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Render to Caesar the Things That Are Caesar’s…
The people who sued Little Sisters of the Poor are now angry that Christians aren’t practicing their faith.
The White House released a proposed budget that would cut funding for many agencies and eliminate a few programs entirely. For those who want government only to grow, this is intolerable. So instead of focusing on our $20 trillion debt or the ineffectiveness of our leviathan government, the left yanked the heartstrings.
“#LetThemDie: ‘Heartless’ Donald Trump Blasted For Killing Meals On Wheels Funds” was a typical headline, this one at Huffington Post. You see, Trump’s budget would eliminate the Community Development Block Grant program, which provides 3 percent of the funding for Meals on Wheels’ national office. The rest of their funding comes from individual contributions, grants from corporations and foundations, and a network of 5,000 independently operated local affiliates.
No matter: This proposal proves that Republicans are hypocritical Christians who want people to starve.
Christians talking bout how they’re happy Trump is de-funding Meals on Wheels as if Jesus wasn’t the poster boy for Meals on Wheels. ?
— Kevin Allred (@KevinAllred) March 17, 2017
Trump’s budget eliminates Meals on Wheels. Literally anyone who votes for this never gets to mention Jesus again. https://t.co/HhiVy3vJWa
— celia fink (@celiafink) March 16, 2017
You don’t have to be a Christian or believe in Jesus to know that Christians are called to feed the hungry. See Mt 25:35 https://t.co/8B5TgubMUB
— Kirsten Powers (@KirstenPowers) March 17, 2017
After eight years of bashing Christians, it’s nice to see Democrats praising Jesus again. But their arguments show a deep misunderstanding of what the faith mandates. Jesus called His followers to feed the hungry; He didn’t demand Pontius Pilate feed the hungry. Jesus didn’t don a balaclava, kick a centurion in the shins, and hang a #resistentiam banner from an aqueduct. He gathered the faithful and commanded them to love others.
Shocking to our modern sensibility, Jesus was concerned with the Kingdom of Heaven, not the governments of man. Washington DC isn’t God’s instrument on Earth — the church is. For Christians, this is a blessing, but one with huge responsibilities. We can’t expect some federal bureaucrat to be charitable for us; we need to take action ourselves. Feed the hungry. House the homeless. And give.
Throughout history, Christians have founded hospitals, built universities, and ministered to the poor. If you wonder why the American church is enervated, consider that it worsened when it subcontracted out compassion to the government.
Published in Domestic Policy, Politics, Religion & Philosophy
I didn’t get the impression that the government was shrinking under his proposal, even discretionary spending. Maybe “those who want [every program] to only grow?” I’m not even sure that’s true. I think many of the Left would like to see the favored programs on the Right reduced if not eliminated. Each side has their own ideas of what the “proper role of government” is, and they both seem to involve the government growing ever larger.
Jon, I am pretty sure that the Little Sisters of the Poor were the ones who filed the lawsuits to not have to follow Obamacare directives. I don’t believe there were lawsuits filed against the Little Sisters.
That said, I agree completely with the premise of your post.
This is on old tactic. When Catholic Democrats like Ted Kennedy and John Kerry were asked about supporting the legal status of abortion while their church adamantly opposed it, they answered that yes, their church does preach against it but they couldn’t possibly impose their religious values on other people. But when the topic was government spending for social programs, they spoke as if they were the Jesus’ spokesman on Capital Hill. They never did point out where the bible mentioned government spending on the poor, but they knew that was what the bible meant.
I have the feeling that I will need to post this again. As well as the following meme.
It is possible that the recent uptick in jobs and investment is because Trump is governing like a fiscal conservative. That uptick will certainly alleviate the suffering of the poor. Why aren’t the blessing of capitalism ever considered by leftists?
Amen brother. Sing it!
We came. We saw. We kicked his skinny little [] … Nevermind. Bless his heart.
At one point (it may have been Mitt Romney–I don’t remember exactly), the pressure to cut taxes in Massachusetts became so great that the government said, “Okay. We’ll do it this way. We’ll lower taxes so that you can do more locally, through the cities and towns.”
That’s what I would do if I were Trump. Lower taxes along with these cuts, saying to the states, “You can do this better than we can.” Then the state governments can follow suit and lower their taxes, saying to their cities and towns, “You can do this better than we can. Here are your dollars back to manage as you think best.”
Christian organizations in Portland will feed anybody who is homeless and other charities provide decent job training. The problem is drug addiction and mental illness. It’s a spiritual poverty more than a physical poverty.
I’m stealing this line, because it so succinctly explains the problems with expecting the government to do the work of charitable institutions.
The amount of overhead and paperwork involved in a local food bank is rather small. The same cannot be said of welfare or any other government spending. Part of charity, for me, is ensuring that my dollars are used efficiently. The same leftists who complain about the high salaries of executives of large charities don’t seem to mind paying government bureaucrats far over market wages or having a ridiculously bloated structure to administer the whole thing.
When politics replaces religion, this is what you get. Anyone who disagrees is a heretic and must be destroyed.
I’m still waiting for someone to identify where Jesus tells his disciples to feed the poor by taking money by force from someone else. The closest I have heard is the reqirement (Old Testament) to leave the corners of your field and not to take a second harvesting pass over your field so the poor could come pick the leftovers. See the story of Ruth for how this worked.
What lefties complain about high salaries for charity executives? (Except maybe conservatively-oriented charities.) A charity is a non-profit, just like the government. To lefties that makes governments and charities unalloyed good as opposed to business (which seeks ee-e-vil profits), and good guys deserve munificent salaries.
