The New Whipping Boy for the GOP

from Agape Press
by Matt Friedeman

Actually, at first glance, you gotta like Senator Tom Coburn's prophetic edge. Crosswalk's Religion Today Summaries on February 15 features the conservative Oklahoma senator's comment: "There's $1.7 billion fraud in the food-stamp program. If the churches had done their job and followed Jesus' teachings, the government wouldn't have started all these programs and created all these problems."

I like that kind of backbone, and it may well be something that the church, and everybody else, needs to hear. Given that the religious right is the most active and reliable support of the GOP's recent electoral success, it takes courage to verbally slap them around for problems obviously caused by a series of elected Congresses with a Messiah complex (the current Congress being no exception).

Still, I have some questions:

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  First, Coburn is one member of the "churches" he talks about. The first paragraph of his Senate bio tells us he and his wife are members of Muskogee's New Community Church. He should thus frame his remarks in terms of "we" instead of "them." As in, "if we the church had done our job ..." More particularly, since he sits in the middle of the real gargantuan perpetrator of this problem, he might begin by describing to us his own culpability concerning the entitlement culture that besets America.
• 
  Coburn is right -- churches don't give enough in either money or effort. But ask, for instance, who the real heroes of Katrina relief are, and the suffering folks on Mississippi's Gulf Coast whom I have talked to will say it is the churches, not government. While Congress' relief efforts are still flagging, the church has been quietly and heroically taking care of business. And where good compassion is happening around this country, it is not government but ministries consecrated to following Jesus' example of "preaching the gospel to the poor" that are leading the way.
• 
  Churches would have a lot better chance of helping now if government hadn't created such an "entitlement" and "victimization" culture. {Government has been creating this "culture" since the 60's. Intentionally. After all, people taking government money have to do what the government says. AND they will do so, so they can continue receiving that money. "Sheeple have been created. NOW, ask yourselves WHY....}Helping the poor today is difficult. The prevailing mindset is that it is a "right" to receive aid, if not from government, then from the church. Marvin Olasky (see his book, The Tragedy of American Compassion) has proposed that, to be effective, compassion must be personal (we must establish a relationship with the individuals), hold the poor accountable for improving their behavior (before we continue to give more aid), and include a spiritual component (God must be brought to bear on the problem). Even the church, which once did these things marvelously, has a tough time today when the poor who come to its doors have been taught by the multi-trillion dollar War on Poverty that it is their right -- apart from relationship, accountability, or God-talk -- to receive a handout.
• 
  I would like to know what Coburn, as a private citizen and not a legislator, is doing today to shoulder his part of the blame. I don't know the senator, and he might be doing much. But it is a good question for him, just as it is a good question for every member of the Church of Jesus Christ. Accusation is easier to swallow from someone who is getting the work of Jesus done on his own time and not on the public nickel or on the ministry tab.

Fundamentally, I disagree with Coburn. If churches had been doing their job, government with its feckless can-do confidence would still have come smashing in to mess it up. No matter how well the job is done, our legislators think that more money and another layer of bureaucracy will help. Check the latest Congressional budgets.

And yet, I will not deny, churches need to do more.

My church needs to do more.

The Church Universal needs to do more.

I need to do more.

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