However, there is disagreement on just “how” we apply ‘social justice’. Some pretty bad things have happened in history through the application of ‘social justice’ - the French Revolution is a good example. There are many instances where feeding the poor led to wars (ie in Africa).
There is a general divided opinion between the conservatives and the Left on this. The Left believe that externals will bring about change, justice, goodness, equality etc. The conservatives believe that a change of worldview will: that it is something internal.
I would go for 95% worldview, 5% externals. An excellent example of this are shown in the graphs on poverty over the past 200 years, especially over the past 10 years. There is an exponential reduction, and before you have finished reading this, hundreds more will have found their way out of poverty. No amount of feeding the poor caused this: it was the free market and capitalism. Where did the ideas of free market and capitalism come from? A Christian worldview. See Vishal Mangalwadi’s: The Book That Made Your World, and there are plenty more like it, ie Rodney Stark’s books. Their arguments and evidence point to ‘change of worldview’ being paramount. The Great Commission has therefore enormous potential.
“In Africa”? Which of the 55 member states of the African Union did this happen in? And when, in the aggregated histories of a billion people across 2,000+ ethnolinguistic groups? Care to be more specific?
It’s not always easy to get kindness right – it does take ongoing work. I haven’t looked over your source, and will wait to see @AMWolfe’s reaction to your specific Africa situation. But I take your point that “kindness” has not always ended up being kindness in longer term. I think it important that we continue to sweat about it and don’t throw up our hands, and say “I don’t need to care about that hopeless situation any more.”
Well, as long as you’re going to equate social justice with either violence (the French Revolution) or, alternatively, disempowering state aid, you might as well equate free market and capitalism with the worst excesses of that ideology as well: say, the military-industrial complex, or price-fixing monopolies (which are part of a laissez-faire “free market” unless the state steps in to break them up).
Good social justice work empowers communities to find non-violent solutions to their own problems. It also encourages those who have historically benefited from the system to join those who have not in addressing structural inequities. This is not necessarily opposed to capitalism and often works with capitalism. It’s only your American Culture Wars grid that forces “social justice” necessarily into the same category as state-sponsored “socialism.”
If you actually talk with people doing social justice work in “Africa,” one of the first things they’ll tell you is that the aid industry robs local actors of their agency — like Toms Shoes, with their “one for one” business model, which disincentivizes the local shoe industry by flooding the market with thousands of free pairs of shoes.
If you want to get a better feel for a good balance of social and evangelistic components in Christian witness, I recommend that your primary dialogue partners be our brothers and sisters among the global poor. And before you say “But Mangalwadi!”… I haven’t read Mangalwadi, but based on the book’s Amazon blurb, I doubt he would disagree with me in anything I’ve said here.
Capitalism can be of great benefit, and programs like micro loans are helpful in developing endogenous businesses, but they have to start with giving, both spiritually and materially. I think it was one of the videos referenced on the Newbiggin post that described typical evangelical churches as focusing on the vertical, of man reaching to God, and the typical mainline churches focusing on the horizontal, with man reaching to man , when both are important and need to be in balance.
Now, how that relates to original post, it does seem that people in general but especially the young are concerned with how they can make a difference in the world, and want an experiential involvement rather than just hearing of missionary’s stories. If churches are too inwardly focused, many will turn away.
The greater problem in the world than hunger is obesity. For the first time in world history, obesity has overtaken malnutrition (including in third world countries). It kills three times as many people than starvation. Global report: Obesity bigger health crisis than hunger | CNN
But this problem is not listed in the Bible. Now this is a genuine question: should Christians switch their thinking and “help the obese” and how?
What do we say to the fact that obesity is often correlated with lack of availability of nutritious food options? The indigenous people where I work have a genetic predisposition to Type 2 diabetes. The subsistence farming lifestyle of the past, with its high fiber, low sugar diet kept diabetes and obesity at bay, but due to exploitation of poor, illiterate, indigenous farmers, lack of available land to bequeath children, and other economic factors (male heads of families leaving for years at a time to try to work in the States or larger cities), many people cannot live off the land anymore and find themselves in situations where the food readily available (or easily prepared after working 14 hours a day at a low wage job) is not nutritious and exacerbates health problems.
I know in inner city areas in the States people talk about “food deserts” in low income urban areas where most people don’t own cars and the only places within 1 mile where you can buy food are convenience stores that sell only processed junk food. I read a book by a dietician who tried to prepare a month of diabetic approved menu plans for people who lived on food stamps or an equivalent food budget, and she could not do it without incorporating in free items from food banks. (And this was a decade ago; prices of high protein foods like eggs, dairy, and meat continue to rise.)
So yes, of course, Christians should be concerned about helping the obese, especially when it is a health problem that is often correlated with if not caused by poverty. Anytime we make the world a better place, promote health and human flourishing, and alleviate suffering in Jesus’ name, we build Christ’s kingdom.
The fact that you’re asking this question shows that you still think of “helping people” as “giving them stuff.” Once you learn to think of it as “working with them to solve their problems,” then, obviously, obesity is not a ridiculous thing for Christians to help with, under the right conditions. So…
Are you an agricultural specialist who can help teach people to grow their own healthy food, in places where nutritious food is less available commercially? or
Are you a nutritionist and public educator who can help people understand the causes and negative impacts of obesity on their health? or
Are you an anthropologist who can help trace out the sociocultural aspects of the obesity epidemic for a particular locale, to help community members identify more effective solutions? or
Are you a linguist who can take the pamphlet written by the nutritionist / public educator and help produce it in the local language?
