What Evangelicals can learn from the Glenn Beck/Jim Wallis Debate

There has never been a more important time for Social Justice and political engagement. Unfortunately for Christians the terms have been largely co-opted by Left wing fanatics intent upon using the good intentions of the Church as the ground for their Statist pretensions. That doesn’t mean God doesn’t want justice; it just means they have no idea what it is.

Take the recent battles between Glenn Beck and his archenemy Jim Wallis as an example. Certainly, no one is going to argue that Glenn Beck has any amount of Christian pedigree. His theology is deplorable even if his understanding of history and political science is much better than what one would expect from someone that has a light grasp of theological dogma. Still, Jim Wallis continually claiming to be an Evangelical is at least as bizarre as Glenn Beck being held out as the answer from orthodoxy. Wallis’ theology is only a bit better than his economic thought. Neither has much business speaking to the important issues involved in a specifically “Christian” interpretation of Social Justice. What stands at the center of Wallis’ reconstruction of Evangelical faith and practice in “Social Injustice”. The motivation is greed, the source is envy, the means is institutionalized theft and the force of the state, and the end is the accumulation of wealth and control over the freedom of others.

There is perhaps no greater provocateur of injustice in American theological culture than Wallis.

The first response will be “How can you say that? Jim Wallace has dedicated his life to Social Justice?” The obvious response being, “No, he has not.” It seems that he has dedicated his life to the subversion of the Evangelical churches traditional understanding of Social Justice through the promotion of merely pagan economic and political thought.

What is Social Justice?

First, social justice is a Christian idea. The terms are not traditional terms but the idea is Christian constant. Any law against theft or murder is a rule of social justice in it’s most basic form. Social justice is not a peculiar kind of justice the way ice cream and pie are different kinds of desserts. Justice is just justice, whole and unalterable. There are some things that are just and some things that are unjust. Those can be personal or social. Institutional injustices are usually social and tend to be functions of the State. The State is another word in Christian theology for any governing authority and the Bible is replete with both advice and criticism of states, statesmen, and statecraft. Still, the church can just as easily be the source of institutional injustice and this happens all through the Bible also.

Second, for the most part, social justice through the Bible and through the entire history of Christian thought has largely meant the exact opposite of what Jim Wallis, the religious left wing, the theological liberals, the political liberals, and the Sojourners establishment say that it means. Today, Social Justice is taken to mean the platform of the Democratic National Convention and the basic principles of atheistic Communism applied as a Theonomic mandate by God, either implicitly or explicitly. This means that the State is supposedly God’s chosen means toward the dissolution of oppression and injustice.

There might be some truth in that the State is God’s means to answering injustice but it is by no means clear who the unjust ones are. People are not right because they are poor; neither are they right because they are rich; people are right when their cause is just. Some people are rich because they abused the poor, which is another way of saying they stole their money. Some people are rich because they suffered and postponed trivial and fleshly indulgence for the betterment of their families and community, and when the leftists steal their money they are certainly the oppressor. The rich are not as easy to oppress as the poor but they are the more attractive target.

Most that are poor bear their poverty as marks of oppression in the form of abuse by their respective States; the State is the primary aggressor against the peace of the people. The most common targets of oppression are children, because oppressing them costs the least in terms of investment and exertion of raw power. After the State, it would be the leftist, socialist, and communists economic schemes forced upon them from without; unjust wars; disease; flood, famine, and fire; and the economic collapses related to those uncontrollable causes that have unprecipitated effects. Still, one would need to be almost completely confused about the human condition to not accept that vanity, sloth, self indulgence, irresponsibility, and the refusal to do in the short term what is necessary for long term benefits is not a very common and much more direct cause of poverty. There are different causes of poverty and wealth, neither is value neutral, and so Justice or Injustice is something to be measured by human action in accord with sound reason and virtue.

Exodus 23:3 says, “Do not show favoritism to a poor man in his lawsuit.” Exodus 23:6 says, “Do not deny justice to your poor people in their lawsuits.” Leviticus 19:15 says, “Do not pervert justice; do not show favoritism to the poor or favoritism to the great, but judge your neighbor fairly.”

