Source: Wikimedia Commons

Up From Superficial Christian Compassion

on January 9, 2015

There’s a refreshing Christianity Today article in which an Evangelical academic who once thought border security “callous” now argues that a “porous border is not compassionate—it is just chaotic…” He urges more funding for securing the border, explaining:

Caring for illegal immigrants is certainly a grace to the individual. But it doesn’t address the underlying problem. Indeed, when replicated on a large scale, it exacerbates the crisis. The more the church is viewed as welcoming any undocumented immigrant with open arms, the more it spurs undocumented immigration: more Central American families are broken apart, immigrants are forced into self-protection in our dangerous inner cities, and ties are strengthened between US gangs and Central American narco-networks. Moreover, Central American countries become increasingly dependent on foreign remittances at the cost of their development.

This thoughtful Evangelical’s analysis does what is increasingly rare in American Christian political witness: actually factoring unintended consequences instead of hyping superficial compassion focused on the moment. Once confined to old Social Gospel utopian liberalism, which imagined building God’s Kingdom through generous government programs, increasingly Catholics and Evangelicals sincerely advocate immediate gratification in public policy as an emblem of God’s mercy.

So Christian hospitality means sweeping amnesty for all illegal immigrants and more open borders. Christian charity means an ever more expansive, expensive social welfare state that guarantees goods and services to all who don’t work. Christian social justice means embracing every claim of racial and ethnic victimhood while offering apologies and reparations. Christian mercy means rejecting the punitive aspects of criminal justice in favor of chronic lenience towards law breaking. Christian peacemaking means protests against war making, intelligence gathering, drones, and aggressive interrogation as violations of God’s shalom. Christian nonjudgmentalism means discarding sexual morality in favor of a new highly intolerant regime of phony tolerance.

These new attitudes of superficial Christian compassion disregard long-term impact in favor of the more immediate satisfaction of applause from the beneficiaries of these ostensibly beneficent policies and, typically, approval from secular cultural elites. These new attitudes also rebut unwanted stereotypes about stern, intolerant, judgmental, and highly punitive religious authoritarians.

Such new attitudes of easy compassion pleadingly declare: Look at us! We’re not like the Christians you feared and despised in the past: Puritans with their scarlet letters. Harsh nuns slapping naughty student wrists with rulers. Fundamentalist preachers who threaten damnation for beer drinking and card playing. No, we are kind, good people, just like you, maybe even better! That these policies of superficial compassion may actually, in the long term, prove quite unintentionally cruel or destructive is not considered.

The new movie Selma has drawn controversy for portraying LBJ as opposing MLK’s aggressive push for voting rights, preferring his other agendas, like the War on Poverty. This portrayal is almost certainly unfair. But virtually ignored is the irony that LBJ in fact sincerely worked for civil rights, while his well-intentioned War on Poverty, the fruit of Social Gospel liberalism, constructed a welfare state that displaced marriage, family, charity, and the church. It unintentionally destroyed much of the black family, creating destructive pathologies that undermined many of the achievements of civil rights legislation, with painful consequences even 50 years later.

Much of superficial Christian political compassion cites the simplicity of Jesus as its justification. In a recent news release affirming the Democratic Senate Intelligence Committee’s “torture” report, the National Association of Evangelicals’ president explained: “We want to uphold the high standard of Jesus who called us to do unto others as we would have them do unto us.”

Does such a standard, interpreted to mean that people can only be treated as they prefer, allow for any form of military warfare or police coercion? Would Jesus ever handcuff anybody? Say hurtful unkindnesses, however truthful, in court? Put the convicted in prison for years? What exactly does “do unto others as we would have them do unto us” truly mean?

None of us wants to be punished for our morally faulty actions or even prevented from taking what we want. Instead, we all prefer endless affirmation and green lights for our desires. But Christian moral teaching understands that all humanity is sinful and by nature resistant to the right and the good. So sometimes prudish Puritans, frowning nuns, and disapproving preachers need to tell us no and risk our dislike.

In statecraft, governments, to perform their divinely appointed duty, can’t behave as permissive grandparents on a weekend, always dispensing candy and ice cream into the late hours. They must at times deter, enforce, punish, and sometimes kill. Jesus’ admonition to “do unto others as we would have them do unto us” is a call for moral correctness and justice, not superficial pleasing and niceness.

