Religious Left At Prayer

You wonder about our liberal friends when they agitate for more social programs with fine moral fervor. What about all the money we are already spending? Doesn’t that count?

The religious left had a convocation recently, organized by Jim Wallis and reported by Mark Tooley. The idea was to reignite the Social Gospel movement of 1900.

Like most religious left outfits, Mr. Wallis's groups want to disengage churchgoers from concerns about abortion and homosexuality and refocus them on poverty and the environment... [H]e still looks to the federal welfare and regulatory state as the source of secular salvation.

Doesn’t the religious left worry a bit about concentrating all that secular power in the government? No, because “poverty is not a family value.”

It was at that meeting, you’ll remember that DNC chairman Howard Dean talked about the nation as back in the 1950 with McCarthyism and no civil rights, and all.

Mr. Dean shared hope for America as a "moral nation," with national health care, an increased minimum wage, and a protected estate tax. "The folks in this church are ones who live their faith through works--that is the mark of a real Christian," he assured his audience.

Something there just slipped past me. What exactly does morality have to do with increased government spending and higher taxes?

The truth is that it is politics not the love of God that stirs in the breasts of the religious left. Nothing wrong with that. It’s just that many of us just don’t want to be forced to pay for the liberal moral vision.

Doing good works with other people’s money just doesn’t sound like the moral life to me.

But really, I’m just tired of all the phoney-baloney liberal rhetoric about the poor and doing it for the children. As Robert William Fogel wrote in The Fourth Great Awakening, the spiritual condition of the poor is worse than it used to be.

Such problems [in cities] as drug addiction, alcoholism, births to unmarried teenage girls, rape, the battery of women and children, broken families, violent teenage death, and crime are generally more severe today than they were a century ago.

You could look it up.

In Britain, for instance, over the last century, violent crime has increased by over 2000 percent, even as social spending rocketed into the stratosphere. Or was it because social spending rocketed into the stratosphere?