Posted on 02/21/2005 6:53:10 AM PST by Mr. Silverback
"Failure makes you reassess.”
So says Jim Wallis, founder and editor of Sojourners magazine, and he ought to know. A number of Democratic Party members are looking to Wallis right now to help with their own political reassessment. Wallis is what the New York Times calls a “leader of [the] religious left,” and as he says, “The Democratic Party has increasingly had a problem as being perceived as secular fundamentalists.”
So now Wallis is much in demand among Democratic leaders who want to learn “to be much more forceful and clear in communicating their faith and values to the electorate.” Wallis’s favorite argument, as reported in the Times and elsewhere, is that the Bible makes more than three thousand references to poverty—far more than abortion or homosexuality—and yet religious conservatives, in his opinion, are obsessed with the abortion issue. So, says Wallis, the religious left is more in tune with the Bible than are conservatives.
This argument was popular during the presidential campaign, repeated even by some conservatives. You may remember my commentary on historian and author Mark Noll. I admire Noll greatly, but I was disappointed by his decision not to vote because he thought neither party was right about the issues that concerned him most, including poverty. It is a perfectionist attitude that fails to take into account the fallen world we live in. Even the magazine to which I’ve been a contributing editor for more than twenty years wrote an editorial suggesting that Christian voters might have to choose between the sanctity of life and social justice.
The implications of this argument are clear: that is, all moral issues are equivalent. So, pick and choose among them; as long as you get seven or eight right answers, you’re okay.
Frankly, I find that thinking muddled, at best. We oppose abortion because we respect the fact that all humans are made in the image of God. How can you be genuinely sympathetic to the poor and the downtrodden if you don’t respect their most fundamental right? I would go so far as to say that unless you’re consistently pro-life, you’re not going to be a reliable defender of the poor.
Why do you suppose that in this ministry we have been going into the prisons for the past three decades? Why do we help people dying of AIDS? Why do we—and so many other Christians—visit the most dangerous places in America? Because the people there are our brothers and sisters, created, like us, in the image of God.
Why help the poor if we don’t believe all lives are equal in God’s sight? If you support ending the life of a child because it will be born into poverty, how can you logically call yourself an advocate for the poor?
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.
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Good post. We need more of these moral clarity because many Christians will never listen to Mark Steyn, Victor Davis Hanson, Charles Krauthammer and political conservatism just because they sound "too humanist". I have seen far too many of them are just like your average New York Review of Books leftists except on abortions, porn, drugs, and gay marriage.
In this country, poverty is a state of mind for the most part. Moral poverty is far worse than physical poverty.
This is precisely what the Catholic Church teaches, though the social-justice lefties just shrug it off.
Political and Christian/religious liberalism Ping!
"Communicating" their faith?
I thought the idea was to have faith, and by following that faith people would see your values for themselves.
If a Democrat needs a PR man to "communicate" faith he really doesn't have any.
These attacks on conservatives, conservative Christians, and religious believers promote a false position i.e. that concern about homosexuality and abortion somehow means you are complacent the needy, the mentally incompetent, etc. Such a premise must be refuted every time. Conservative Christians, etc. have been the fundamental driving force behind grass roots efforts for true change from the very beginnings (including the anti-slavery movement, civil rights, etc.) At the same time, contrary to popular mythology and entertainment propaganda - leftist 'progressives' have acted as destroyers of moral stndards, promoters of moral relativism, and frustrators of the genuine social change as they work to implement failed cocepts of founded in socialism and communism rather than supporting a market economy that has in the past permanently and effectively raised the living standards and conditions of the vast majority.
Taking people's money at gunpoint and giving it to someone else is not charity for the poor, Mr. Wallis.
"Bleeding heart leftist enablers" ping.
Well said.
Its the cheapest and easiest thing in the world to point your finger at someone and to tell them that they are not doing enough and then turn around and be charitable with the money you collect.
Perhaps conservative Christians' charity is not obvious because they follow the advice of the gospel not to let the left hand know what the right is doing when you give alms. Jim Wallis trumpets "his" charity to the world and has his reward.
The old saying my grandparents espoused.... "You can't just talk the talk. You must walk the walk for people to believe you".... is still relevant today.
Dems don't get it!
They figured out the words, but can't carry the tune.
For liberal socialists, it's always a zero-sum game. It's a false premise that they use over and over again. The crowd that excoriates those of us who believe that such things as right and wrong exist for being too 'Manichean,' actually outdoes anyone else on that score. It's just more projection of their own deep-seated self-hatred.
Ever notice that they hold us to standards of proof and certainty that they themselves will not and cannot be held? I love to flip their premises around on them. They always squeal like stuck pigs when I do that.
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