History can be a frustrating subject. Part of the purpose of history is to learn from the past. It is frustrating when people don’t take the time to do so.
Part of the purpose of history is also to see the sovereign hand of God at work as he raises and levels nations, peoples, movements, leaders, etc.
As Christians, these things should matter to us because we should be able to look farther than the moment, the immediate, and consider the long-term ramifications of certain discussions, even into the eternal. We should use the past not to blame but to instruct and gain wisdom for the future.
So to those Christians out there who might be more on the liberal side of some of these issues, let’s look at some history to see what it teaches us.
Today and tomorrow we will deal with the modern movement among many Christians to petition the government to take care of those in need.
Karl Marx, an atheist who mocked and denigrated any belief in God, wrote his Communist Manifesto from Germany railing against the capitalists and their abuses of the poor during the Industrial Revolution, prophesying a different revolution to come whre all men would equally share all things and work solely for the betterment of mankind.
Well, that never happened, and yet Lenin took this philosophy and applied it to an agrarian nation, setting up Communist Russia in 1917 and pulling them out of WWI, much to the delight of Germany at the time.
That war ended and America enjoyed the roaring 20’s until the worldwide economic depression caught up with them in 1929. And so, many closet communists thook this as an opportunity to divide the nation according to class, based on many actual problems within the industrial sector during that time that oppressed the “working class”. It worked.
Christians got involved at this point because they saw the great need among the poor, children, women, immigrants, and minorities (to some degree … still a pretty racist country at that point), and many developed what became known as the “social gospel.”
Hoover was wrongly blamed for this economic crisis and FDR was in, promising a New Deal, itself fraught with the language punishing those who were producing and making money.
Now, many people who claimed Christ at the time were involved in these massive programs, assuredly out of great feelings of compassion over the desperate needs that were obvious.
Despite our modern perception, the New Deal didn’t ever help the Depression. At all. In fact, the Depression got worse. Unemployment especially spiked under FDR.
To be fair, this wasn’t all due to the New Deal. A severe drought in the midwest didn’t help, and the argument could be made that perhaps the Depression would have been even worse without the New Deal.
The fact of the matter is, however, that the New Deal, hailed by many modern liberals as necessary and heroic, was a complete failure. A couple important things came out of the New Deal, but 90% of it just didn’t work. To the chagrin of pacifists, it took American involvment in WWII to pull us out of the Great Depression. (We started producing things, and rewarding those that did, instead of punishing them.)
In fact, check the numbers if you don’t believe me. Whenever taxes have been raised, even if just on “the rich”, economic stats got worse. Unemployment and inflation will rise. That translates into MORE poverty. The whole economy may not move into a recession, but in general the numbers are there.
(As an aside, the greatest examples of compassion during the Great Depression were from individuals, not the government.)
Let’s skip ahead to a more recent example. Liberals continuously push for a higher minimum wage. Well, a new raise in minimum wage recently went into effect and unemployment immediately rose.
The forced redistribution of wealth by the government is not compassion in the least. It doesn’t help the poor, and more importantly, it does not teach a nation how to be individuals of compassion.
Part 2 tomorrow.
Peace.