Douglas Feavel

Misdirected bureaucratic provisioning and unearned individual gratification have together served to collectively mask God as our Savior and Provider. Worldly government largesse is substituted for His proper place and our proper role. Wanting what is not ours is envy; taking what is not ours is theft. Personal charitable giving – the conscientious giving and receiving of gifts by and to individuals – is the appropriate alternative. In the realm of government-sponsored charity, want is often confused with need. At its rare best, welfare is a short-term patch; its continuous application is a poor substitute for the necessary moral changes, lifestyle adjustments, and personal growth that collectively nearly guarantee lasting, positive results. This approach requires planning and application that are long-term in scope, not just patching previous quick fixes.

“Today’s socialists and progressives support not only more governmental redistribution but every aspect of the sexual revolution from no-fault divorce to pornography, abortion, the ever-widening LGBTQ agenda, and the legal assault on marriage. All of it leaves women and children at the mercy of the state. When families fail, the state grows to pick up the pieces.” Quoted from “The Realty of a Pipe Dream”, an article by Robert Knight. Ultra-liberalism always has rationalistic and relativistic God-is-dead-and-we-didn’t-need-Him-anyway elements associated with it. As a tried-and-true test, look for this perception; it’s always found underneath the facade of any pretentiously compassionate social proposal, policy, or program; and just beneath the skin of any aggressive proponent of a liberalistic lifestyle, education, or philosophy. We should not accept as the real thing what is only a veneer; the truth is always available, but like the pearl of great price, it must be industriously sought and then held securely.

Generosity is a virtue, but being generous with other people’s money is not a virtue; it’s simply false and Pharisaically overblown. Liberals like to use compassion as another weapon in their continued bullying of conservative Christians by trumpeting how freely they validate every indiscriminate entitlement cause while demonizing our discernment and long-term fixes with their non-stop libeling, name-calling, and disparaging labeling like stingy, selfish, greedy, racist, and uncaring. Author Lynne Truss writes that engaging in such uncivil “abuse is the weapon of the weak.” The truth is – regarding true humanitarian causes, not their political coverings – conservatives have a strong record of out-giving liberals from their personal resources, and evangelical Christians give exponentially more from them than do both liberals and non-Christian conservatives. What liberals don’t mention is that their generosity only extends to foundation spending (e.g. Ford, Annie E. Casey, John and Catherine MacArthur, Robert Wood Johnson) and confiscatory tax revenue spending; that is, other people’s money and not their own money (with the exception of the small-tax portion which a minority of liberals are forced by law to pay). They speak of fair share, but in reality about a third of adults contribute almost nothing because they pay little to no taxes; thus, fair is applied only to getting, not to giving. For fair share to be truly fair, taxes should be levied on all citizens based proportionately on income from all sources, including the freebies. Everyone should have skin in the game, as it helps assure their active participation and interest in – as well as appreciation of – the outcomes related to our common good. Indiscriminate and institutionalized giving is far more harmful than helpful. Replacing God with government does not change His role in our lives, despite the growing faulty acceptance that God and government are interchangeable providences. When something becomes too popular, that’s a certain indication that a sanity-check is overdue, and that swinging the pendulum back toward the center is necessary. To be a success, the society must be essentially Christian in its practices.

The practice of true Christianity is the best expression of, and most effective means of, relevant charity. It requires caring for the needy, both spiritually and physically, by letting God work His purposes through us as we agree with Him and yield to Him – including our purses and wallets. To accomplish these ends, Jesus promoted charitably giving out of our own blessings, time, and production; not forcibly taking from our neighbor and then giving or keeping what is not ours. That isn’t godly no matter what label it’s been accorded; and it certainly isn’t noble or wise. Such methods are neither self-sustaining nor effective, and they are more akin to theft than to charity. These are cleptoparasitic in nature; i.e. parasitism by theft, as when one animal takes food that was caught, collected, or prepared from another animal whose efforts derived it (definition paraphrased from Wikipedia). Robert Knight of the American Civil Rights Union says: “There’s something about deploying the government as a mugger to obtain the fruits of someone else’s labor that appeals to the worst in us. But it invariable leads to poverty, dishonesty and even tyranny.” John Timmer’s Dutch parents hid Jews in their house during the Holocaust. He wondered what motivated his parents to take such risks with six of their biological children in the home. John concluded that God shows compassion (aka charity, care, or welfare) to us, so we are expected to show the same to others. In taking such actions, he says, “rescuers make themselves the equal of the rescued because both are equally dependent on the compassion of God”.

Marvin Olasky asserts that making contributions because they’re tax deductible is not nearly as involved, direct, or effective as offering a room in your house to a homeless person or to a pregnant, abandoned woman. Gilt-edged liberals remotely operate their charitable practices hands-off from a safe distance, assuring that they suffer no personal cost or inconvenience while smugly basking in the reflection cast by their very public humanitarian gestures. Someone must, however, pay the real costs caused by their fallacious generosity, and it’s usually the working/ giving/caring middle class and the Christian outreach ministries. A hands-off approach is in contrast to: Let brotherly love continue.  Do not forget to entertain strangers, for by so doing some have unwittingly entertained angels. Remember the prisoners as if chained with them—those who are mistreated—since you yourselves are in the body also. (Hebrews 13: 1-3, bold text added)