The Sage Forge

Coercing Generosity

It is said that Rome became a Christian nation when Constantine declared , in about 313 A.D., that it was. That is nonsense. If anyone was headed for the flames of hell on the day before the Edict of Milan the same person was still headed for the same flames on the day after. Nothing in Christian theology allows for collective conversions.

Salvation, and thus the very nature of the Christian faith, is personal and individual. It happens between a person and God.
This simple fact means that what one does to honor God is also individual. If I feel compelled to do good things I honor God to do those things within my own means. If my goals extend beyond my means I can show leadership by enlisting the aid of others so inclined. That permits them to make their own personal commitment to God’s service.

On the other hand Christian service does not permit the coercion or theft of other’s means. It is wrong to rob a neighbor even to feed the poor. It is wrong to leave someone who is inspired to serve God no choice in how their services or resources will be distributed.

Compelling people to do what we think is good is not necessarily evil but at best it is morally neutral. It can never be good. The politician who spends out of your pocket to do what he advertises as good has not demonstrated a Christian commitment.

Much of what has been done in the name of goodness over the last forty years has accomplished things Satan himself could not have hoped for by more direct means. The black family has been devastated. The black father is often little more than a sperm donor. The single greatest predictor of future criminality and poverty for all ethnic groups is welfare’s legacy of single-parent households in communities once dominated by nuclear families. A white baby boy born to an unwed teenage mother is as likely to become a criminal as his minority counterpart.

Government’s prescription for conscripted charity has become hell’s definition of heaven.

Professionals

Government’s usurping of the role of voluntarism in charity tends to have other unchristian effects. It distances us from the difficult realities of service to others and it creates the artifice of "careers" in that service.

As parents of infants we are often on the receiving end of various bodily functions. This is not a horror to us, though. As a kind of sacrificial giving in the service of love this acceptance of something unpleasant has the effect of serving to bond us more closely with our children. We simply can’t idealize our children into some romantic artifice as their reality is running down our shirt.

Such is not the case when we set service away at a safe distance.

When we are insulated from the needy by professional servers we develop an idealized vision of who they are and how their needs should be met. Furthermore we establish a class of people who serve two masters. The professionals’ services are rendered to one group of people but are paid for by another.

Because the professionals have become our proxies in a relationship with the needy, and their livelihood is dependent on our view of the needy, a perverse pressure is placed on the professionals to distort our view of the need.

Professional service carries with it a pressure to enhance the security of the field. The needy can’t provide that security. The artifice of a professional bureaucracy into which we insert people who may or may not have a personal faith commitment to the original goal of service can, as a result, impede the accomplishment of that goal.

We and the needy are served better to find and fund people committed to servicing the needs they see regardless of the insecurity to which their efforts expose them. Government does not do this sort of thing well.

Establishing a Religion

Mr. McNeely’s articles reveal a man who seems an unlikely candidate for overtly eliminating the Constitution’s prohibition against the establishment of a state religion. It is difficult, however, to see how the establishment of mandatory public charity in areas outside of public health and education is not the exercise of a religious sensibility.

We do not require that this service reduce poverty in poor communities. By the most recent measures it has not. Yet we continue the vast transfer of resources that shows no tangible positive results. These services are an act of faith. The fact that people would defend the services by couching their argument in religious terms unmasks the blatantly religious foundations of the national church.

One can demonstrate that the groups most supportive of this national religion are the same groups who demonstrate the greatest hostility to the religions that most effectively compete with it. Not only do these groups resist permitting the government to provide funding to effective faith-based charitable organizations they are actively hostile to the free exercise of the religious principles on which they are founded.

This debate is not over whether a religious sensibility will drive our efforts to do good with the government. Religions are only conceptions about the source and meaning of life. Even those who pretend to themselves not to have a religion are driven by such sensibilities. They are inescapable. The debate is over whether we will permit one of those sets of sensibilities to use the power of government to dominate, and ultimately to suppress, the others.

Call it Secular Humanism or Political Correctness, over the last forty years we have slowly given the government the power to do just that.

Lee Jamison can be reached for comment at lee@leejamison.com