All right, so let us continue our discussion of Christians on the dole. And let us realize two things about it. First, given the fact that in the Western world, the dole has metasticized, it is complicated. And second, a large measure of these complications have arisen from the rationalizations that we have allowed ourselves over the years. The problem is corporate, and the solution will be corporate repentance, and that corporate repentance will be made up of individual repentance in countless instances.
But what should individual repentance look like? The center of that repentance is that we must stop kidding ourselves, and that will not be possible unless we fix some attitudes. We should be careful to tell ourselves the truth about the economic consequences of the system we are in, instead of consoling ourselves with the personal blessings and conveniences that may have come our way because of the system we are in. We are talking about millions of people, and their economy, which means that we need to take into account the distinction between “effects that are seen” and “effects that are not seen.” Has medical treatment under socialized medicine ever saved somebody’s life? Sure. That’s an effect that is seen. What about all the people who will die after the whole thing goes down into insolvency and bankruptcy? That is the effect that unseen by most, and therefore unaccounted for. If you are grateful that your widowed aunt has her Social Security, that is good. You should be. But if you are equally grateful that your grandchildren are going to have Social Security benefits, then we need to take time out from our debate here so that someone can teach you how to count. How many people will die after our gods fail us?
So let’s begin with what repentance does not look like. It does not look like acquiesence. It does not look like the chilling conclusion of 1984, where Winston wins the victory over himself and makes his peace with Big Brother. My son-in-law and daughter and small gang just got back from a three-year stint in the UK, where the only medical care available is through the National Health Service, from which may a merciful God deliver us. At the same time, if the Lord has you living in such a situation, and you break your leg, is it a sin to go get a socialized cast? Of course not. A British Christian does not have an obligation to lie by the side of the road, refusing to get into the ambulance because of “the principle of the thing.” If you were to do that, they will give you a socialized cast and a socialized pill to quiet you down. But when we move from seeing something as a regrettable necessity, which it is, and come to embrace it as the compassionate future, we have at that point been smitten with a judicial blindness. Doctors who are paid by the government to “treat what ails ya” are not going to be distributing sweetness and light by the fistful. Things are going downhill, and to pretend the opposite is the larger problem.
Second, as we work through this sort of thing, we want to make sure that we are not reacting emotionally in order to protect something we ought not to be protecting. If I chastize brown dogs, I am not chastizing all dogs for being brown. If I mock a spavined mule, I am not saying that all mules are spavined. If I say something about a hobbyist midwife, I am not saying that every form of midwifery is comparable to putting sailing ships into bottles. So what distinguishes a hobbyist from a professional? Well, to take the example at hand, a vocational professional would not opt out of the “medical system,” while depending on one of the worst aspects of that same medical system to pay for a disaster if things go wrong. But just so everyone knows it from me, let me say it plainly — there are godly midwives and there are ungodly medical doctors. Our problem is that such plain statements don’t really fix anything. I can acknowledge all kinds of evils and perversions in the realm of conventional medicine (as I do and have), but I am still seen as defending the system across the board. I am seen as a defender of conventional medicine in the same way that an anabaptist thought John Calvin was a papist. And because I say that there is such a thing as an incompetent midwife, this is seen as a scathing attack on all midwives of all time, including “the midwives who stood up to Pharaoh, and whom God Himself approved, but Wilson attacks them anyway.” But I was only critiquing the incompetent midwife, the one who is only up to Lesson 3 in the correspondence course, the lesson where they cover poultices made out of corn flakes and skim milk as a treatment for breech babies. And the fact that you will have to google this to find out whether it is a made up example only proves the point. There are problems out there. But this kind of party spirit thinking obviously exists in order to keep scrutiny at bay. To have a “white hats” and “black hats” mentality about these issues exhibits the presence of a controlling ideology — and in this discussion, it likely to be an ideology that is defending the notion that there is too such a thing as a free lunch, the lunch in question being the one I am currently engaged in eating. I just found it sitting here.
So third, we should be ruthless with ourselves and our possible motives when it comes to those areas where rationalization is likely. Just to spell it out, getting “free” goods and services is an area where rationalization is likely. Socialism is such a bad idea that the adoption of it can only happen through an appeal to sin. And the kind of sin that makes socialism appealing would include envy, self-pity, laziness, ingratitude, faux-compassion, and self-justification. For example, let’s take the envy and self-pity. We (all of us) live in the midst of incredible wealth. No people in the history of the world have been as blessed as we are. Looking at a bell curve, this includes those on the second quartile from the bottom — the lower middle class. It also includes a host of people in the lowest quartile. These people are doing really well, far better than most people in the world today, and much better than most people who have ever lived to date, including Nebuchadnezzar who didn’t even have an iPhone. But at the same time, these people who are doing really well also live in close proximity to those who are doing really, really well, and within shouting distance of those who are doing really, really, really well. And so they are being encouraged to think of themselves as poor, which is kind of true, after a fashion. But it is comparative poverty, relative poverty, and this means the verses we cite on our self-pitying behalf don’t mean what we think they do.
