What hath secularism wrought?
It is past time to admit a very hard truth: America’s poverty problem is also a depravity problem.
It is simply a fact that people who work hard, finish their education, get married, and stay married are rarely — very rarely — poor. There is no other proven formula for lifting Americans out of poverty. None. Food stamps don’t do it. Medicaid doesn’t do it. Soup kitchens don’t do it. Good intentions don’t do it. Hundreds of billions of dollars of transfer payments have not budged the poverty rate.
Simply put, any anti-poverty efforts not aimed at getting kids to complete an education, get married, and stay married are a waste of time. They may ameliorate immediate physical needs, but the very act of ameliorating those needs renders a destructive lifestyle sustainable and viable.For many, many years I spent time “in the trenches” reaching out to at-risk youth. At first I was the stereotypical naive idealist. ”All they need is love and a chance,” I thought. Working in mentoring programs, I spent untold hours playing catch, going to little league games, going to parks, and just hanging out with at-risk kids as part of a variety of programs. Seeing ragged clothes, I’d buy new clothes. Hearing that a mother couldn’t pay the light bill, I’d kick in and help. I spent night after night sleeping in homeless shelters, cooking dinners in the evening, pancake breakfasts in the morning, and fixing snack lunches for hard days on the streets.
I can’t remember when I first realized that I was accomplishing nothing of substance. A few car break-ins taught me that some guys saw me as an easy mark. A few pot purchases with the “gas bill money” taught me that others saw me as an ATM. Admonitions to “stay in school” had little appeal compared to drug-fueled orgies for kids as young as fifteen years old. I tried. God knows I tried. But it was all for naught.
Only one thing really worked. The Cross. There are kids today that Nancy and I worked with who are doing well, who are happily married, and who are pillars of their community. What made the difference for them? The Cross. It wasn’t about my words. It wasn’t about my effort. (After all, I tried just as hard or harder with other kids — who are now in prison or “baby-daddies” or both.) The kids who made it heard the Gospel, repented of sin, and were transformed through the renewing work of the Holy Spirit.
It’s trendy now for churches to put less emphasis on the Gospel and more emphasis on service. I’ve even heard Christians almost brag that their outreach efforts don’t include any proselytizing at all. This is tragic. Billions of dollars of “service” won’t change hearts and lives. We know that now. In fact, those very billions may very well numb the human heart to the gravity of its sin.
So, yes, let’s do “more,” but let’s make sure that “more” is aimed at the real source of American poverty — our depravity.
The communities that are poorest are those with the highest percentages of believers. The reason one can persuade them to repent by talking of The Cross is that they already have faith.
And of course, as Zombie readers already know, these communities have the highest rates of obesity.
http://www.jochnowitz.net/Essays/ObesityAndHell.html
@ George Jochnowitz:
george the last time that it was popular to think that religion causes obesity was England under the early Tudors.
the correlation in our Southern states has more to do with the fact that the people of the Bible Belt states weren’t just generally religious but also generally poor and not highly or well educated.
Such folks tend to fill themselves with both complex and simple carbohydrates and fattier cuts of meat.
They ain’t getting fat from praying.
http://enikrising.blogspot.com/2011/08/depravity-of-mistaking-correlation-for.html
@ CK MacLeod:
Thanks. it never occurred to me that anybody else had heard of David French and his crazy-assed 16th century views
@ fuster:
Don’t know where you originally ran across these antediluvians, but the article seems to have appeared at National Review Online, where it represents avant-garde 21st C conservative thinking.
of course I ran across them courtesy of JED. The Frenches are published in Patheos right next to the Optimistic Christian.
yes, very JEDistical. But I guess the only way to prove ‘em wrong would be to eradicate the ENTIRE legacy of the Progressive Era, then sorta see how things went for a century or two.
@ CK MacLeod:
wouldn’t be enough for French. I would say that he’s a real by-God Calvinst likely too find Cromwell far too lax and corrupted by this evil world.
and, what the hell, here’s the (post and ) comment that got me banned from Patheos
@ fuster:
That comment linking Dyer’s post got you banned?
I bet some Megatron type could on and on about flushing all Muslims down the toilet and would escape with a light reprimand, as at Dyer’s home blog.
yes. that one surprised me. still haven’t figured out how agreeing with the author about the evangelical movement’s increase arising from poor and uneducated folk earned that.
and Megatron got the only reprimand that I’ve ever seen Dyer issue, and I’ve earned a couple that she hasn’t meted out, so I greeted the one to Meg with a bit of approval and nothing but.
@ fuster:
Agreeing with the author is a truly dastardly tactic. I just hope you didn’t send them a supportive e-mail, thanking them for your deserved punishment. That would have been unforgivable, and might require that you be banned forever from the internet including Starbucks and and other hot spots.
@ CK MacLeod:
I’ve never been in a Starbucks. They tell me it’s swell.