Read At Your Own Risk, But If You Start Read The Whole Thing

I'm not sure what I think about this piece.  On the one hand, if this was written from a more progressive point of view and was intended to be hip and edgy, people would love it.  But it's not, so I suspect that it'll piss off a lot of progressive christians.  My problem is that my lived experience tells me that there are a lot of rich people who are good people and who fund a lot of really good causes and a lot of good things.  I also see and experience quite a few poor people who are clearly not good people.   Right now, I'm in a place where this is making me question the simplistic "poor=good, rich=bad" dynamic that we hear from so many people.    This is long, and has a lot of graphics, but I wanted to copy/paste the whole thing.  I'm not sure I endorse this entirely, and I'm not sure I'd condemn it entirely.   About the only thing I am reasonably sure of is that this is a thought provoking piece and is worth sharing here.   

 

 

https://matsumoto.substack.com/p/my-lazarus

JMJ

I have a lot of issues with Christianity and, one of them, is that The Poor are mostly bad people.

Unpopular to say maybe. Que sera sera.

In Jesus’ time perhaps it was different. I don’t know. I wasn’t there. Back then, maybe it really was the case that lots of good, otherwise normal people were brutally oppressed by the social structures of their day, kept down and economically destitute and dependent through no fault of their own.

Maybe.

Today though, that’s mostly not the case, and if you don’t believe me I encourage you to go and try it. Go on. The Poor aren’t hypotheticals. They exist. They are real, flesh and blood people and you can go and interact with them. Strangely though, most middle-class people don’t do this and only ever seem to know The Poor academically. From a distance. Through news articles, statistics, and books. They’ve never gotten down and dirty with The Poor. They’ve never tried to befriend an actual poor person.

I have.

Others have.

Dorothy Day did, going to the trouble of making a whole institution dedicated to The Poor which has, over the last 30 years, accomplished basically nothing and maybe made things worse. They hand out coats I guess. That’s good. Someone should hand out coats. The Problems they exist to deal with are never solved though. Very seldom do any of The Poor get better. They just come back around next year, needing another coat, every one of them with some wild, bullshit story about how they lost their last one through totally foreseeable circumstances. Boyfriend stole it. Kid left it on the stove and it caught fire. It was mauled and torn up by the neighborhood dog, or their cousin manipulated them into giving it away, or they had to sell it to cover a night of gambling gone bad. Stuff like that. Thing is, most times they’re not even lying. Their lives really are just that dysfunctional and insane. The on the ground lived reality with The Poor is much, much different than the stories we tell ourselves about them. The Poor are very different than Sunday School led you to believe.

For one, The Poor rape kids a lot.

Like… a lot, a lot.

Listen, I get it. I know we’re not supposed to say this. Our culture believes in only attacking safe targets. “Don’t punch down,” as they say, and so on. Every burglar on T.V. is a white guy, for example. The guys who beat up Joker on the train were finance bros. It’s safe to depict things like that on television because it’s all so disconnected from reality that it can’t offend anyone. Everyone knows its fake. You can’t make a commercial with a black guy breaking into a house because everybody knows that black guys are the ones most likely to actually do that. Similarly, you have to pretend that society’s violent thugs are somehow also employees of Wayne Enterprises, precisely because we all understand that that’s who real thugs least resemble. In the same way, our society has spent a lot of time and energy trying to convince itself that The Real Rapists are frat bros on college campuses, or corporate executives, or other people in positions of wealth and power.

They’re not though.

The real rapists are The Poor.

The people in the ghettos. In the trailer parks. The people in the favelas. The people on Skid Row.

It’s Poor People.

“The Global Poor” are the rapists.

For all the times you’ve been accosted by men wearing suits and ties.

Look, the age of consent in Mexico is 12.

Here are countries that don’t recognize “Marital Rape.”

Here’s some data about the violence against women in West Africa, one of the poorest places on Earth, and, bear in mind, this is just for those over the age of puberty!

Every “poor place” is actually kind of a rape dungeon. The Poor aren’t good people.

