Some religious left guy at the Huffington Post, calling himself Chuck Currie, doesn't like some religious right organization:
If you have ever heard of the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD) and thought it was a religious organization, you would have been mistaken. Names can be deceiving.
Why would you think it was a religious organization? It has "Democracy" in it, which is a form of government, so it sounds like it's about politics. It has the preposition "on", which suggests a distance from religion- as does the word "religion," actually. You have religion departments, comparative religion studies, and so forth; on the other hand, you have churches, synagogues, mosques, sacrifices to the gods and the like. People talk about other people "practicing religion", and describe other people as religious. I would expect an institute on religion and democracy to advance a certain perspective about religion and its relationship to democracy. If the author hadn't suggested the idea, his readers probably never would have thought the organization was an apolitical religious organization. First paragraphs can be deceiving.
the IRD was busy denouncing Christian advocacy on behalf of the poor this week as worshiping "big government."
Usually people don't denounce "advocacy on behalf of the poor" generally; they may disagree with Chuck Curry specifically about the best way to do so. For Curry, the whole question of how best to help the poor is largely a phony controversy; that's why he puts "big government" in quotes, to show that the debate over the role of government is for him a sideshow, while the debate over whether to help the poor at all is real. The question for Curry and his ilk is one of will to do the right thing rather than knowledge of how to do it, or trading off between competing goods.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), the United Church of Christ (UCC) and a plethora of religious leaders from across religious traditions have been calling on Congress and the president to "put the poor and vulnerable first" as difficult budget decisions were made for the remainder of FY11 and next year's federal budget.
Sadly, those calls largely went unheard in the budget compromise reached late Friday evening. Those most vulnerable will suffer as we continue tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans while cutting critically needed domestic programs. The "least of these" that Christians are called on to defend are being left behind. For the IRD, however, that is exactly what the doctor ordered.
Most taxes don't come from high-bracket taxes on the rich; a lot of them come from the rich, because the rich have a lot of income, but whether the top bracket is 35 or 39 percent doesn't make a lot of difference. (You could of course tax at 70% and drive everybody into shelters.) Conversely, most of what government does isn't targeted at the poor. Most government activity is directed at helping the public generally (government funds roads because people like to drive, disease research because people don't like getting diseases, education because people want to be educated) or to benefit whatever special interests happen to take control of it. Consequently, the main political question is always how much money we want to devote to collective action and how much to our own goals, rather than how much the rich should give to the poor. Curry promises to show us that the budget doesn't do enough to help the poor, but he changes the subject to the top marginal tax rate rather than telling us what we need to do to help the poor and how we are failing to measure up.
Mark Tooley, IRD's director, wrote this week for Front Page Magazine, a far-right publication with morally troubling leadership, that the "Religious and Evangelical Left":
...assume that only centralized, coercive government can guarantee "justice" and provide "charity." Other social actors, like families, churches, private charities, philanthropies, and civic groups, not to mention private business, are all to submit unquestioningly to government supremacy in every human arena. Here is the Religious Left's vision of "God's Kingdom," administered from Washington, D.C.
That isn't true, of course. So why write it? Tooley, a former analyst for the CIA, has his reasons.
[Me again; typepad doesn't let me double outdent after a double indent] Curry does assume, at least, that opposition to government efforts to help the poor is equivalent to opposing help for the poor (or, since few people oppose all government aid to the poor, that opposition to the levels and method of spending that Curry happens to favor is immoral.) We should also consider at least the possibility of government action crowding out or altering the course of private action in negative ways. But Mark Tooley used to work at the CIA, and is therefore a bad person!
most Christians come together over the issue of poverty. For conservative political leaders, this is troubling. And so they use IRD as a vehicle for attacking faith leaders and organizations, like the National Council of Churches, whenever Christians work in common cause to help the poor lift themselves out of poverty, to advocate for an end to war or for policies that would reverse the impact of human caused global climate change.
This isn't true, of course. So why did Curry write it? Because, again, he believes we have it in our power to bring "an end to war," to "help the poor lift themselves out of poverty", and the like, and that anyone who disagrees with his methods simply doesn't want to accomplish his goals.
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