The DNC gathered in its summer coven in San Francisco yesterday for the purpose of drumming up more fresh Hell to inflict upon our troubled nation. One of the notables was the president of the NAACP’s North Carolina chapter, the Reverend William Barber. At the meeting, he gave what is essentially his stump speech (you can find it here | here | here) but he tarted it up a bit to try to inoculate the Democrats from the well-grounded charge than they have abandoned economic liberty in favor of turning the US into a Venezuelan style socialist hellhole.

DNC Speaker Rev. William Barber: Socialism Endorsed By Constitution, Biblepic.twitter.com/jPA08RC87Z — Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) August 24, 2019

When we embrace moral language, we must ask does our policy care for the least of these? Does it lift up those who are most marginalized and dejected in our society? Does it establish justice? That is moral question. If someone calls it socialism, the we must compel them to acknowledge that the Bible, then, must promote socialism. Because Jesus offered free healthcare to everyone and he never charged a leper a co-pay. You want to have…it is time for us to say, if you want to have a moral debate, bring it on, baby. The Bible says a nation will be judged by how it treats the poor and the sick and women and immigrants. The Bible says that God makes in rain on the just and the unjust alike. If you want to call caring for folks socialism, then the Constitution is a socialist document because it calls us to promote the general welfare and to establish justice.

This is the kind of deeply heretical and dishonest bullsh** that political clergy spin. It doesn’t matter if they are Salvadoran Jesuits preaching Liberation Theology to benefit an atheistic overthrow of the existing government, Father James Martin flinging about proof texts to show that God is perfectly fine with unrestrained butt-sex, or some guy trying to LARP as a Jim Crow era civil rights leader.

First and foremost, while we are called, as Christians, to help those in need, there is zero evidence that Jesus was terribly interested in social policy. Rather the opposite. Barber says Jesus gave free health care to everyone…not true at all. In John 5:3-9 you have the story of the lame man at the pool of Bethesda:

In these lay a large number of ill, blind, lame, and crippled. One man was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had been ill for a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be well?” The sick man answered him, “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; while I am on my way, someone else gets down there before me.” Jesus said to him, “Rise, take up your mat, and walk.” Immediately the man became well, took up his mat, and walked.

He didn’t provide healthcare for everyone because Jesus didn’t do tricks. Think of the times that he told people he’d healed to not tell anyone. In this case, He healed one man. This is because that Christ’s purpose in performing miracles was to increase the faith of the cured person and the audience and bring about a conversion of hearts. In John 4:48, He seems to express frustration that many people will not believe without miracles…something he pointedly addresses to St. Thomas in John 20:29.

You have the incident in Matthew 26:

Now when Jesus was in Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, a woman came up to him with an alabaster jar of costly perfumed oil, and poured it on his head while he was reclining at table. When the disciples saw this, they were indignant and said, “Why this waste? It could have been sold for much, and the money given to the poor.” Since Jesus knew this, he said to them, “Why do you make trouble for the woman? She has done a good thing for me. The poor you will always have with you; but you will not always have me.*

By the way, there is no evidence that Jesus healed Simon and one would think that if he did, it would have been noteworthy to Matthew who would have been present.

The whole quote about “render unto Caesar” is not an endorsement of government (I’ve actually seen the mouthbreathing left use it that way), it is a rejection of temporal politics as meaningless. He’s saying that he doesn’t care about what you do with your money but he does care about what you do with your soul. Those two things may be tied together but Christ doesn’t institute any requirement that the state confiscate your property to give to others.

In the verses that demand charity, there is never any requirement that you send your money and property to a central government so that bureaucrats can live off from it or politicians use the resources to garner votes. The only recognized source of charity in the Bible is the individual and the Church. It is voluntary individual action and not coerced collectivism by the government. The fact that tax collectors ranked with harlots in the social hierarchy should be a clue as to how government was viewed.

Were Barber’s assessment of Jesus’s ministry was in any way true, then Judea and Samaria would have been completely healthy and there would have been no poor people. That was not the case. In fact, you will be hard pressed to find an example of Christ making a poor man no longer poor.