Christopher Neiswonger

This is why I can so easily hate the religious left with a purely righteous-ish hate… because their pompous hypocrisy mirrors their political cohorts’ with such an accurate emulation that when squinting I can scarcely tell Brian McClaren and Rob Bell from Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. Their ilk salivate at the chance to point their pot-stained fingers at the least savory portions of fundamentalism and decry the Bible-thumping-ness of that fringy lot… and then in the NEXT BREATH proceed to emulate every behavior and prejudice they just condemned. *sigh*

Rather than go to Sojourners.com here are a few better ports-of-call for the masses out there: http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/author/scrowder/ http://www.youtube.com/user/machosauceproduction http://blog.beliefnet.com/crunchycon/ http://loyaltoliberty.blogspot.com/ http://evangelicaloutpost.com/archives/category/politics/republicans

Without further delay here is the great article from APACNY:

Rev. Jim Wallis–the head of Sojourners, and an icon of the religious left–has verbally assaulted Sarah Palin today on the Sojourners blog known as “God’s Politics,” and has actually questioned the authenticity of her Christian faith.

The blog has a code of conduct for participants that includes the following rules:

I will express myself with civility, courtesy, and respect for every member of the Sojourners online community, especially toward those with whom I disagree—even if I feel disrespected by them. (Romans 12:17-21)

I will express my disagreements with other community members’ ideas without insulting, mocking, or slandering them personally. (Matthew 5:22)

I will not exaggerate others’ beliefs nor make unfounded prejudicial assumptions based on labels, categories, or stereotypes. I will always extend the benefit of the doubt. (Ephesians 4:29)

Apparently, this language does not apply to the blog’s founder–at least not when he is talking about Governor Palin. See http://blog.sojo.net/2009/08/11/palin-bad-for-dialogue/. Here is a telling excerpt from Rev. Wallis’ remarks:

Sarah, you’re the one who is acting in an ‘’evil” way. After listening to your policy pronouncements during the campaign, many Americans decided, generously, that you weren’t ready yet for high political office. Others thought you just weren’t very smart. But this statement last week really does clear up the question for me. You are speaking like a demagogue in the worst tradition of those who knowingly distort and deceive, for their own political purposes. You want to stoke people’s worst fears and then, hopefully, they will look to someone like you to be their leader. You’re not stupid after all.

Please don’t invoke your “Christian faith” anymore and embarrass the people of God even further. May your efforts to scare Americans during this important debate fail. May your political future also fail, and may your star fall as fast as it rose just a few months ago — because we now know who you really are.

What, you may ask, did Sarah Palin do to arouse the ire of Rev. Wallis and to cause him to question her Christian faith? She did something that appears, in leftist circles, to have become the unpardonable sin: Raising objections to President Obama’s nightmarish “health care reform” proposal. (See http://www.frc.org/get.cfm?i=WU09H07&f=PG07J01 and http://www.frc.org/get.cfm?i=WA09H08#WA09H08.) Here is what Governor Palin said:

The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

To be fair, Govenor Palin’s comment about standing before a “death panel” is a bit hyperbolic. However, Governor Palin’s concern about the euthanasia-related implications of the President’s health care proposal is quite well-founded–especially in light of heartbreaking recent news from Oregon (see http://www.thecloakroomblog.com/2009/08/obam/). Her concern is also shared by various pro-life organizations, including the Family Research Council.

While I am tempted to “fire back” at Rev. Wallis, let’s instead pray that he would change his ways and reverse the errant path his organization has taken. Let’s pray for Sarah Palin, too, as she and her family have been treated viciously over the past several months. And finally, let’s continue to pray against the President’s “health care reform” proposal.

Blog Action Day is an annual nonprofit event that aims to unite the world’s bloggers, podcasters and videocasters, to post about the same issue on the same day. Our aim is to raise awareness and trigger a global discussion.

This year’s issue is poverty. Let’s be honest… poverty sucks. Nobody who’s in poverty wants to be there. So why is anyone in poverty? What’s the root cause of poverty? Can we do anything about it?

Talking about poverty in the United States seems a little like talking about electricity within the Amish community — we have it, but not much of it (relative to the world), and in seemingly different flavors and for different reasons. I’ve seen some poverty both in the US and in other countries… and frankly, our poverty appears lame by comparison. My wife, who volunteers in a local shelter and has also been to many more regions of the world than I have, has an even clearer perspective. My lineage comes from Armenia… a place with serious, serious poverty. My wife and I support a little girl in Bolivia through Compassion International. And there are of course many, many more places around the globe that are so poor it makes Western poverty look like the Hamptons. I guess it’s relative. Is it?

