Missing the Missed Point, part 3

Now we get to the part of Keely Emerine-Mix's post where she says something that is halfway sensible -- the church has too often tended to shun sinners as unworthy of our charitable attentions. There is definitely a real and present danger of that in churches, and it is heinous in part because it implies that if they are left outside the church because they are unworthy, we are inside the church because we were somehow found worthy. And of course that is both atrocious theology and a denial of God's abundant grace toward us.

(Since that is about the only decent point she makes in this post, maybe Mrs. Mix could have substituted a link to John Ford's Stagecoach, as that movie has just about the same perspective and points as her post, but in a much more entertaining format.)

There is a great irony, however, in Mrs. Mix's charge that the great sin of the post-World War II church has been the deliberate neglect and avoidance of sinners, because one of the chief causes -- if not the number one cause -- of all the problems that she rightly points out in the latter part of the second paragraph and in subsequent paragraphs is -- you guessed it: the rise of the government welfare State. That's right, the government welfare State that Mrs. Mix so loves and wishes to see grow ever larger and stronger and more involved in all areas of life, as the foremost agency of God in promoting the well-being of people on this earth, is the primary isolator of the "prim and proper people" (the "haves") from what Mrs. Mix likes to refer to as the comfortable middle-class white church's "great unwashed" (the "have-nots").

So at least as regards the final part of the post in question, I have to congratulate Mrs. Mix on pointing to a very serious problem. Unfortunately for her, she and her fellow pantywaist liberal Christians are largely responsible for causing this problem, and just about everything that she proposes as solutions will only make this problem worse. The more the Welfare State grows, the greater will become the chasm dividing people according to economic class and race in this country. The resentment across this divide is mutual: people on the receiving end of government hand-outs think they are entitled to them, and they resent the middle and upper class, and the middle class resents the poor people who are seen as leeches and as dragging down the overall level of the entire society. The only solution is a return to biblical blueprints for welfare, getting the government out of these activities and returning them to the family and the church.

Liberals love the Welfare State in part because it creates the illusion that everybody's needs are being adequately met WITHOUT any liberal actually having to go out and get his or her hands dirty. And of course that also applies to a lot of people who would not self-identify as liberals but for whom, nevertheless, the existence of the Welfare State is found to be mighty convenient.

Fortunately for the Gospel, however, such approaches are bound to FAIL and sooner or later (probably after the whole house of cards comes tumbling down) everyone is going to be forced to resume doing thing's God's way. Of course, by that time we will all be much poorer but from that point forward things will start to look up.