Can we all please stop using Jesus to advance our political positions?

This is a somewhat political post but in light of a few conversations on “What Would Jesus Cut” (i.e. in the U.S. Federal budget, as if Jesus spent a lot of time writing policy papers on the proper role and scope of government in a free republic), I think it is appropriate to step back from the emotionalism and take a hard look at the topic of government spending and faith. While I am typically far more critical of my fellow conservative believers, I was inspired this morning to look at some of the statements made by Christians on the political left and what better place to look than the leading voice of that group, Jim Wallis of Sojourners.

Please let me be clear. I have no reasonable doubt that Jim Wallis is a believer. Certainly a believer that gets a lot of stuff wrong (as I do) but also one who appears to love Jesus and who is often correct in his criticisms of the political right. Where he often stumbles is when he moves away from critiquing the “Religious Right” and advocates replacing it with the “Religious Left”. This is from his February essay, Budget Cuts and Bad Faith :

I believe that vaccines that save children’s lives; bed nets that protect them from malaria; and food that keeps their families from starving are more important to Jesus than tax cuts for the rich; bigger subsidies for corporations; and more weapons in a world already filled with conflict. I also believe that tested and effective domestic programs that clearly help to lift people out of poverty are more reflective of the compassion of Christ than tax and spending policies that make the super-rich even richer. And I don’t believe, as the Republicans keep saying, that the best way to help everybody is to keep helping the super-rich. That’s not smart economics and, as we say in the evangelical community, it’s not biblical. So many of us in the faith community are ready to make a moral argument against the proposed budget cuts to our members of Congress, especially to those who claim to be people of faith.

Very eloquent and impassioned to be sure. I would agree in part and have said so. There seems to be an odd disconnect between evangelicals who claim to follow the Lamb who was slain, the Prince of Peace, and at the same time support military spending and the death penalty without question. I also am a big fan of vaccines for children, bed nets and food for the poor. Whether that is something that is properly the responsibility of the Federal government is a separate issue. Where I am questioning the whole line of Jim’s thinking is the reliance on the Federal government to facilitate the execution of justice as a Kingdom priority. There is a line that is crossed when we start to see the secular government being assigned as proxy for the church.

There are two problems with this theory of government as proxy for the church. One is theological. The Bible spends a great deal of time speaking about the poor and the responsibility of Christians to aid those in need, especially among fellow believers (see Acts 4:35 as well as the multiple places where we see Paul taking up a collection for the church in Jerusalem). The Bible is clear that we are called to care, sacrificially, willingly and joyfully, for the least of these, to be concerned about the poor, to not have Christians in need in the Body, to visit the widow and orphan in their affliction. The Bible says nothing about taking money away from people, believers and unbelievers alike, by confiscating that money through taxes and under the threat of imprisonment and giving it to other people as a means to alleviate poverty. It seems that the Biblical message is that poverty is one of the signs of a sinful world, something that is never going to be “conquered” but something that requires sacrifice on the part of Christians to help one another. Advocating taxing the “super-rich” to support the poor is an abdication of our responsibility and without Biblical support.

The other problem is practical. It doesn’t work. At all. In fact, it is pretty apparent to all but the most dense that the “War on Poverty”, i.e. transferring wealth from one person to another after filtering it through a bureaucracy and doing so under the threat of imprisonment, has been not only a failure but in many ways has made things worse for the poor.

Those on the political Left certainly have emotion on their side so we on the Right have to rely on old fashioned facts and reason. For example, this is from a great article this morning from the conservative Heritage Foundation, Morning Bell: How Many Trillions Must We Waste on the War on Poverty?:

Which American politician said the following? “The lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence immediately before me, show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fibre. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.” Had to be a mean-spirited Tea Party conservative, right? Wrong. President Franklin Roosevelt included these words in his 1935 State of the Union Address.

Twenty-nine years later, the American welfare state was still relatively small, consuming only 1.2 percent of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP). The American family was also still intact, with 93 percent of children born into stable families. But then President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty happened. Forty-five years and $16 trillion later, thanks to big government, poverty is winning. Thanks to over $900 billion a year (over 5 percent of GDP) of spending on over 70 means-tested welfare programs spread over 13 government agencies, more than 40 million Americans currently receive food stamps, poverty is higher today than it was in the 1970s, and 40 percent of all children are born outside of marriage.

