Posted by
Bert Chapman on Tuesday, June 14, 2011 8:28:00 AM
Rowan Williams is the Archbishop of Canterbury and the titular head of the Church of England and the worldwide Anglican communion. This church, like many other mainline Protestant denominations, has been torn by schism perpetrated by declining membership, increased societal secularization, and the failure to promote biblically correct teaching on homosexuality and a variety of other moral issues. Such muddled thinking has also occurred when Williams and other Anglican prelates have decided to comment on economic issues facing Britain and other countries.
Britain's high indebtedness is causing the Conservative/Liberal Democratic coalition government headed by Prime Minister David Cameron to make cuts to that country's expensive social assistance programs. This morally legitimate policy response has been denounced by Williams and other trendy leftist prelates. They believe the government's first responsibility should be to economically provide for the poor. Of course, Williams and his colleagues never bother to consider the corrosive defects governmental social assistance programs have on the poor and on family well-being. They create a dangerous culture of dependency on governmental largesse and sense of perpetual entitlement to living off the government and other taxpayers and take away any individual sense of initiative and self-responsibility for their behavior. They also pose onerous tax and regulatory burdens on individuals and businesses that make it difficult, if not impossible, to create new businesses to hire workers and generate more wealth for Britain and other countries.
This should be an opportunity for the Church of England and other religious organizations to promote greater individual self-initiative and entrepreneurship by not looking to Government as the source of economic, personal, and societal salvation. Williams, instead, should call for individuals to place their ultimate trust in God, develop the strong sense of personal responsibility for actions repeatedly enunciated in scripture, and promote the critical importance of the traditional family has the best source for personal moral development and economic stability. The Church of England should be promoting job training programs and skills and work with businesses to create additional jobs for aspiring workers and with the government to enhance opportunities for individuals desirous of establishing their own businesses. This new sense of entrepreneurship and personal responsibility should be reflected in church sermons and official pronouncements instead of clinging to failed obsolescent socialist and Keynesian delusions that governmental spending and stimulus packages are the only way to achieve social justice.
Sermons on Jesus' parable of the talents would be a good step in the right direction.
The seductions of the secular left have been common to the church during the last two centuries. This has been demonstrated by the U.S. "Social Gospel Movement" and contemporary faddish attraction to deifying the environment instead of the sovereign Lord of creation, promoting inclusion and diversity instead of the preeminence and exclusivity of Christian redemption, and a pathetic emotional need to avoid being charged with hate by the church's secular and religious enemies. Williams and other leftist religious observers of economic society have to little experience with managing personal, family, business, nonprofit organization, or governmental finances. Seminary training generally does not include grounding in the intellectually and Judeo-Christian moral foundations of free market economics and this makes it all to easy to be seduced by the nostrums of redistributive economics and the fallacious leftist conception of "social justice" which increases individual dependence on secular institutions instead of empowering them to reach their God-given potential.
If Christians want to speak credibly on economic issues, they need to know what governmental economic policies have and haven't worked and be able to explain those policies in an articulate manner that resonates with the everyday needs of individuals while also positively motivating them to look at long-term economic issues and the multiple moral consequences of economic decisionmaking.