Consider. The U.S. Census Bureau classifies a number of Americans in our lower echelons as “poor.” Sixty-two percent of these folks have satellite or cable. Ninety-seven percent have color television; over half of them have two or more of them. Almost three quarters own a car, while thirty percent own two cars or more. Seventy-six percent of our poor households have air-conditioning. Forty-six percent own their own homes. The homes they own, on average, have three bedrooms, one and a half baths, a garage, and a porch or patio. The average poor American has more square footage than the average person (not poor person) who lives in Paris, London, Vienna, or Athens. Only six percent of our poor people live in overcrowded conditions, while more than two-thirds of them have more than two rooms per person. Seventy-three percent have a microwave oven, more than half have a stereo, and a third have an automatic dishwasher. Got the picture? [Source: Jay Richards, Money, Greed and God (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 87ff]
Compare this to real poverty, absolute poverty. Fifty thousand people die every day of poverty-related causes. Since 1990, that has tallied up to 270 million people who have died because they were poor. 10 million children a year die of hunger or treatable diseases. Eight hundred million people go to bed hungry every day. Over a billion people in the world live on less than a dollar a day. James 2:15-16 is talking about the people in this paragraph, and not most of the people in the paragraph above it.
But it is not surprising that we have gotten ourselves confused — we use the same noun poverty to describe the condition of people in these respective states. But the confusion is not just over the definition of a word. This is a confusion that causes real damage. Instead of responding with gratitude for all God has given us, and seeking to export the gospel preconditions of the economic system that made this possible to those who desperately need it, we have taken to whining about our comparative disadvantages, and doing so in a way calculated to bring Third World economic expertise over here. And having behaved this way for a generation or two, we are getting our wish. Obama is spending us into the poorhouse, and this is not really disputable if you just take the trouble to count. This is just another testimony to the enslaving power of sin. The issue is sin, bad attitudes, envy and ingratitude, and not the presence or absences of “resources.” If a people are ungrateful to God, they will do poorly over the long haul. If they are grateful to God, they will do well. We here in America are refusing to be grateful — our health system, the best in the world, is dogmatically declared to be broken. Come with me to Haiti. I’ll show you broken.
So let’s cash this out. We are talking about various forms of petty thievery, larceny in the heart, on the individual level. The collective effect of this is spectacular grand larceny on a national scale, followed by a national crash, but on the individual level, the pending flood just looks like a raindrop. Now to be crystal clear, that larceny does not exist in the hearts of those who recognize all this for what it is, and who are doing their level best keep from taking undue advantage. Go back to our kids in the UK. If they thought, “While we are over here, let’s load up on all the free benefits,” that would be an individual manifestation of the corporate problem. But if they used the system when they had to, recognized it for what it was, and tried honestly to minimize their need for it, they are just doing what they have to do.
Take another example — two men are laid off and both take their unemployment. One of them begins looking for work the first day, and goes off unemployment three weeks later when he finds a job. The other guy makes sure that he takes the maximum time allowed, and gets a job the day after his benefits expire. He has done this multiple times, and has it down to a science. Now in both cases, unemployment is a bad idea. Unemployment offers perverse incentives to both, but one of them refuses those incentives. Our unemployment system as it now exists is not a true insurance program — if it were being run by a private company, that company would be bankrupt. But if it were a private company, it wouldn’t be bankrupt because of people like the first guy. This is another way of saying that public unemployment insurance is not losing money because of the first guy. I can hear the “what abouts” now. What about a diligent guy, pounding the sidewalks every day looking for work, but he fails to get work for the entire period that his unemployment lasts? What about him? He shouldn’t tie himself in knots over it — it is like breaking your leg in the UK. Not the best plan, but the providence of God is usually something you should roll with.
But larceny does exist in the hearts of those who have come to think of these entitlements as their “right.” Among Christians, this larcency is usually petty larceny, and it is usually accompanied by the sin of grumbling. People who filch things from their boss, for example, almost always do so in a context of grievances, and grievances are usually borne of ingratitude. Almost no one wakes up in the morning and thinks, “My boss has always treated me in a world class fashion. I think I’ll rob him blind today.” No, man is a rationalizing, self-justifying creature. If we are going to steal something, particularly something little, we tend to tie it up in the bubble wrap of our grumbles. “Management hasn’t treated me right. The Church doesn’t do this. The Christians who knew I was hurting didn’t help out when I needed it. The conservatives who told me to get a job just don’t understand. Don’t you understand? They owe me.”
And who are “they”? Oh, I don’t know — that mysterious benefactor who funds all this with his magic dollars. Sure, he’s paying something, but I am pretty sure he owes me way more than that. Because I am put upon, the system owes me something. And this opinion is reinforced and stroked by our envy-ridden culture in countless ways. And if someone questions it, they are not just questioning a math problem. They are questioning an entire complex of self-rationalizing conceits. And that explains the reaction.