Editor: Over this Christmas holiday season, it’s been mind-bending to read missives and carte blanche opinion-makers defend the blatant double-speak of Christians who claim to want Christ in their lives, without giving up their caches of gratuitous loot and other forms of needless materialism.
‘Well, how much have you given to the poor and needy, Mr. Sterle?’ is the potentially effective, knee-jerk reaction I’ll typically receive. Indeed, the hypocrisy label is a red herring often conveniently utilized by the big-wealth-is-Christ’s-blessing Christians. It is used as a diversionary tactic to attempt to shut up the likes of me.
The fact is, if hypocrisy was morally sufficient to prevent people who do or have done wrong, but wish and plan to do wrong no longer, from publicly speaking out on wrong behaviour, society would be even far more screwed up than it already is.
If the virtues that Christ taught, like subsisting on that which one truly necessitates to live comfortably enough (e.g. no Mercedes or Cadillacs, backyard swimming pools or gratuitous earnings of nine to 12-figure incomes), were truly followed in the exact manner that He’d meant, there’d be far less coveting a neighbour’s possessions.
As one obviously wealthy Christian letter writer put it or, as the fiscally ultra-conservative libertarians like to refer to it, it is the politics of envy.
Indeed, it’s bitterly ironic that one can often find more Christ-like charity from atheist secular humanists than from the likes of very many fundamentalist evangelical Christians.
To be clear, I’m not intending to needlessly critique or bash Christianity and Christians. Rather, I wish to point out that, Biblically speaking, one cannot serve two masters.
People cannot preach Christianity, while simultaneously dismissing and denouncing global leaders’ attempts to find and implement at least some semblance of fiscal sanity, in a just society sense, for the vast majority, the have-nots.
Frank G. Sterle, Jr.,
White Rock