One of the cruel ironies of pie-in-the-sky thinking about the Federal government fixing poverty is that not only does it not help the poor but it actually promotes generational poverty. I read somewhere else this morning, from the delightfully named Mortimer Zuckerman, that some 50,000,000 Americans are receiving some sort of tax-payer funded program (food stamps, unemployment, etc.). That is 1 of every 6 Americans and that is the fruit of 45 years of trillions of dollars in a misguided and failed “War On Poverty”. Not only is the church not called to care for the poor through political means, those very means tend to make things worse!

Christians should and must do more to be selfless and care for the least of these. We need to stop seeing one another as competitors but rather as co-laborers. We really need to question our support for, not mere acceptance of, military spending and capital punishment. We really, really need to stop confusing the church and the state.

Clericalism and the welfare state

"In this connection, the modern clergy system is a religious artifact that has no biblical basis. This system has allowed the body of Christ to lapse into an audience due to it's heavy reliance on a single leader. It has turned church into the place where Christians watch professionals perform. It has transformed the holy assembly into a center for professional pulpiteerism supported by lay-spectators

Perhaps the most daunting feauture of the clergy system is that it keeps the people it claims to serve in spiritual infancy. Because the clergy system usurps the Christian's right to minister in a spiritual way during corporate gatherings, it ends up debilitating God's people. It keeps them weak and insecure.

Without question, many - if not most - of the people who are part of the clergy profession love God's people and desire to serve them. Many of them sincerely want to see their fellow brethren take spiritual responsibility (Numerous clergy have expressed their frustration with not seeing their congregations take more responsibility. But few of them have traced the problem to their own profession)

Yet the clergy profession ends up disempowering and pacifying the believing preisthood. This is the case regardless of how uncontrolling the person who fills the clergy position may be.

Here's how it works. Since clergy carries the spiritual workload, the majority of the church becomes passive, lazy, self-seeking ("feed me"), and arrested in the spiritual development.

Just as serious, the clergy system warps many who occupy clerical positions. The reason? God never calls anyone to beear the heavy burden of ministering to the needs of the church by himself. Yet regardless of the spiritual tragedies the clergy profession engenders, the masses continue to rely on, defend, and insist upon it. For this reason the so-called laity is just as responsible for the problem of clericalism as is the clergy.

If the truth be told, many Christians prefer the convenience of paying someone to shoulder the responsibilty for ministering and shepherding. In their minds, it's better to hire a religious specialist to tend to the needs of God's people than to bother themselves with the self-emptying demands of servanthood and pastoral care"

Frank Viola, Reimaging Church, pp. 160-161 (emphasis added)

That was a powerful statement, perhaps the best I have come across yet in his book. Like so much of the institutional church the clergy system, while well-meaning and intended to be helpful in most cases, has actually hurt the people it is supposed to help. So why is the title of this post a linkage between the clergy system and the welfare system? Because clericalism, like the welfare system, has led to dependence and weakness.

I think Frank Viola really hits a proper qualifier in pointing out that this is not because people in vocational ministry are power hungry and greedy, but in many ways it is a result of "laity" who are dependent and spiritually lazy. I am concerned that people look at statements like this and see it as an attack on people in vocational ministry. That is not at all my intent nor is it in my opinion the intent of this book. There are a few megalomaniacs in pastoral ministry, I have met a couple, but for the most part the men who labor as pastors make less money and take more grief than they could in a number of other professions, and they do it out of love and in service to Christ. What other profession requires an expensive Masters degree that will lead to you making less money than you would with just a Bachelors degree?

Ultimately, the system is unhealthy for the “laity” and unhealthy for the clergy and their families. In thumbing through Frank Viola’s other book I just got from the library, Pagan Christianity, he cites a poll with some pretty unpleasant numbers from pastors who are overworked, stressed and seeing an enormous strain on their families. I agree with Frank Viola and George Barna when they assert that it was never God’s intention to lay all of the responsibility for a local assembly on the shoulders of one man, but in almost every church we have attended or visited that is the reality. Lots of people have noted this “burn-out” among pastors and how many men leave the ministry every year, but no one seems to connect the dots and realize that the problem is in the system itself.

