found this interesting, thought i would share.

Professor, Chicago Theological Seminary
Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite


It’s not ‘class warfare,’ it’s Christianity

President Obama just drew the economic battlelines more clearly in his call to raise $1.5 trillion in new revenue primarily through increased taxes on the wealthy, letting the Bush tax cuts expire, and closing tax loopholes.
“Class warfare!” countered the Republicans.

Americans sharing more equally in the burden of pulling our country out of massive debt, and using tax revenue to stimulate the economy and create jobs isn’t “class warfare,” it’s actually Christianity.

Many Christians are starting to find the increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of a few very rich people to be an enormous moral and ethical problem. Catholic theologians and ethicists took pains recently to challenge Speaker Boehner on Catholic values in regard to his views, particularly on the economy.

But not all Christians agree with those perspectives. Today, not only is economics a political battleground, it is a faith battleground particularly in Christianity. According to some Christian conservatives, unregulated capitalism, with all its inherent inequalities of wealth, is God’s plan.
(good god!)

“Christian Captialism” in their view, isn’t an oxymoron, it’s God’s will as revealed in the Bible. God wants you to own property and make money, and if some make a lot more money than others, that’s okay. In fact, it’s God’s will too.

These competing views are very influential in our current public debates. The Christian conservative viewpoint, however, has been more instrumental in shaping our political shift to the right in recent years, not only on social issues, but also on economic issues. You can see this display in the “God Hates Taxes” signs carried at Tea Party rallies.

Let me be clear as I can be. We need to understand the so-called “Christian” underpinnings of the anti-tax, anti-government, anti-the-poor, “let him die” approach to economics and public policy today as completely un-Christian, as well as un-American. What we need to do is re-establish our national values of fairness, equality and opportunity for all, values that I believe are actually the core of the Christian faith, (as well as of other religious traditions and of humanist values).

First, in order to do that, we need to understand how we got to the place where the “ownership of private property” and amassing wealth is accepted by many as the “biblical perspective,” and taking care of each other through shared sacrifice, is dismissed as secular humanism. Nothing against humanists here, but the Bible is all about taking care of each other, including taking care of each other by sharing what we have, not through amassing wealth.

Part of the way we got here is by Christian conservatives ignoring a lot of what the Bible says on wealth and poverty, and being highly selective in what they call “biblical.” In all these reference to the “Bible,” the self-styled Christian capitalists don’t ever seem to recall that in the Book of Acts, the early disciples “shared all things in common.” As I wrote for On Faith, the early church is Glenn Beck’s worst nightmare because it was socialist.
This is what the Bible actually says about the economic practices of Jesus’ followers: “Now the company of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one said that any of the things which he possessed was his own, but they had everything in common... There was not a needy person among them, for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the proceeds of what was sold and laid it at the apostles feet; and distribution was made to each as any had need.” Acts 4:32-35.

Glenn Beck’s attacks on the Reverend Jim Wallis, an evangelical Christian who works on poverty issues from a biblical perspective, is illustrative of the need of the far right to discredit biblically based anti-poverty political work.

But as I, and Jim Wallis and others have shown over and over and over, the biblical practices on justice for the poor are far more radically egalitarian than anything being proposed in terms of economics today by Democrats.

Not only do we need to understand that “Christian Capitalism” isn’t Christian, we need to understand how it is distorting capitalism. The “ultracapitalism” of people like Speaker Boehner and Paul Ryan (among others) is often called “market fundamentalism” and it is the nearly unshakeable faith held by its true believers that the best economic results are obtained when the market is allowed to function without the restraints of regulation. Just reduce taxes and let the “job creators” do their thing. Remember “trickle down economics” from the Reagan years? This is the belief system that launched the Reagan Revolution in the U.S. and started the decades long reduction in real wages of the American middle class and the rise in American poverty levels.

“Market fundamentalism” isn’t good, it’s the economic theory that is rotten to its core, and, as Kevin Phillips argues, “bad” for our economy. Phillips, in his book Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism shows exactly how it is that the Christian conservative view that unregulated capitalism is God’s will props up, or enables, the bad economic theory of unfettered, “reckless” capitalism. In his book, Phillips connects the dots on how conservative religion and market fundamentalism mutually reinforce one another, to the great detriment of the country and the world. He calls Christian fundamentalism the “enabler” of market fundamentalism and shows how conservative Christianity provided the cultural shift necessary so that ordinary Americans would become anesthetized to their previous suspicion of unregulated capitalism born in the 1930’s.

Phillips observes that the complete breakdown in the United States these days of realistic thinking about how markets and financial systems actually do work has three sources: “homage to financial assets,…market efficiency” and “evangelical, fundamentalist, and Pentecostal Christianity, infused with a millennial preoccupation with terrorism, evil, and Islam…” These are the three legs of the stool that caused the “de facto anesthetizing, over the last twenty years, of onetime populist southern and western” regions. It should be noted that these are the same sections of the country that are demographically the regions with the highest Tea Party concentration, especially the South.
“Anesthetizing” is a great metaphor for what’s happening in our public square about the economy because you have to be nearly unconscious not to realize that “Christian capitalism” is neither good Christianity nor good capitalism. It’s not “Christian” because it ignores the central teachings of Jesus on the moral imperative of taking care of the poor in the Sermon on the Mount, and it dismisses the actual economic practice of the disciples as described in the Book of Acts.

It is also lousy capitalism.

