I mentioned last week in our chapel service at World Vision’s U.S. headquarters about a recent Christianity Today article I read that I can’t seem to get off my mind.
In the article, a recent survey (pdf) by the Pew Research Center showed that American evangelicals were more in favor of cutting federal spending to “aid the world’s poor” than any other area. Second and third to cutting foreign aid were “government assistance for the unemployed” and “environmental protection.”
As World Vision urges Congress right now to reconsider its possible budget cut that will greatly affect foreign disaster assistance by more than two-thirds, I wonder how Christians in Jesus’ day would poll in a survey of this same sort.
From Polling Evangelicals: Cut Aid to World’s Poor, Unemployed on Christianity Today:
The top choices among evangelicals for the chopping block are economic assistance to needy people around the world (56 percent), government assistance for the unemployed (40 percent), and environmental protection (38 percent).
In each of these categories, evangelicals were more supportive of decreasing spending than are other Americans. In fact, evangelicals were more supportive of funding cuts in every area except military defense, terrorism defense, aid to veterans, and energy.
Cutting foreign aid and support for the unemployed while favoring increases in defense and police are not priorities of all evangelicals.
Robert Zachritz, government relations director for World Vision in the U.S., said in a statement that U.S. programs help save lives worldwide.He said 8 million children die each year — lives that could be saved with low-cost aid programs to provide malaria bed nets or child immunizations.
“World Vision recognizes the need to make tough decisions addressing the present fiscal crisis, including budget cuts, but these should not fall disproportionately on the poorest of the poor,” Zachritz said. “Congress is considering an overall budget reduction of 8.8 percent from the FY2011 presidential request, with cuts disproportionately made to the most cost-effective humanitarian programs saving children’s lives.”
Join World Vision’s fight to preserve funding for humanitarian programs that save lives. Contact your members of Congress today.
For more from World Vision on U.S. Budget Cuts that threaten the poor:
But until we accomplish this, we cannot just cut 40% of the humanitarian aid budget. Why are people so upset about spending 1% on humanitarian aid and not upset about spending 60+% on the military!? I think this is the point that this article is trying to make. Rich Stearns isn’t advocating socialism, he’s making the much-ignored point that for fundamentalist evangelical Christians to accomplish a “Christian Nation,” perhaps they should start by supporting Christian priorities. At present, we have an enormous contradiction:
If you believe it is solely the Church’s job to take care of the poor, then great, support a separation of church and state and get Evangelical lobbying out of politics.
If you believe that we should be a religious state, a “Christian Nation,” that that’s fine too. But advocate for our government to uphold Christian values of putting people before markets, and the poor before war-aims.
But please realize the enormous contradiction in Christianizing our government while upholding wealthy American-capitalist values (which are clearly against the teachings of Jesus).
I respect WorldVision profoundly for having the courage to stand up against the Christian Right to support Jesus’ values.
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