Corralled and steered

Adam Lee of AlterNet ponders whether Fundie churches want people to be destitute in sharp contrast to the command of Jesus to feed the hungry. Many Fundie churches are out to stop our gov't from funding various programs to help the needy. It is up to churches to handle such things, they say. It has historically been up to the churches, not the gov't. But they seem to be ignoring (or trying to hide) that charity for the poor has never been enough (there was a reason for the New Deal). To cover all the need – the gov't spends $105 billion a year and doesn't meet it all – every church in the nation would need to raise an extra $50,000 or more. That's an impossible task for a majority of our churches, which currently run at a loss. Don't these Fundie churches know that a lot of need, for millions of people, simply would not be met?

Yeah, they know. And the unmet need is intentional.

The Fundie churches decrying gov't programs for the poor are after two things:

(1) The ability to deny aid. Some people don't deserve aid. As a gay man I know who is at the top of that list, though the list would be long and include blacks, Jews, atheists, addicts, and those who have a criminal record. Due to discrimination sexual minorities tend to be poorer than the comparable straight person. The denial of aid after a denial of a job would be a double discrimination.

(2) A captive audience. In exchange for a ladle of soup the church can demand you sit through a sermon or require membership or a loyalty test of some sort.

Here's the summary:

If government charity were to be cut off, the churches wouldn't be able to come close to supplying the wants of everyone, and so they'd have strong incentive to impose stringent conditions on the people they did help. Only the most faithful, the most compliant, the most submissive would be able to get through the door.

And that's precisely the state of affairs that the religious right yearns for. What they want is to build a theocracy from the ground up, where the poor and the needy are abjectly dependent on a church that can yank away the necessities of life if it judges them insufficiently compliant, and so the masses will have no choice but to be corralled and steered.

Lee offers Mississippi as proof of his statements. It has the most churches per capita yet is the poorest and sickest (measured by life expectancy).