Screen shot from Southern Baptist Convention’s North American Mission Board website.
USA Today reports that 80% of disaster relief aid following Hurricanes Harvey and Irma comes from faith-based organizations—denominations, individual churches, non-denominational charitable organizations.
For anyone familiar with Marvin Olasky’s The Tragedy of American Compassion, that’s no surprise.
In what Bill Bennett called “the most important book on welfare and social policy in a decade. Period,” Olasky first gives the amazing history of how well charitable organizations—the vast majority of them Christian—met the needs of America’s poor, the sick, and those devastated by natural disasters, crime, or substance abuse.
Then he documents how the secularist “social work” movement, from the late 19th century through the late 20th, intentionally pushed charitable organizations off of what it considered its “turf.” The basis of its actions? Contrary to Biblical teaching, it defined “social justice” as the right to equality, or some approximation of it, not of process but of outcome.
For the “social work” movement, this meant calling help for the poor “charity” was an insult because it failed to recognize that they had a right to whatever help they received. It also meant that the time-tested practice of religious charities of distinguishing between the “worthy poor,” who suffered through no fault of their own, and the “unworthy poor,” who suffered as a consequence of their own choices and needed not (or not only) material gifts but also moral reform, had to be abandoned.
If helping the poor was not charity but justice, it followed that it was government’s job. And since the Progressives who touted “social justice” were mostly Marxists with an expansive vision of the state, that was just fine.
What has been clear throughout the history of such government efforts is that they are far more expensive and far less effective than private charitable efforts. Government welfare programs consistently result in people’s remaining poor long term, while private charitable efforts consistently result in their rising out of poverty. That’s been documented in book after book, but Charles Murray’s Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950–1980 and Walter Williams’s The State Against Blacks are good places to start. The performance of religious charitable disaster relief efforts following Hurricanes Harvey and Irma—providing four-fifths of the aid—is just one more demonstration of that.
Big government inevitably has big overhead. It does less with more. For its key tasks—tasks that really can’t and shouldn’t be done by the private sector, like law enforcement and national defense—that’s just something we have to put up with.
But we shouldn’t put up with it when government does what the private sector can do better. If, despite government’s consuming 36% of America’s GDP (three-fifths of that on pensions, health care, education, and welfare), it consumed only 14%, that would free up over $4 Trillion that the more efficient private sector could use to meet the same needs, but better.
How much of that $4 Trillion would go to charitable disaster relief efforts? No one knows without testing, but one thing’s clear: every dollar of it would be better spent by the charitable sector than by government.
Joe says
This article makes typical uneducated mistake of confusing Marxism with a desire for big government. Anyone familiar with the tenets of Marxism can tell you that its goal is the complete dissolution of the state. There is no government. Only associations of workers trading with each other for their needs. But, it is a real hot button word to tar enemies with given the politicization of the term and the dumbed down population that can no more list the fundamental tenets of the western liberal democratic state than they could tell you the difference between a derivative and an integral. Marxists, who believe the government is a tool of capitalist oppression and evil, are at the opposite end of the spectrum from Progressives who believe the government is good and a tool for dealing with society’s problems
But the article is not meant to inform is it? It seems it is meant to misinform and more importantly build those emotional kneejerk responses to hearing the words Progressive and Climate Change. After all, you found a scientist and everything. That should be enough to convince your base that the rest of the scientific community is part of some evil empire intent on doing evil for what particular reason?
E. Calvin Beisner says
Except that Marxism also calls for socialism–state ownership of all productive property–as an intermediate step on the way to the mythical dissolution of the state when communism finally comes to fruition.