tax policy that forces both parents into the marketplace, hand over their children to care providers, and keeps them from the financial security that enables their home to be secure and places of peace.
How do we do this? It begins with changing the culture of the church and its vision of virtue. The church is more than mild-mannered preachers preaching to mild mannered people about being more mild-mannered. Above everything else be nice. The operative words of our faith are not niceness, tolerance, and nonjudgmentalism but faith, hope and love. These three great words require us to be strong and to stand against what destroys the family, the human spirit and compromises the future of our children.The church must turn its vision from getting and having to being and doing.
Love for the poor means giving them opportunity and responsibility and a helping hand on their way to a virtuous life. Love for people means setting up a system of fair rules before which all are accountable. It means regulation and enforcement so that the wealthy cannot use power to gain unfair advantage. Love means that any laws which weaken the home, encourage the neglect of children, and destabilize the trustworthiness of promises made and kept are laws that good men and good women will oppose.
My childhood years were spent in southern segregation, when I learned that we are a better people when we face our natural aggression toward those who are different. I grew up during the Vietnam war when I learned that government will lie and imperial power has natural and necessary limits. I came to some kind of political maturity during the Carter years when I learned what happens when incompetency and depression fill the places of power and a whole culture begins to despair. I was an observer during the Reagan years and the burgeoning of a more lively hope. It was during the Clinton years that I saw economics run wild and the excessive of the impulse to have without the accompanying responsibility for the moral life. And during the recent Presidency I have seen a tiredness and staleness in political discourse where the great ideas of our American dream have lain dormant. And now another turn of the page.
In this moment we are being called back to the great ideas. Do not think that your own personal piety will turn the tide. Do not think this is other people’s job. Do not think things will just turn out okay. Just when you are most tired, just when you are most disgusted, just when you are most out of money and just when the car is headed downhill and picking up speed, you are asked to turn the tide.
Like Esther in the Old Testament, you were born for just such a time as this.