Capitalism is an economic system where the means of production are privately owned and operated for profit in a competive market. The capitalist system relies on self-interest, not “stewardship” to actually run. Theories of markets actually assume that people will act according to their self-interest and not from a disinterested love of others.
This has been known for a very long time. In 1776, Adam Smith, sometimes considered the “father” of modern economics, related human nature and how markets work. “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the bakers that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantage.”

Capitalism isn’t “God’s Plan,” it’s an economic system that runs on the human desire for more, our own self-interest. This is not necessarily evil. It can actually be a very productive system, but it is not beneficent. In order for there to be good values in our economic life, capitalism needs to be regulated so it does not wreck the whole ship with unfettered greed (as happened in the banking industry starting in 2008), and it needs to be supplemented with social safety nets and tax policy to achieve an approximate (not absolute) “freedom from want” as in Franklin Roosevelt’s wonderful phrase. It was Roosevelt who translated “freedom from want” into a series of government programs to make it a reality such as Social Security, unemployment insurance, aid to dependent children, the minimum wage, housing, stock market regulation, and federal deposit insurance for banks.

The Christian approach to economics is to be the conscience of the nation and to insist that we regulate capitalism so it does not become reckless and destructive. Christians must call on the nation’s politicians to have us share the burdens and the sacrifices, as President Obama is doing, in order get to the “freedom from want” that is in our democratic values and our faith values.

We do this because the Christian conscience is driven by duty to “love God with your whole heart and your neighbor as yourself.”

That’s in the Bible. Luke 10:27. Look it up.


for lb:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/on-faith/post/its-not-class-warfare-its-christianity/2011/09/19/gIQAkoMxfK_blog.html

go there for more links within the article itself 

for lb:


Thanks..... :) I actually like your article posted. 

I love this article. It states so well my concerns and frustrations with current political discourse. Thank you for posting it. 

Part of the way we got here is by Christian conservatives ignoring a lot of what the Bible says on wealth and poverty, and being highly selective in what they call “biblical.” In all these reference to the “Bible,” the self-styled Christian capitalists don’t ever seem to recall that in the Book of Acts, the early disciples “shared all things in common.” As I wrote for On Faith, the early church is Glenn Beck’s worst nightmare because it was socialist.

lol...it's really amazing how some people completely miss the mark...socialist?...lol...socialism FORCES you to give all that you have...the early Christians sold what they had (NOTICE...they sold what they had...the gov't didn't sell what they had) and they FREELY gave the money THAT WAS UNDER THEIR CONTROL...yep...these believers did share...they considered their money/possessions to be common property...however it was VOLUNTARY not FORCED...therefore NOT socialism 

“Class warfare!” countered the Republicans.

omw the Republicans are so lame. I can just see them sitting around in Boehner's office racking their addled brains to come up with an incendiary sound byte to sell to their rabid base.

 

Such desperation.

Obama is losing.

Everyone knows it. Some won't admit it.

He is well on his way to being a one-termer. 

I, for one, find that lots of my relatives and quite a few friends have benefitted from my family's commitment to capitalism. As soon as the government comes along and starts taking everything we work so hard for, I'm going to settle my lazy self into the couch and watch all the TV I've been missing. 

. As soon as the government comes along


What do you mean "as soon as?" I thought you've been attacked by the Government since Obama took office? 

While one can make the arguments about capitalism being made - it can't be denied that it has resulted in the creation of more wealth than any other system of government to date. It has developed a strong middle class which the other forms of economic activity have not. Even many of the countries that are close to socialism today have had to move to capitalism to be able to create enough economic growth to feed and clothe their people at the bottom of the economic ladder. The facts of life are that someone has to be able to create the wealth for jobs and goods and services to be available. Government has clearly shown that it can not do that - it can only try to redistribute what wealth someone else has created, and eventually with no one creating wealth, everyone's standard of living is reduced. Clearly there have to be constraints on capitalism to prevent unfair competition, illegalities, etc. But as long as fair competition is maintained all will benefit from the growth that capitalism can provide. Consider the entrepreneurs working in their garages decades ago working on funny looking little boxes that became the personal computers we know today. Yes they are immensely wealthy and deservedly so - but look at the wealth and opportunity this has created for everyone today. When the government takes money out of the hands of the entrepreneurs and investors, the wealth creation cycle is broken and diminished. It is traded for current consumption by groups favored by whichever political group is in power at the present time. Eventually there is not enough wealth being created to go around - look at Greece and Spain. 

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Where in the Book of Acts - which, by the way, I have been studying for the past 3 months as part of a year long study - do we see government forcibly taking property from citizens and redistributing it to other citizens?

If you read Acts chapter 5, you will easily see that the money from the sale of the property belonged to Ananias and Sapphira. It was theirs to do as they pleased.

I will listen to some theologians, but I have a difficult time taking biblical advice from people who neither believe the Bible nor submit to it.

Now, VOR, since you apparently know how much I and my church are or aren't doing to help the poor, in the interest of honest disclosure, what percentage of your gross income to you give to chaity?

Finally, this "Think of the children!" routine is one of the most disgusting back door methods for higher taxation. I would be happy to pay more taxes if you could somehow show me that our current level of entitlement spending is too low. 

my 2 cents:

i find it both hilarious and sad at the same time.

It is quite revealing that many cry out that the bible is a book of fairy tales... the people who read it are deluded and that God aint so

however

they always use the bible and christianity when trying to prove their points... without fail

if its a book of nonsense then why even bring it up... ever... it aint worth it

i will tell u why

its that knawing down in their innerds telling them they r skating on thin ice and they know they r wrong

u cant fight against God and win

it aint happenin' 

Either that, or they're wondering why more people don't practice what they preach. 

Either that, or they're wondering why more people don't practice what they preach.

good point right there