Wednesday, July 12, 2006

The Religious Left in America

OpinionJournal reports:
Religious left activist Jim Wallis (author of the best-selling "Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It") threw a party in Washington, D.C. and many liberal politicians came. Hillary Clinton was there, as were Howard Dean and Barack Obama. Marian Wright Edelman waxed poetic about "the children."

"Pentecost 2006" was the Wallis convocation, a joint affair last month of his Sojourners magazine and "Call to Renewal" political organizing arm. Pentecost, of course, is when the Holy Ghost fell upon the New Testament church in Jerusalem.

But there was no speaking in tongues at Mr. Wallis's Pentecost. Instead there was a lot of tongue wagging, mostly at Republicans. Poverty is not a family value was the theme.

Like most religious left outfits, Mr. Wallis's groups want to disengage churchgoers from concerns about abortion and homosexuality and refocus them on poverty and the environment. Mr. Wallis, the old Students for a Democratic Society hell-raiser from the 1960s, has tempered his rhetoric. But he still looks to the federal welfare and regulatory state as the source of secular salvation.
The state is God on earth for Jim Wallis.Here's what Gary North has said about the "Jim Wallis" movement:
"Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote." (Exodus 20:15, as modified by the Social Gospel)

The Social Gospel is a theological defense of the welfare state. The welfare state relies on a system of compulsory taxation that is backed up by the threat of government violence against taxpaying residents within its jurisdiction.

The welfare state threatens residents and citizens with the following penalties for resisting the tax collector: (1) the confiscation of their assets, (2) fines, and (3) imprisonment. The welfare state's law-enforcement agents are armed and are empowered by law to shoot anyone who physically resists the tax collector.

The welfare state exists only because voters have authorized the confiscation of private property through violence by the state. In the name of helping the poor, middle-class voters extract most of the loot: tax-funded education, Social Security, and Medicare. The welfare state is therefore the implementation of coventousness by politics.
As you can probably guess Gary North isn't going to get tenure at Harvard for those comments.