@dalepetrie Michael Lerner in The Left Hand of God addresses exactly the point you are trying to get at in your question, and is a “must read” if you are serious about this. I think Lerner and Hedges are part of a movement on the Religious Left, to articulate an alternative that stands in contrast to the Right Hand of God, ”[a] vision of God as a powerful avenger, the Force that will overthrow evil through superior power, the Force that seeks to exterminate enemies and suppress dissent. The vision of the Right Hand of God imagines that evil can be wiped out by one more war or by imposing rigid commandments about how to live and enforcing them through violence and punishment. It imagines that people can be coerced into goodness.”
Lerner says that the Right does have empathy for their immediate circle, by which they mean people like them, whom they regard as the deserving poor as opposed to those others, those undeserving poor. But where and how one draws this line this fits into a larger world-view about whether the world can be healed or saved, and who in it should be helped. Its a bit complicated, so bear with me.
The ascendant form of evangelism on the religious Right is Dispensationalism. Dispensationalists believe that we are “living in the last stage of history prior to the Second Coming of Christ, a thousand year period in which Satan and all his demons will be imprisoned, and then a final battle will take place in which Satan and all his evil followers will be destroyed by fire and a new heaven and a new earth will be established for all eternity.”
To paraphrase Lerner, Dispensationalists see the world as on a downward spiral toward total corruption and that humans can do nothing but wait for the coming of Christ. Social action is seen as a waste of time because there will always be wars and injustice till Jesus returns to rectify it all. Feeding the hungry is legitimate not for the goodness that is involved but for the opportunity it may present to open the people being fed to accepting the gospel. Convinced that nothing much can change, they often take the evil around them as confirmation that the biblical predictions are already on their way to coming true.
Dispensationalists are unapologetic champions of the Right Hand of God. And while they would not reject a call for a world based on love, kindness, generosity, and nonviolence, as espoused in the Sermon on the Mount, they would argue that it has no application today but was meant instead for the thousand year period after Jesus returns.
When you live by the Right Hand of God, you believe that you must dominate others if you don’t want to be dominated yourself, and you also accept looking out for above and beyond all as nothing to be ashamed of, but as common sense. They will empty their pockets to fund a food pantry and bask in the warmth or their own quite genuine spirit of generosity and human kindness, but then they will turn around and vote for a party that depresses the minimum wage, slashes social services to the poor in order to fund tax cuts for the rich, and which fights tooth and nail to prevent the enactment of universal health care.
Why this disconnect? Because they don’t approach the systemic problems of society in systemic terms. The Christian skill set in analyzing social problems does not include systemic social and economic analysis. They don’t see the selfishness and me-firstism, which is at the heart of a spiritual crisis that pervades the entire capitalist system Rather, they blame the crisis on the intrinsic sinfulness of individuals. When Wall Street brings the world economy to the brink of collapse, they blame it on a few greedy individuals, while overlooking that Wall Street is a virtual temple of greed that exists to advance, celebrate and consummate greed and excess in all it’s forms.
They also see societal distortions as the product of some group in society that only cares for itself and promotes selfishness and materialism because it cannot embrace the “true” values of “our” religion. And who are they? Whichever group happens to be the major scapegoat of society at the time, the major “demeaned other.” The major demeaned others have generally been Native Americans and African-Americans, with Catholics, Jews, the Irish, Italians, Poles, Mexicans, Japanese, and Chinese taking their historical turn, and gays, lesbians, and Muslims today.
Each of these groups has had to struggle against prejudice in order to be included in American society. And when each gets a foothold, the Right often denounces these groups as “special interests” pursuing their own narrow selfish agenda and thereby disrupting the narrow sense of community and “family values” on which family life is believed to depend. Thus, gays are perceived as a threat to marriage and the family in general, and are blamed for rising divorce rates and a “decline in private morality” for the decline of society in general. Racism has morphed into a general hostility to the ACLU and for civil rights generally; and a “get tough” law and order politics, and the largest prison system in the history of the world fed by a war on drugs that is really a war on people of color.
The Left takes the rather uncomfortable position that we can never do enough to atone for the enslavement of blacks, the genocide and subjugation of Native Americans, or the benefits we currently enjoy from America’s global economic domination, and ecological irresponsibility. The implicit message of the Right, on the other hand, is that “you are enough simply because you are a Christian. Because you are one of us, there is nothing you have to accomplish to be judged valuable. The very fact that you’ve become part of our group (by accepting Jesus as your personal savior, or by recognizing the right of Americans to run the world, or by recognizing that we have the right path to God is enough—you are one with us, you are saved, you are part of the elite,your life has meaning because you are one of us.”
In a sense, the Religious Right practices retail compassion but wholesale selfishness. Charity begins at home, you hear them say, or near home. It can never take the form of a more equitable and just society because then people would be able to obtain benefits without working for them (like public schools, roads and libraries).
But it really isn’t about that, its the fear that those undeserving (and demeaned) others might getting something that might be better than we have—that one person 15 years ago who had lobster one night when we could only afford hamburger. If you know anything about poor people they will splurge on things that may strike us as extravagances that people in “their” circumstances shouldn’t be able to afford. The reason they do this is precisely to affirm that they are deserving of nice things too, and not some lesser form of humanity who should not even aspire to such tastes. This is nobody’s business but their own.
How many times has that anecdote been repeated? And, each time implicitly arguing the utter futility and wastefulness in giving food subsidies that allow the poor to make their own dietary choices in dignified privacy. This is the welfare queen myth being born anew (based on nothing more than a prejudicial perception about what is “too good” for poor people). And each time it is repeated, it justifies taking even more food out of the mouths of poor children. Ah, what sweet compassion it is to force people to come into your soup kitchen, food pantry or shelter and endure your demeaning soul-soliciting pitches in order to get some scrap from your table.
After all, people aren’t poor because there is any structural misallocation of opportunity or resources in the society, are they? Everyone in America gets the same great public education no matter where they live, right? There isn’t any racial discrimination anymore, right? There aren’t any lingering pockets of deep poverty, hopelessness and despair any more, are there? So, obviously, the only reason anyone is poor is because they they just don’t want to work. Instead, they want everything just handed to them.
Obviously, such people aren’t worthy of our compassion because they are sinful. They are lazy, slothful and self-indulgent. And they are just using the government to advance their own narrow selfish agenda to get something for nothing. Never mind that we have been getting something for nothing from them in the form of slavery, legal discrimination, redlining, economic disinvestment in their communities, and the slave wages we currently pay prisoners.
The Right holds itself out as individually and collectively compassionate because it doles out a meager private charity with one hand, while on the other it votes for politicians who seek to deepen the poverty that makes charity and welfare necessary. Just look at how the Right has piled on with yet another phony corporate-sponsored PR campaign full of lies in an attempt to de-fund ACORN, because they register poor folks to vote and use that voter base to press for things like a living wage. They raise money to help out pregnant mothers, but they vote for politicians who cut back funding for Family Planning. They send money to Africa for water treatment plants, but support governmental policies that destroy subsistence farming throughout the developing world.
It is, ultimately, feel-good compassion that palliates individual hurts, but which does nothing alter the inequitable power relations that keep the injured person in a subordinate and demeaned position.
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