As a point of clarification, my “Cup of water” post was intended to establish a sidebar listing of various Christian organizations dedicated to providing assistance not only for the spiritual, but the physical needs of impoverished people throughout the world. Ideally, the links should take one directly to a donations page (e.g., see here). As I’ve previously stated, I believe that the poor will always be with us and that notions of eradicating poverty worldwide are, at best, misguided. But, as I’ve also previously stated, I believe that we, as Christians, have a scriptural mandate to help fellow human beings in need. In light of the one year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and the ensuing relief debacle, we are reminded of instances of governmental inefficiency and waste, outright fraud, etc. Such reports reinforce, in my mind, the fatal flaw in believing that the government has the capability, much less the responsibility, of providing relief (whether it be disaster or economic).
It’s not up to the government.
It’s up to us.
August 30th, 2006 at 11:06 am
Rusty wrote:
I must confess that this kind of rhetoric sounds to some of us blue-leaning Christians like a quote from the Gospels according to St. Self-Reliant. It tends to absolve those in power (D&R both, Christian and non-Christian both) of responsibility both in anticipating and responding to large scale disasters. It tends to use cases of better-off survivors’ success stories to downplay or denigrate the cases of those who can’t get it all together.
Don’t get me wrong. Private charitable Katrina aid, especially from churches, was as indispensable as it was unprecedented. It’s the claim that this avenue somehow ought to be the whole enchilada that I question.
OK. Let’s use as a working figure the $110B the Feds have promised for Katrina area aid. To make numbers round, let’s assume there are 220 million practicing Christians in the US.
Each of us then needed to come up with roughly $500 in cash, property, and/or sweat equity. Our churches could collect and gather it, then send it to some other church in the Katrina zone to allocate, organize, plan, and execute the disaster recovery. Those churches, many of which have no physical plant and widely scattered members post-flood, could somehow manage to coordinate, say — 10 experienced construction workers arriving from Spokane with a trailer of building materials from Milwaukee and a rented front-end loader from Montgomery — to rebuild a small section of Hwy 611 in Metairie. [!?]
Or maybe government(s) could promote the general welfare by hiring and training professionals to plan and budget and execute the mitigation and recovery of similar situations, using public and private charitable means.
It’s foolish (to me) to suggest that a complex society like our own ought to be taken care of without recourse to an equally complex bureaucracy, and typically on this planet that has meant government of some kind. It’s even more puzzling to me when this becomes a core Christian value for some.
In Gen. 41, God blesses the world through the government of the kingdom of Egypt. Egypt — the OT symbol of evil — no less. How? A member of the faithful (Joseph) worked through the official government bureaucracy (indeed, he created it!) to gather, store, and distribute food aid. It was done rationally and proactively and maybe even fairly. All this from the ancient Egyptian equivalent of the USDA and FEMA! God could have inspired Joseph to tell every Egyptian family to open a Swiss numbered account or build and stock their own bomb shelter in case the unthinkable happened; but instead he blessed the world through Joseph’s wisdom and forethought expressed as a centrally planned government program. Genesis doesn’t say whether there was corruption or waste in the administration of the food aid program; if there had been, would it have negated the divine blessing?
The above quote is from George W. Bush. Why do some of us act like it’s a quote from the Bible?
August 31st, 2006 at 9:05 am
Andrew P.,
…this kind of rhetoric sounds to some of us blue-leaning Christians like a quote from the Gospels according to St. Self-Reliant.
I don’t recall the NT mandating we look to the government to help the needy. I do see it telling us it is our responsibility as Christians, not as a means of being self-reliant, but because it is the Christian thing to do.
Let’s use as a working figure the $110B the Feds have promised for Katrina area aid. To make numbers round, let’s assume there are 220 million practicing Christians in the US.
Each of us then needed to come up with roughly $500 in cash, property, and/or sweat equity.
I think you miss my point. We should not expect the government to bring relief to the needy because it’s not up to the government, it’s up to us. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t accept relief assistance from the government, even though it is absurdly inefficient. Consider your $110B number. That dwarfs the relief numbers to other recent disasters. And what have we to show for it? I have no doubt that had 220 million people donated $500 each to private organizations or churches, that immensely much more progress would have been made in relieving the needs of those affected by Hurricane Katrina.
Let me also state that I believe infrastructure projects (e.g., highway) are the responsibility of the government, and are most effectively executed by private firms.
A member of the faithful (Joseph) worked through the official government bureaucracy (indeed, he created it!) to gather, store, and distribute food aid. It was done rationally and proactively and maybe even fairly. All this from the ancient Egyptian equivalent of the USDA and FEMA!
Are you suggesting we disband our current form of government and embrace the Egyptian method, including waiting for a monarch to have a dream interpreted by a foreigner in prison? (just kidding) Seriously, though, do you see this story as indicative of how we should approach our understanding of one of the purposes of government? Or do you see this story as part of a larger narrative portraying the redemptive plan of God? It’s interesting that the point of the story isn’t that people got fed, but that what man intended for evil, God intended for good, that what was essentially dead was brought back to life, and that God worked out the redemption.
…but instead he blessed the world through Joseph’s wisdom and forethought expressed as a centrally planned government program.
And if God were to so inspire a program here and now, I believe that it would truly be a blessing. Nothing. Absolutely nothing of what I’ve seen come out of government aid programs leads me to believe that such programs are analogs to Joseph’s divinely inspired stockpiling of grain.
August 31st, 2006 at 5:04 pm
Of course, the important point of the account of Joseph is God’s redemptive plan. What his brothers and Potiphar’s wife and his careless fellow prisoner meant for evil, God intended for good. Some of that good came about when big bad selfish idol-worshipping Egypt nonetheless blessed the nations through Joseph’s stewardship. The greater, more profound good was the preservation and redemption of the nation of Israel, ensuring and prefiguring Jesus’ coming.
I would argue that the OT authors didn’t contrast ‘the government’ against ‘the people’ in the same way that we often do. (Kings/Chronicles diatribes against evil rulers, corrupt priests, etc. notwithstanding). It really didn’t make sense to do so, when state and temporal power and Judaism and ethnicity were so closely linked. Levitical instructions allowing for gleaning by the poor and immigrants can be seen as personal practices of piety; and since they had the force of law they can also be seen as the expression of the central powers to provide for the most vulnerable in accordance with God’s order for the society.
NT hostility toward the occupying Romans and collaborationist tax collectors and Herods understandably results in a Christian community sensing a call to take care of the needs of the world with as little contact as possible with the Babylons of governmental power. Communalism is the NT is expressed as sharing among the community (Acts 4) and as preserving the society as well as taking care of the poor in Jesus’ name.
I don’t contend that the Gen 41 case is normative or even common. And I agree that many government programs are wasteful, poorly targeted, and sometimes even counterproductive and promoting of evil (welfare programs which create incentives contra marriage, for one). And yet, when I look at something like Social Security, I can see plenty of blessing in it, blessing that ultimately is of God. Christian responsibility to care for the weakest ought to be able to allow for God’s mysterious ways, and I think those might sometimes include a few bureaucrats cutting checks…
I’d love to be proven wrong. If the next nationwide disaster is met with sufficient private charitable aid to render government assistance moot, I’ll take it all back.