Paul Ryan is right – you can be a conservative and a Christian

[Geee]

Uk Telegraph:

 

American liberals have a schizophrenic view of God. When it comes to lifestyle issues, they think church and state should be separate. But when it comes to welfare, federal largesse morphs into Christian duty. In the worldview of the Left, were the Second Coming to occur tomorrow, Jesus would sport an Obama 2012 badge on his tunic. And he certainly wouldn’t be the first person who came back from the dead to vote Democrat.

On Thursday, Republican Congressman Paul Ryan delivered a speech at the Catholic Georgetown University in Washington DC on the subject of God and the US budget. Ryan is a small government conservative, so he was greeted by the inevitable posse of p-oed liberals. They carried a big banner that read, “Were you there when they crucified the poor?” The banner turned out to be bigger than the protest, but its sentiment was backed up by a letter signed by 90 faculty members and priests protesting Ryan’s economics. They wrote, “We would be remiss in our duty to you and our students if we did not challenge your continuing misuse of Catholic teaching to defend a budget plan that decimates food programs for struggling families, radically weakens protections for the elderly and sick, and gives more tax breaks to the wealthiest few.” The letter concluded, “In short, your budget appears to reflect the values of your favorite philosopher, [the libertarian] Ayn Rand, rather than the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”

The claims of the letter writers deserve to be taken seriously because they deal with the duty that we all have to care for vulnerable. Put simplistically, Christ commands his followers to a) value the spirit above the material and give alms to the poor. It is not unreasonable to conclude that the Christian message of self-sacrificing love finds its programmatic expression in social democratic welfarism. Why not use the technology and power of the modern state to create a more humane world? And if we have the capability to do it, how can anyone who opposes the redistribution of wealth seriously call themselves a Christian?

In his speech, Ryan explained how. First, charity is impossible without wealth. Unless America comes up with an economic plan that encourages growth, more people will be forced into unemployment, the tax intake will shrink, and both private giving and government handouts will cease. Second, big government programmes have consistently failed to work. The Federal Government has been fighting a “War on Poverty” since the 1960s. The result is that today one in six Americans lives in poverty – the highest rate for a generation. Third, bankruptcy will damage those parts of the welfare state that everyone wants to protect. Unless Social Security is reformed, it will run out. That hurts the folks who really need it, an act of negligence that passes the high cost of our mistakes onto a future generation, which is an immoral thing to do. In sum, Christian socialism in action can have troublingly unchristian consequences.