As I thought about what Frank Viola wrote, I saw an analogy between the clerical system and the modern welfare system. Why is the welfare system dehumanizing and an utter failure? Because it provides for people while asking very little from them in return and actually discourages them from seeking to support themselves. The very people who are supposed to be helped by the welfare system are actually hurt by it and the dependence it causes becomes generational. Passivity begets passivity.

The clergy-laity distinction does the same thing. How else can you explain the vast numbers of people who have been in church all of their lives, people in their later years with decades in the pew, who are sincere, prayerful Christians and yet are spiritually immature and doctrinally deficient? The solution for this problem among my Reformed brethren is more and longer preaching. The problem is that more and more preaching adds to the already heavy burden of ministry because one guy has to do it all and I am increasingly unconvinced that passively listening to a sermon week after week, no matter how good the sermon, is really the key to bringing people to spiritual maturity. Trying to replicate a Together for the Gospel talk every week from the pulpit is doomed to failure. Most men don’t have the same oratory skills as a John Piper or C.J. Mahaney and most church congregations are not as motivated as the T4G audience. The result is frustrated pastors and laity with glazed over eyes. That is not a knock on preaching, it is a knock on passivity.

Let me say again that my goal is not to see how we can tear down the clerical system and throw pastors out on the street. It is to discover how we can get the Body of Christ to all work together for the glory of God, to edify and instruct one another, to love and support one another rather than the unhealthy system of subcontracting out the “one anothers” to “just one”. How can we get men who are motivated and skilled in teaching to help others to grow, not merely spoon feed them while they passively sit in the pew? The Body of Christ is not healthy when we have a small cadre of highly motivated and heavily burdened men doing the work of ministry for a majority who are spectators. The church is a community, not an event, but we treat like a theatrical presentation instead of a living, loving gathering of the redeemed sheep of the Great Shepherd.

Ronald Reagan famously stood in West Berlin in 1987 and said “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” It was one of the seminal moments in the Cold War and came shortly before that wall was torn down. Growing up in the 70’s and 80’s, the Berlin Wall and the Cold War were just facts of life. They were on their side and we were on our side and that is just how it was. What we found out was that the Berlin Wall was not a permanent fixture. It was just a barrier thrown up by some people and once it started to crumble, the whole thing fell. It was not without trouble and some chaos, but real reformation is rarely neat and tidy.

Let’s get people up out of the pews and pastors down from the pulpit. Let’s love the elders not by paying them to do it all for us but by supporting them and shouldering our share of the load. Let’s have real Biblical leadership, with men serving from within the Body as elders instead of directing from above the Body as CEO’s. Let’s get back to “one another” instead of “one and all the others”.

The two pronged attack by liberalism

First, we had a panic induced piece of legislation pushed through that dramatically increased the size of the government. Labeled a “stimulus” bill, the reality is that what the bill contained was mostly pork, social welfare spending and income redistribution policies. Very little in the bill will create jobs and even less of it will lead to long term economic growth. That is the first wave.

Now we are seeing the other hand, a panic about the size of the deficit that is being created in large part by the giant spending bill that Obama just signed! That is the insidious genius of Obama, that he gets people in a panic to fix the mess he just made worse! What is the solution of the Obama White House to reduce the deficit? Cutting spending? Of course not!

Mr. Geithner said that the proposed budget will reduce deficits in part by "restoring fairness to the tax code." That will be accomplished by taxing the gains of Wall Street fund managers at ordinary income rates, instead of lower capital gains rates.

In Washington speak, “restoring fairness to the tax code” means big tax increases, but as pointed out before even taxing every taxable penny of “the rich” who already pay the lion’s share of taxes will not do the trick. It goes without saying that between the giant deficit spending bills Obama has pushed through in the first two months of his administration and the looming unfunded mandates of Medicare and Social Security, the only way to pull it off is going to be deeper and wide tax increases, some directly on your income and others indirectly or more subtly in gas taxes and the carbon emission “cap and trade” scheme that will pass enormous costs on to business and eventually consumers. Nothing like crippling a seriously damaged economy by punishing success, investment, innovation and risk taking,

Rest assured that we will keep hearing the refrain of this mess being Bush’s fault, but it is instructive to note that since Obama has taken office and especially since he announced this ludicrous $4,000,000,000,000 budget, the stock markets have plummeted to lows we haven’t seen since 1997. At some point, even an apathetic public is going to have to see beyond the media spin and realize that Obama is bent on driving this country into economic ruin and a mirror image of the failed Western European social welfare state.