So how do we end poverty? Well… we don’t. For me as a Christ-follower I’m called to fight poverty, but not to END it. We’re NEVER going to end poverty. You can’t end poverty any more than you can end indigestion or greed. Poverty is the result of humanity’s fallen-ness and depravity. We are by nature very clever and slightly evil. Anyone who’s spent any time at a homeless shelter knows that some people, no matter how much wealth they’re given, will be impoverished again eventually.

Ok, so how do we fight poverty? And even more importantly for Christ-followers like me… how do we fight poverty in a way that glorifies God, rather than in a way that glorifies secular humanism. One of the best scriptural assessments I’ve found anywhere addressing this issue was this article here, titled The Cause and Cure of Poverty, written by John Armstrong for Mark Driscoll’s TheResurgence blog. My own attempt to directly word-tackle this issue would seem pathetic next to John’s article… so just read his! Seriously!

Some excerpts:

What causes poverty? The question presently plagues many serious Christian thinkers and leaders. The answers vary but the proposed solutions are the stuff of our political campaigns every four years. We can already hear the discussion from the various candidates for the presidency in 2008, both Republican and Democrat.

[...]

…Capitalism is deeply rooted in the Judeo-Christian moral code. (This is not to defend all that Adam Smith, the so-called father of modern capitalism, wrote since Smith made mistakes as any theorist will.) …Capitalism is not rooted in greed at all, as is falsely argued by numerous Christian activists today. …Capitalism, when it is rightly understood, is rooted in altruism. And it is fundamentally based upon creativity, the creativity of both service and wealth. …Wealth is good, something many pious Christians have a hard time appreciating.

[...]

Simply put, capitalism creates new wealth, it doesn’t simply capture it or steal it from others.

Think about the much-maligned Wal-Mart chain. Politicians, and the various critics of modern forms of American capitalism, routinely attack Wal-Mart even though their overall record as a company is generally one of helping create jobs, of providing goods at cheaper prices and of stimulating creative economic changes. Yes, mom and pop stores do suffer when Wal-Mart moves to town. But that is the nature of the system. Mom and pop will have to adjust. The spirit of freedom allows them to do exactly that if they become creative enough to work better within the free-market system.

[...]

Socialism always destroys personal freedoms by trying to plan for other lives through a central government system that watches out for you. (This is why President Reagan once quipped that the worst words you could ever hear were these: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help you!”) Capitalism allows you to plan for yourself. It allows for creativity and enterprise. Furthermore, it encourages people to provide for others in order to express their creativity through goods and services. Greed is, in reality, inimical to capitalism. Greed drives the welfare state more than it does capitalism since greedy people want unearned rewards to be given to them by a benevolent government that levels the playing field. Such a system directly causes people to petition governments to solve their personal problems, and the bigger the government’s role becomes the worse the nightmare.

The problem with liberal economic state-based solutions is that they undermine this cycle of personal success and initiative. Capitalism allows even “the wretched of the earth” to succeed. Envy and greed create wars and revolutions. Witness the great twentieth century bloodbaths, most of which revolved around economic thoughts and the role of government in engineering material possession and seeking to level the playing field economically.

[...]

Many young Christians are being sold a bill of goods about the evils of capitalism by evangelical writers such as Ron Sider, Tony Campolo and Jim Wallis. The intentions of these men are generally good. They desire equality, which is good. They also hate injustice and racism. This is also very good. But the equality of means and income is not the basis of real freedom. Even lifting everyone out of poverty is not possible since poverty is rooted in much more than access to more money.

Indeed, it seems too many Christian folks are buying into a form of humanist socialism as a means to address society’s social justice issues. Their heart may be in the right place… but Christ tells us that WE (His followers) are the ones who are supposed to be doing that work IN HIS NAME, so that HE get’s the glory rather than some socialist system. So rather than pay higher taxes into an impersonal, godless system of idiotic wealth redistribution we should be supporting free markets and lower taxes so that not only is new wealth is created for all, but so we have more personal income to directly invest (both with our money and volunteer time) into Christ-honoring ministries that fight poverty and win souls.

Free market capitalism and lower taxation actually become a major part of the Christ-follower’s fight against poverty — surprise surprise.