A couple of years ago, on the recommendation of a person I knew on-line (and wanting to become a little more knowledgeable regarding American politics from a Christian perspective), I subscribed to the magazine Sojourners. It didn’t take more than one issue for me to regret the subscription. My core beliefs just did not mesh with what I found inside those pages.
There’s a book out right now by Jim Wallis, the founder and editor of Sojourners, called, God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It. Chuck Colson, author of the brilliant How Now Shall We Live? and founder of Prison Fellowship Ministries, had an excellent commentary, a response to Jim Wallis’s book, on February 21 called Moral Equivalency: The Religious Left Gets It Wrong that is well-worth reading. In it, he says:
The religious left is trying to tell us that you
can take away the reason for doing something and still expect people to
do it. Nobody’s going to win the allegiance of serious evangelical
or Catholic voters by offering handouts to the poor with one hand while
taking away their human dignity with the other. Sorry, Jim Wallis, all
issues are not morally equivalent. The first one, the right to life, is
non-negotiable. It undergirds all others: Take it away, and the whole
house of cards collapses.
To which I say, Amen.
-rlh-
“Nobody’s going to win the allegiance of serious evangelical or Catholic voters by offering handouts to the poor with one hand while taking away their human dignity with the other.”
It saddens me when “Christians” think this way. I remember when my mother and I had to live in our car because we had no place to stay. Her “Christian” friends wouldn’t take us in. You can talk to me about dignity when you find yourself in a comparable situation. I can assure you that living in a car, as well as other situations that the poor face everyday rob one of dignity more than any “handouts” will.