Perhaps most importantly, are you either from the culture that needs this help, or else invited by stakeholders in that culture?
If you answered yes to some of these questions, and you’re a Christian, then under the direction of the Holy Spirit and with the discernment and support of your local body of Christ, it’s possible God might use you to help some folks somewhere fight obesity!
Neither is climate change. Or opioid addiction. Or breast cancer. Are we only supposed to care about problems listed in the Bible?
If you’re going to start delving deeper into Christian responses to poverty, you really might want to ditch the mildly offensive Cold War-era terminology. (John Stott’s “Majority World” is a much better alternative.)
Despite what I said above, I would say no. Hunger is still a pressing issue — at least according to your article:
“The report revealed that every country, with the exception of those in sub-Saharan Africa, faces alarming obesity rates” (emphasis added).
I looked for the original report behind the CNN article and couldn’t locate it. But it’s important to note that starvation itself is only one, rather spectacular, negative outcome of food insecurity. A much larger section of the world’s poor don’t die of starvation but they do die of preventable diseases that they catch because their immune systems are underperforming due to malnutrition. So again, I haven’t read the original report, but if you’re weighing the varied negative effect of obesity against only deaths strictly from starvation, I’m not sure you’re looking at an apples-to-apples comparison.
And because I don’t have a strong note to end on and I’m getting tired, I’ll just punt and borrow Christy’s words to summarize:
Before I had experience working with inner city youth, I used to joke that the U.S. was the only country in the world where the poor people are obese. I’m not quite so ignorant these days. For the working poor in this country, “proper diet” means getting the most bang for the buck. I probably don’t have to explain that the produce section, pound-for-pound, is the most expensive in the supermarket, and the working man on his lunch break is getting a $5 box at Taco Bell, not the $8 burrito at Chipotle. And when both parents must work to make ends meet, inexpensive frozen and pre-processed meals are what come out of the fridge.
Essentially, the working poor must eat as cheaply as they can, which means quantity beats quality every time. No matter where they live.
I think what @Christy is pointing to is that when modern processed food brokers arrive in a rural area characterized by generations of farming … the availability of low-cost unhealthy food creates a “New Normal” that tempts the population into thinking they are now “living better” because they have full
bellies… or that they now have a little bit of money left to buy some other quasi-impulse product.
And in the process… the society’s health is eroded inexorably… out of ignorance of the dangers or out of impulses that cannot be efficiently resisted.
There are many factors involved. My wife works with a a couple of families who rountinely make the rounds at a couple of food banks in the area, and there is pretty good food in general, but like you say, heavy on carbs.
Unfortunately, when they do purchase food, it tends to be convenience type pre-prepared stuff and junk food. Many today do not know how to prepare food from the basics. There is usually relatively cheap protein available, usually chicken or pork loin, both of which are pretty lean and healthy, but instead pre-prepared meals are purchased. Beans and rice make a complete protein, and are cheap, with most of the world living off of a grain and legume, so it can be done.
We are pretty much off topic, and my apologies for contributing to the diversion. Perhaps it is a fertile topic to move to a new post if the discussion continues in this direction as science does impact the ways in which we feed the poor and clothe the naked.
I don’t know of any research on this but I am aware of something that would be a strong trigger for leaving the faith. Ken Hamm usually opens a week of meetings with: “If millions of years are true; the bible is not true.” A person growing up believing that statement faces a hard choice.
Well, the statement is true (to an extent), even if (as you say) it is terrible…
I always found this a problematic argument. Was going to insert an illustration of my own, but the things that were coming out were either nonsensical or rather morbid , so I will just go with Matthew 7:4-5:
“Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is the log in your own eye? 5You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.”
Excellent biblical illustration, one that we should all heed.
In this particular example, Jon, are there any other commonly held biblical interpretations that you feel negate the whole of the scripture and make it false? ( I can think of denying the resurrection, but denying and rejection is not exactly the same as having a different interpretation but accepting the truth of what is written, just seeing it differently.)
The statement (“If millions of years are true; the Bible is not true”) is entirely false. Because of Ken Ham’s many false statements along these lines, thousands of young people raised in Christian homes have turned away from Christ. What do you call teaching that turns people away from Christ? I certainly wouldn’t call it “evangelism.” Since we’re in a Scripture-quoting mood, I’ll toss out just a couple …
“If anyone causes one of these little ones–those who believe in me–to stumble, it would be better for them if a large millstone were hung around their neck and they were thrown into the sea.”
“Not many of you should become teachers, my fellow believers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly.”
“If the tenets of young earth creationism were true, basically all of the sciences of geology, cosmology, and biology would utterly collapse. It would be the same as saying 2 plus 2 is actually 5. The tragedy of young-earth creationism is that it takes a relatively recent and extreme view of Genesis, applies to it an unjustified scientific gloss, and then asks sincere and well-meaning seekers to swallow this whole, despite the massive discordance with decades of scientific evidence from multiple disciplines. Is it any wonder that many sadly turn away from faith concluding that they cannot believe in a God who asks for an abandonment of logic and reason?”–Dr. Francis Collins, “Faith and the Human Genome”
If deep time “invalidates” the Bible (and by extension, God himself), that sounds like a pretty shaky foundation to me. But it does explain why I felt such a burning need to “prove” a young earth when I followed that viewpoint – because I believed that without that “proof,” my faith would collapse. I’m glad that dichotomy was false.
, so I will just go with Matthew 7:4-5: