SOCIALISM’S COST AND APPEAL

A Letter to a Socialistic Friend:

“I am also pragmatic in this area of economics as you are. There is no absolutely right economic policy. Instead, I think that wisdom should always require us to examine the impact of our policies, recognizing that there are dangerous extremes and abuses of power on both sides of the economic divide.

However, I tend to lean away from Marxist socialism for a number of reasons:

1.    I don't think it represents the Biblical ideal. Instead, people need to be able to reap what they sow and to give voluntarily and discerningly. I had spent more than two years with perhaps the most successful Marxist communities - the Israeli kibbutzim. However, these were voluntary. Members could come and go as they pleased. However, even these proved to be unsustainable, and their businesses ceased to be competitive. Eventually, after the idealism waned, these communities tended to breed laziness and slothfulness. Most of these communities still exist, but they had to shed most of their Marxist features.

2.    I think it tends to undermine Christian values, family, and community making people dependent upon the State, the God-substitute, instead of learning how to depend and to be accountable to one another. It also breaks down families, making the husband unnecessary.

3.    Top-down control is wasteful and unsustainable. It also exercises more control and conformity over our lives.

4.    Instead of empowering, it robs people of their initiative.

5.    Socialism involves greater measures of control over individuals and families heightening the potential of the abuse of the few over the many.

6.    Those who are more gifted will tend to escape the socialist system making it even less competitive.

7.    Marxism has a consistent track record of repression and genocide.

Admittedly, unbridled capitalism also embodies many dangers. However, with laws in place to control the abuses, capitalism unleashes human initiative and is the greatest engine for economic progress and general well-being. In comparison to socialism, it only requires minimal governmental oversight and interference into our lives.

Why then its popularity in view of its many costly failures and human rights abuses? Here are several probable culprits:

1.    As the West has moved in a leftist direction, capitalism has been routinely vilified by the universities and the media.

2.    Socialism promises the world, while it denies the costs.

3.    Socialists claim that the rich steal wealth rather than create wealth.

4.    We want immediate benefits and have little inclination to think about the future costs.

5.    Socialism is wrongly associated with compassion and empathy. We want to think of ourselves as compassionate, and Socialism provides the outlet.”

6.    By equalizing everyone, it is assumed that the causes of division will be removed. Instead, it seems to breed more resentments, when some work hard and other don’t.

THE RACIAL DIVIDE: A LETTER TO MY BLACK SISTER IN CHRIST

I was so deeply touched by your message that I decided to drop everything after returning from my Thanksgiving weekend to write you a response.

Before God, I have no greater burden than that we would love each other across color and ethnic lines to show the world the reality of our Lord Jesus:

·       “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” (John 13:34-35; 17:20-23)

As a Jew, I was thrilled to visit a German missionary friend who had me speak at two church gatherings in Germany. What a delight to love and to find brotherhood among those whom I had wanted to kill. I treasure the time that we shared together. I also treasure my black brethren, many of whom I teach and regard as giants of the faith. Before God, I would stand up for them just as some as I would my biological brethren.

This is why I am so upset with the secular elites who continue to use every possible occasion to sow division within the Church and to keep the Black vote democratic. This is why it was so painful to read one more such article, the one you sent me. However, for your sake and the sake of the Church, I forced myself to read it.

Here are some of my thoughts following a couple of the quotations I pulled from the article:

·       Modern evangelicals' support for this president cannot be separated from the history of evangelicals' participation in and support for racist structures in America. https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/white-evangelicals-love-trump-aren-t-confused-about-why-no-ncna1046826?fbclid=IwAR1mQs12kDbXDjtrZpB0plW--osJifDEdPMUJVtS7duVY9r2F1weqHmudu0

The logic of this article is “Once guilty, always guilty. Once a racist always a racist.” Well, let’s now apply this logic of “once guilty, always guilty” to the Democratic Party! Even if evangelicals entirely dropped the ball during Jim Crow, why can’t our performance not be separated from a vote for Trump now?  I just don’t get it – why must a vote for Trump be equated with racism?

We hear a lot about the failures of the Church during segregation. However, the elite media refuses to mention the performance of Bible-believing whites during Reconstruction following the Civil War. Retired Professor of History and Black Church Studies and author of “Black Preaching,” Henry H. Mitchell, had admitted that he had written to raise the esteem of his Black people. Nevertheless, Mitchell also has some good things to say about the White Church and their role in Reconstruction:

·       After the South was opened up to the missionaries, under protection of military occupation, the Protestant churches of the North launched a veritable crusade to bring literacy to the huge host of the newly freed. (Mitchell, Black Church Beginnings, 142)

·       I was stunned to see whole pages of names of people who had been sent south to do mission work. There were hundreds of these names, in tiny print, on page after page. (142)

·       Regardless of paternalism and hazards to African American self-esteem, it was this huge crew of volunteer and minimally paid instructors, of not just Baptist but all denominations, who laid the foundation for all the secondary and college work reported in the pages that follow. There may have been only a log cabin church to teach in at first; it may have been by firelight, but these volunteers taught their very hearts out. There simply isn’t room to begin to cover the host of primary reading classes that were begun in churches and elsewhere soon after the Union troops took over. (142-43)

·       There were, of course, some educated African Americans from the North hastening south to lift their sisters and brothers. But this vast number of newly freed African Americans required this white host at the outset… The first Southern generation of locally educated African American instructors was first trained in schools planted by white missionaries. (143)

This same inflammatory and destructive article claims:

·       White evangelicals certainly are not concerned with white supremacy, because they are often white supremacists.

I used to believe that whites had a different odor. I hated them so much for killing my people that being in an elevator with too many of them made me sick. However, while I have met white supremacists on rare occasions, I could never regard any of them as Christians, even less so as evangelicals, who are supposed to put the Bible first. As a result of the Bible teachings, I could never look down on anyone. Nor can I understand how any true Christian can. Nor, in my 43 years as a follower of Jesus, have I ever heard a sermon preaching racism in an evangelical church. We, who love the Words of God, understand that our only hope is in the grace of God. This is because we understand that we deserve to die for our sins just as soon as anyone else. Therefore, it is our duty to pass on the forgiveness that our Savior has extended to us and to love all.

This inflammatory article contains many gross distortions like:

·       During the civil rights movement, many white evangelicals either outright opposed Martin Luther King Jr. or, like Billy Graham, believed that racial harmony would only come about when the nation turned to God.

I’m sure that Graham did believe this way. Hatred and racism will be with us until the return of Jesus. However, Graham should be commended for doing so much to tear down the racial barriers, even threatening to withdraw from meetings/gatherings that maintained the barriers. Interestingly, many Black pastors also opposed King.

There are many such articles that have been circulated in the past three years. It doesn’t matter to them whether or not they’ve got their facts straight. All that matters to them is that they have driven a wedge between the Black and White churches.

In "The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech," liberal democrat, Kirsten Powers, wrote:

·       Mary Frances Berry, an African American and former chairwoman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights under President Bill Clinton, wrote in a Politico online discussion: “Tainting the tea party movement with the charge of racism is proving to be an effective strategy for Democrats.”

This should remind us of many similar charges, like the Republican party's "war on women." This is not just laughable, but also highly inflammatory! Powers explained that:

·       Berry, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, added, “There is no evidence that tea party adherents are any more racist than other Republicans, and indeed many other Americans. But getting them to spend their time purging their ranks and having candidates distance themselves should help Democrats win in November. Having one’s opponent rebut charges of racism is far better than discussing joblessness.”

Although blacks might feel affirmed such propaganda, the anger generated by this onslaught of attacks against evangelicals has proved to hold back the black community and to be highly divisive and has served to further alienate the black and white evangelical church. If I was black and believed such propaganda, I would have been led to commit destructive acts. What the Leftist media has been doing is criminal!

Sister, thank you for bringing to my attention the depths of your feelings. Please join me in prayer that the Lord will make His people one, the very thing that He so desires.

WHY DO WE SUPPRESS THREATENING THOUGHTS?

In Thoughts without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective, Mark Epstein, M.D reflects on the power of what we suppress to govern our lives:

·       If aspects of the person remain undigested—cut off, denied, projected, rejected, indulged, or otherwise unassimilated—they become the points around which the core forces of greed, hatred, and delusion attach themselves. They are black holes that absorb fear and create the defensive posture of the isolated self, unable to make satisfying contact with others or with the world.

Our repressed material can even shape our personalities and our orientation towards life in general:

·       the personality is built on these points of self-estrangement [denial and suppression of what is threatening]; the paradox is that what we take to be so real, our selves, is constructed out of a reaction against just what we do not wish to acknowledge. We tense up around that which we are denying, and we experience ourselves through our tensions.

Our suppressed thoughts can exert such a destabilizing influence that our personality is reconfigured to defend against them. However, Epstein seems to assume that our personality developments are largely a reaction to our relationship with our parents:

·       One recent patient of mine, for example, realized that he had developed an identity centered on feelings of shame, unworthiness, and anger rooted in a momentary experience of his mother’s emotional unavailability when he was a young child.

It is often assumed that facing what we have repressed will drain its power and will be harmoniously integrated into the rest of our personality, but will it? Are there deeper levels of the repressed material, for which these conflicts, merely provide a protective covering?

There are also other doubts about this analysis. While this patient’s chronic relationship with the parent can be both painful and formative, can this explain the broad array of related human phenomena we observe cross-culturally?

The need to be respected and to think well of ourselves. This need is often manifested in the need to be right and the denial of our weaknesses and moral culpability, and our tendencies to blame others rather than ourselves. Why do we need to deny our culpability? Why is it so threatening to not deny it?

The need to impress others. Why? What we have suppressed tells us that we do not deserve their positive regard, and so we try desperately to seek the approval of others to compensate.

Self-harm as a form of anxiety reduction. Why? Our suppressed material informs us that we are unworthy and deserving of punishment. Therefore, we punish ourselves to find some momentary relief.

We seek to avenge ourselves on those who have dishonored us. Why can’t we simply laugh them off? Because their disapproval uncovers and affirms what we have repressed about ourselves - our unworthiness - and this is highly threatening. Revenge enables us to temporarily regain a sense of our worthiness.

These are the manifestation of what psychologist John Bradshaw calls “toxic shame,” which he defines as the:

·       The internalized feeling of being flawed and defective as a human being. In the internalization process, shame, which should be a healthy signal of limits, becomes an overwhelming state of being, an identity if you will. Once toxically shamed, a person loses contact with his authentic self. What follows is a chronic mourning for the lost self. (Homecoming, 67)

Bradshaw assumes that this problem has been caused exclusively by a lack of love. Therefore, he prescribes love affirmations to address this lack.

Other therapists have also noted these universal problems and their connection to denial and have attempted to address them with the Rogerian Unconditional Positive Regard. While these empathetic techniques can help to facilitate the therapeutic relationship and to encourage the client to explore what they have repressed, will it enable them to live at peace within themselves without unrealistically inflating their self-estimation? Does it go deep enough?

From a Biblical POV, there is a deeper unresolved conflict, which high self-esteem cannot touch but merely cover over - our awareness of sin, more culpability, and our impending judgment (Romans 1:32). We feel judged and condemned, because we actually are! These unceasing intuitions can only be adequately addressed in one way - through reconciliation with the Source of all morality and moral judgment, through the death of a Substitute, Jesus.

Therefore, our Lord calls out for the guilty to come and receive complete absolution:

·       “Go, and proclaim these words toward the north, and say, ‘Return, faithless Israel, declares the LORD. I will not look on you in anger, for I am merciful, declares the LORD; I will not be angry forever. Only acknowledge your guilt, that you rebelled against the LORD your God…and that you have not obeyed my voice,’” declares the LORD. (Jeremiah 3:12-13)

If this analysis is correct, it explains why we cannot face the depths of our moral failures and the judgment we know we deserve. It is just too threatening! No wonder the deep hatred that many express towards God!

ARE EVANGELICALS THE NEW PHARISEES?

The level of hatred and contempt against evangelical Christians, those who worship the Lord according to His Word, grows daily, even from those within churches. A favorite ploy is to equate us with Pharisees and other legalists, like those who opposed Jesus. In one instance, Jesus had healed a crippled woman,

·       And he laid his hands on her, and immediately she was made straight, and she glorified God. But the ruler of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had healed on the Sabbath, said to the people, “There are six days in which work ought to be done. Come on those days and be healed, and not on the Sabbath day.” (Luke 13:13-14 ESV)

Heartless? Yes! It’s not every day that the sick can come and get healed. Besides, should the Sabbath day take precedence over the healing of a desperate woman, who had suffered for 18 years? No! But this is how the world chooses to portray the evangelical, as a heartless, brainless hypocrites, who are more concerned about trivial rules than about loving others. In contrast, Jesus is regarded as a loving and tender-hearted shepherd, who is willing to break the rules.

However, these aren’t accurate characterizations of any of these three parties. For one thing, Jesus was a stickler on the laws/teachings of the Bible, which He never violated. Instead, He taught that we must live according to every one of God’s Words:

·       “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’” (Matthew 4:4; 5:17-18)

Instead of denigrating the Law, Jesus always sought to interpret it clearly, insisting that there were some laws more important than others:

·       “Or have you not read in the Law how on the Sabbath the priests in the temple profane the Sabbath and are guiltless? I tell you, something greater than the temple is here. And if you had known what this means, ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless.” (Matthew 12:5-7)

Jesus correctly insisted that there are some considerations greater than Sabbath Day observances, namely mercy!

It is also wrongly assumed that the Pharisees had been faithful observers of the Law. While they made a splendid show of living by the Law, according to Jesus, they were hypocrites:

·       “For if you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote of me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?” (John 5:46-47)

Why then were they esteemed as faithful interpreters and keepers of the Law of Moses? It was all just a hypocritical self-centered show:

·       “They do all their deeds to be seen by others. For they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long, and they love the place of honor at feasts and the best seats in the synagogues and greetings in the marketplaces and being called rabbi by others.” (Matthew 23:5-7)  

Even in our present context, the religious leadership demonstrated their hypocrisy, since they too worked on the Sabbath:

·       Then the Lord answered him, “You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the Sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger and lead it away to water it?  And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen years, be loosed from this bond on the Sabbath day?” (Luke 13:15-16)

In contrast to the Pharisees, evangelicals strive to put the Lord and His Word first in our lives (Matthew 6:33; John 14:21-24). In this we struggle to not succumb to the temptations to win the esteem of others. Instead, we struggle to put our Savior first in all things. Many of us do not look very impressive on the outside (1 Corinthians 1:26-29). We often come from broken backgrounds and lack education and the respect of the community, but why are we so widely hated, even by those who call themselves “Christian?”

Jesus often prophesied about how the world will hate the Christians who truly follow Him:

·       Matthew 10:21-22  “Brother will deliver brother over to death, and the father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death, and you will be hated by all for my name’s sake.”

·       Matthew 10:34-36 “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household.”

·       Matthew 24:9-12 “Then they will deliver you up to tribulation and put you to death, and you will be hated by all nations for my name’s sake. And then many will fall away and betray one another and hate one another. And many false prophets will arise and lead many astray. And because lawlessness will be increased, the love of many will grow cold.”

·       John 15:18-20 “If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.  Remember the word that I said to you: ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you. If they kept my word, they will also keep yours.”

Our persecutors will even be convinced that God endorses their persecution of Christ-followers:

·       John 16:2-3 “Indeed, the hour is coming when whoever kills you will think he is offering service to God. And they will do these things because they have not known the Father, nor me.”

In contrast, the Pharisees of Jesus’ day were held in the highest esteem. They occupied the best seats and were distinguished by the highest levels of education and eloquence.

However, we rejoice in persecution, as Jesus had explained:

·       “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.” (Matthew 5:10-12)

Consequently, if you want to know who are the people of Christ, it is generally those who are hated, persecuted, and refuse to adopt the values of their prevailing cultures.