Seawriter
I’m pretty sure there are many people who can be functioning addicts if only they were allowed to get a job without having to pass a drug test. I mean, I completely understand a business not wanting to take a chance on someone who uses, but I’m afraid part of the reason people end up with nothing and no way to recover is because they’re not allowed to try because of society’s strong bias against use of practically any mind-altering chemicals to be a part of society. If you not allowed to build anything until you make a complete 100% recovery, it would seem to becomes a lot harder to convince yourself it’s worth trying.
Oh I agree but how many homeless can be functioning addicts? I am sure they are functioning addicts in all walks of life — mostly artists but sometimes lawyers and Doctors as well. My hunch is that addiction prove the homeless to be homeless and that homelessness is a result of not being a functioning addict.
As with all economics, it’s always about marginal cases. There may be a majority of homeless who can’t be functioning addicts, but I still would bet a large percentage is in the category of “could be functioning addict if allowed to have a chance.”
How hard is it to understand that the definition of “charity” is helping people by spending your OWN money.
Utterly disagree. There is a very large constituency within the Left that believes charity and volunteerism should be outlawed because it feeds “privilege”. So the argument goes, only the causes favoured by privileged white people get funded.
e.g. Up here in the Great White North there was a push to eliminate a campus charitable event that raises funds for cystic fibrosis research, because CF predominantly affects white people.
The second argument this constituency within the Left uses against charity and volunteerism is that they steal jobs that would otherwise go to good unionized government workers. e.g. Whenever a town punishes folk for plowing their neighbours’ sidewalks or planting flowers in a public park.
It’s the same constituency that thinks unpaid internships should be prohibited, or that college athletes should be unionized.
So these nuns are Southernors, I take it…
Through marriage, as a great poverty relief program. Don’t tell the left that.
My favorite #conservativesareheartless meme this week relates to the Obamacare replacement. As we all know, the individual mandate under Obamacare forced young and healthy people to buy insurance that they didn’t need or want, and to overpay for it at that, so that there would be enough money in the insurance system to cover the sick people. Now I’m seeing commercials telling me that the heartless conservatives are taking away insurance from those people who don’t want it and don’t want to pay for it. The truly compassionate position, don’t ya know, is to have IRS agents with guns show up at the homes of those people and assure them that in 3 minutes either their signature would be on that insurance policy, or their brains would.
Of course these commercials never actually mention that they are talking about insurance. They just call it “health care.” “Tell Congress not to take away your ‘health care.'” Jackasses. I am proud to be heartless.
There’s also the problem of how one defines “homeless”.
The meme I posted above only counts those sleeping outdoors, but US law defines “homeless” as “individuals who lack a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence”. This includes couch-surfers, workers living in temporary housing like motels or camps, children awaiting placement in foster homes, etc.
If you count a “homeless person” as anybody who “experiences homelessness” for “a few nights” over the past year, the number in the USA is between 2.5 and 3 million. However, if you only count people who persistently sleep outdoors, like persistently non-functional drug addicts, the number drops to the point where it’s virtually a rounding error.
I’ve read the Bible a few times, and I guess I missed the part where it said, or even implied, that Jesus said God wants the government to put a gun to people’s heads, steal the money out of their wallets, and give that money to people who feed the poor. Anyone have that verse?
There is the bit that claims all government leaders are appointed by God, which some interpret to mean that anything government does is by divine sanction and Christians should never ever resist government edicts as long as those edicts don’t directly contradict scriptural law.
Since scripture doesn’t prohibit government from taxing people to feed the poor, if governments choose to do so then it follows that God must want them to do so.
“Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves.” – Romans 13 : 1-2
“This is also why you pay taxes, for the authorities are God’s servants, who give their full time to governing.” – Romans 13 : 6
Someone on Ricochet pointed this chapter out to me once, at which point I was compelled to stop yelling “taxation is theft” at every opportunity. It’s a rather inconvenient passage for me, but there it is.
So, basically, what we’re talking about here is that MoW HQ might have to switch from color copiers to black & white.
We have had to cut costs and cut back certain programs at my church. Nevertheless, we have persisted in talking about Jesus.
About a year or so back, some progressive lefty out of Australia, I think, published a screed decrying the “privilege” experienced by children whose parents were married. The New York Times even had an article discussing the effects of the marriage gap on income inequality.
Problematically, their solution is never to stress the importance of marriage, especially to those most in need of its message and with the least room for error in their lives… and they’ll never admit that the papacy has been right all along.
No where does the Bible tell people to form large, centralized governments to support the poor. We are to be held accountable as individuals for assisting the poor.
One of the (many) problems with ‘government’ charity is that it appears to absolve people from their individual responsibility to the poor. They vote for high taxation (imposed primarily on other, richer people, of course), and then their ‘job’ is over – they can go about their business involved with the poor! When they see ‘hurting’ people, they can just exclaim, “Someone should be doing something about this!” – not them of course.
And we haven’t yet begun to talk about what we’re going to do when we run out of other people’s money, as we surely will because math is heartless and doesn’t care.
I wonder if the 3% of the Meals On Wheels budget from the feds was enough to cover the administrative and reporting costs involved in getting that money from Washington.
Yabbut, no where does the Bible prohibit it either.
Yeah, but when I die some bureaucrat will get to go to Heaven for me.
And the irony is that these are the same people who will yell “Theocracy!” or “Separation of Church and State” whenever the government does try to do something they don’t like.