While Barber seems to know precious little about Christian theology, he knows even less about the US Constitution. It is not a collectivist document. The Bill of Rights, itself, is an indictment of Barber’s view which I can only assume is an ill thought out, cornpone version of the bastardization of America’s history being fluffed by the New York Times 1619 Project.

Barber and his cohorts are not offering Christianity because their entire philosophy is build on defying the Commandment to not covet and to use the coercive power of the government to engage in theft. The are a prime example of the wolves in sheep’s clothing.

In fact, if you’re a Catholic, Christianity is incompatible with Socialism and it has been so declared for a century and a half. This is Pope Leo XIII in 1878:

“They [socialists, communists, or nihilists] debase the natural union of man and woman, which is held sacred even among barbarous peoples; and its bond, by which the family is chiefly held together, they weaken, or even deliver up to lust. Lured, in fine, by the greed of present goods, which is ‘the root of all evils, which some coveting have erred from the faith’ (1 Tim. 6:10.3), they assail the right of property sanctioned by natural law; and by a scheme of horrible wickedness, while they seem desirous of caring for the needs and satisfying the desires of all men, they strive to seize and hold in common whatever has been acquired either by title of lawful inheritance, or by labor of brain and hands, or by thrift in one’s mode of life.”

Pope Pius XI in 1931:

That We, in keeping with Our fatherly solicitude, may answer their petitions, We make this pronouncement: Whether considered as a doctrine, or an historical fact, or a movement, Socialism, if it remains truly Socialism, even after it has yielded to truth and justice on the points which we have mentioned, cannot be reconciled with the teachings of the Catholic Church because its concept of society itself is utterly foreign to Christian truth. [Socialism] is based nevertheless on a theory of human society peculiar to itself and irreconcilable with true Christianity. Religious socialism, Christian socialism, are contradictory terms; no one can be at the same time a good Catholic and a true socialist.

Pope John XXIII in 1961:

The reason [that Christianity and Socialism are incompatible] is that Socialism is founded on a doctrine of human society which is bounded by time and takes no account of any objective other than that of material well-being. Since, therefore, it proposes a form of social organization which aims solely at production, it places too severe a restraint on human liberty, at the same time flouting the true notion of social authority.

Pope Saint John Paul II in 1991:

Socialism considers the individual person simply as an element, a molecule within the social organism, so that the good of the individual is completely subordinated to the functioning of the socio-economic mechanism. Socialism likewise maintains that the good of the individual can be realized without reference to his free choice, to the unique and exclusive responsibility which he exercises in the face of good or evil. Man is thus reduced to a series of social relationships, and the concept of the person as the autonomous subject of moral decision disappears, the very subject whose decisions build the social order. From this mistaken conception of the person there arise both a distortion of law, which defines the sphere of the exercise of freedom, and an opposition to private property.

Pope Benedict XVI in 2005:

The State which would provide everything, absorbing everything into itself, would ultimately become a mere bureaucracy incapable of guaranteeing the very thing which the suffering person − every person − needs: namely, loving personal concern. We do not need a State which regulates and controls everything, but a State which, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, generously acknowledges and supports initiatives arising from the different social forces and combines spontaneity with closeness to those in need. … In the end, the claim that just social structures would make works of charity superfluous masks a materialist conception of man: the mistaken notion that man can live ‘by bread alone’ (Mt 4:4; cf. Dt 8:3) − a conviction that demeans man and ultimately disregards all that is specifically human.

Dan Crenshaw summed it up best:

Deliberate misreading of Biblical principles by DNC to promote socialism. 👇 The Bible teaches charity with one’s own time and money. Socialism teaches charity with other people’s time and money. So….not the same thing. https://t.co/9Z9bUQNntX — Dan Crenshaw (@DanCrenshawTX) August 24, 2019

And if Barber really likes socialism so much he could push away from the f***ing table and give about 2/3 of his daily caloric intake to the poor. By that simple measure alone, he could probably eradicate hunger in a small-to-medium-sized country all on his own (small wonder someone so wedded to Gluttony is also enamored of Envy). Then he could live up to his own principles and be healthier in the process.

=========

=========

Like what you see? Then visit my story archive.

Follow @streiffredstate

I’m on Facebook. Drop by and join the fun there.

=========

=========