Today I went to the Seattle Art Museum. My wife took the day off so that we could go and see the Nick Cave (The Artist/Tailor, not the Musician/Bad Seed). The exhibit is called, "Meet me at the Center of the Earth." It is a display of some 30-40 different "sound suits."
That's not what this diary is about.
This diary is about the convenient dovetailing of the needs of the conservative churches in the US to be able to claim that they are doing good work, because they are helping the poor, the homeless, and anyone less fortunate.
Some of the policies that the RW has been able to get conservative Christians to go along with are seemingly at odds with the words that Jesus himself was supposed to have said. So naturally, we on the left frequently question the merits of the conservatives' faith, because they seem to be opposed to the very things that would allow all of us to jointly share the burden of lifting people out of cycles of poverty.
I was reading a quote from the Nick Cave where he was talking about his home life. He made the point that he had 6 or 7 siblings, and that there was a scarcity of clothing and other things, so that all things in his home had value. That's one of the key points of his work. He uses things he finds in thriftstores to create these amazing works of art which rely on a high level of skilled craftsmanship in the tailoring.
The connection here might seem confusing, but I started to think about the number of times I have tried to figure out where I could give a good pair of basketball or baseball shoes that my kid has grown out of. We have always loved to get the cousins' clothes and athletic shoes. They are always needed at some point, and the shoes we buy usually get worn about 40 times before they are put in the attic as my kid grows out of them.
I've always wondered if any of his teammates could use them. My kid goes to school in a part of the city that is historically poor and largely made up of immigrants to the US. They don't appear to need new basketball shoes or soccer cleats, but I can't tell their family finances from looking at the kids' shoes.
The point here is that one of the main proving points of the value of religion in the US is that US churches spend a lot of their effort supporting the poor either through meals programs, shelters, some job training... Yet, many of the most openly devout conservative evangelical Christians are dead set against the sort of governmental intervention through government administered social programs that would actually go further towards reducing inequality by giving each and every American the same access to things like quality schools, college education, health care, and food for the hungry.
That is always a baffling notion. How could one claim to be for helping those less fortunate people, but also against paying a small percentage more in taxes to support the types of policies that would give them a better opportunity to reach the place where the more fortunate are perched?
Generally, the answer comes down to one of individual liberties or the need to not support those people who are failing with our tax dollars. Additionally, they will say that the government is incapable of administering these programs successfully.
To me, it all seems like an easy answer that is intended to confirm the conservative political biases that are at the root of the philosophy.
The key point I want to make here is that it seems to me that these RW Christians want a certain set of outcomes:
They want less power for the government to solve the problems of the disadvantaged, and they want more power for the church to be the savior for those who live lives perilously close to the edge of complete ruination- if they haven't already fallen over that edge.
In order to achieve these goals, they can't allow the government to provide for the poor through the shared wealth of the people of the richest country in the world. It seems clear to me that part of the benefit of trying to make charity the basis of our social support system is that the provider of the benefits gets to announce that they are saving people.
I certainly don't begrudge any religion the right to offer services for the less fortunate, but I do reserve the right to question the motivation of the religious institution.
If the government of the US were able to fundamentally end poverty in the US, would religious institutions lose some of their standing in the US?
Without poverty, would American Christianity have the same level of power that it has today?
Do conservative Christians need poverty for their institutions to flourish?