If I had been a terrorist ten years ago, reflecting back now with a moral sense, I would have preferred being water boarded than withholding information that left the blood of innocents on my hands. Across my years, the admonishments or punishments of parents, teachers, employers, or police officers were never welcomed or at the time appreciated as just. Only with time and reflection does the discomfort seem not only justified but helpful.

There is in American religion today a dearth of confident authority figures unafraid to speak as adults and risk the unpopular appearance of stern harshness. They emasculate their churches and urge upon the nation policies that espouse kindness but in fact hurt and destroy. If Jesus is their model, they should consider He never won any popularity contests during His brief earthly walk. Instead, He thought of consequences across generations, millennia, and eternity.

This article originally appeared on The American Spectator 

  1. Comment by Orter T. on January 9, 2015 at 6:41 pm

    Good assessment. I have come to the conclusion that one of the most detrimental things the church did was to join with the government in an attempt to legislate “civil rights” for everybody.

    I was in high school in 1967 when my mother became director for a Head Start program for two counties in East Texas, aka the deep south. As a result, I was very aware of the verbiage used to describe the plight of the blacks. I find it disheartening that the exact same verbiage is still being used right down to the hand wringing that the big bad police are whuppping up on the poor ol’ black folks. Unfortunately, the verbiage and hand wringing are from a whole new set of voices and hands. My question is not what is wrong with the police, but rather why, 50 years after all the civil rights/war on poverty legislation, are the blacks still the helpless people being victimized? When do they stop being the victims? To use a phrase from the 1960’s, “How do we break the cycle of poverty?”

    For the United Methodist Church, the answer is the reason we are in existence. John Wesley has been credited with saving England from going the way of France: going up in flames at the hands of a group of people who felt trapped in poverty. Here is a nuts and bolts summation of how John Wesley really changed the world:

    1. Wesley never set out to change anything; his goal was to live a holy life centered in God. That quest led him to unexpected places.

    2. Wesley encountered and was transformed by the triune God of holy love .

    3. Wesley then told others, including those living in poverty, about the triune God of holy love.

    4. Wesley then enabled those that responded to his message to live a life centered in God 24/7 regardless of their circumstances. And there were specific requirements to being a Methodist; people were required to “to the line”.

    5. God was then able to transform whole communities one person at a time. Within his lifetime, Wesley saw the economic status of Methodists improve so much he worried they were becoming spiritually complacent and would become the form of religion without the power.

    Wesley is the proof of this statement from C. S. Lewis:

    “If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were those who thought most of the next. The apostle’s themselves, who set out on foot to convert the Roman Empire, the great men who built up the Middle Ages, the English evangelicals who abolished the slave trade, all left their mark on earth, precisely because their minds were occupied with Heaven. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become ineffective in this one. Aim at heaven
    and you will get earth ‘Thrown in.’ Aim at earth and you will get neither.”

    John Wesley aimed at heaven with his own life and then enabled others to do the same–the church, England and America were “thrown in”.

  2. Comment by MarcoPolo on January 17, 2015 at 7:18 pm

    Orter T.

    I’m not sure what you meant when you opened your comment with lamenting the association of the Church and the State in the attempt to legislate Civil Rights back in the 1960’s?

    Wasn’t it imperative that the Church get involved? The “front-lines” of the Civil Rights struggle demanded that anybody who wasn’t a homophobic bigot, get involved to right the wrong.

    In referencing the subhuman treatment that white citizens foisted upon black citizens over time, we mustn’t forget that many, if not ALL those whites, were self proclaimed Christians.
    Certainly, they were NOT Christ-like in thought, OR deed!

    My wife and I just saw the film: ‘Selma’, and I don’t see where Mark Tooley’s criticism has any merit. But he has surprised me before!

  3. Comment by Neil Bragg on January 11, 2015 at 8:31 am

    “Would Jesus ever handcuff anybody?” Well, yeah, if he was a policeman whose job was to protect people from criminals. One of my classmates worked for years as a cop, retired, now a full-time pastor, was a Christian during his police days, saw no contradiction at all between his job and his faith. Anyone care to imagine what life would be like without cops? It isn’t fear of God that keeps burglars out of your house or robbers from mugging you in the mall parking lot, it’s fear of the police and prison. As Paul recognized, governments (no matter how bad they are) do serve an essential God-ordained purpose.

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