In the same vein, here, back home in America, a lot of digital ink has been spilled trying to work out what, exactly, causes the black crime rate to be so high. “Socioeconomic Factors” is a common answer. “Systemic Racism” is another. The farther-right elements of our society like to claim it’s due to “Lower IQ” and the farther-left due to “Capitalism.”

Okay.

But… couldn’t it also be because black boys in the inner city are raped a lot?

Cause, they are.

I mean, doesn’t that make as much sense as any other explanation? Wouldn’t it be natural for abused children to grow into young adults desperate to re-assert their masculinity and dominance because they were made to feel weak as kids?

Did you not know?

This is where the “He disrespected me!” culture comes from. It’s why “disrespect” is seen as justification to pull a gun.

Because they were raped.

They’re reacting against the fact that they were raped.

The Public will never listen to this though because it implies that one of its sacred castes, “The Poor”, are evil.

Raped not just by strangers or “friends” mind you. No. By relatives. Male ones, yes, but female ones too. Data on this is hard to come by, for numerous and rather obvious reasons, but a lot of black men who grew up poor seem to report early sexual encounters with an aunt, cousin, or even a grandma, and this is stuff that our society can’t even begin to address because doing so would insinuate that The Poor can be bad.

Can’t do that.

Nope.

The Poor are only holy angels.

One of modern society’s last remaining taboos is ascribing evil to The Poor.

This is from John Hopkins. 30% of “Urban” black males have a “sex experience” before age 13.

Likewise, go to a trailer park.

I know most of you haven’t.

What you will find if you do though is that, just like the “inner city”, the trailer park is actually not a bastion of down-on-their luck saints with hearts of gold. Sorry! I don’t know what to tell you. It just isn’t. On the contrary, it’s actually just a place where the police get called a lot. It’s a place where Childhood Protective Services spends a disproportionate amount of time.

This just doesn’t happen as much in middle-class suburbs. Hate to burst your bubble. It just doesn’t. People with money are usually morally better.

Our misperceptions on these issues are, of course, Jesus’s fault.

I don’t know how else to see it.

He’s the one that taught us, over and over again, that The Poor were blessed and particularly beloved, while The Rich were evil and, unless they sold all they had, likely destined for a Devil’s hell. I grant you that The West is no longer, in any institutional sense, “Christian”, but the shadow of its former faith and moral assumptions nonetheless looms large, and it is from Christ himself that our culture gets such a reflexive deference to those without money. We insist, along with Jesus, that The Poor are secretly the best among us, and The Rich obviously the worst. I mean, the word “Billionaire” has practically become a slur. As Super Mario’s brother demonstrated not so long ago, you can just up and kill someone in cold blood to great public applause if you want to… provided he’s a rich person. Provided that he has a title like “CEO” or something attached to his name. God help you if you accidently use too much force when arresting a poor guy though. A guy fighting back. A guy maybe even trying to stab you, or run you over with his car.

Is this fair?

Is this warranted?

I mean, how would our society function without Bankers?

I will Mrs. Helen Lovejoy. I will.

Legitimately asking.

Tax The Rich. Eat The Rich. Kill The Rich.

Okay… but how are people supposed to afford homes or cars without a rich person being there to offer them a loan? Where do businesses get their start-up cash? How many times have you specifically been saved by the ability to use a credit card? In a similar vein, The Gospel writers seemed to have fucking hated Tax Collectors. Well, are IRS employees bad? Truly, how do you expect a state to function without collecting taxes? Jesus Economics sound nice and all but we have a Welfare System and $88 trillion in unfunded entitlements. Also… bridges. Roads. We need $920 billion for Medicaid. I did the math. Nobody else did. When Brian Thompson was killed, United Healthcare was making, on average, around two to four hundred dollars a year in profit off every customer. How much lower should it have been? Can’t be zero. “Government should pay for it!” K. But it doesn’t. And to fill that niche, Thompson’s company provided a cheaper Health Insurance alternative that told you up front, in the writing, what it would and wouldn’t cover, and I know because I used to have it. They never cheated anybody. They always stuck to the stated agreements. Unfortunately, Brian’s customer base was largely poor people, and most of them can’t read. Are you going to sit there and seriously try to tell me that Jeff Bezos hasn’t provided value to your life? That he forced you to start using Amazon Prime? Having the ability to order almost anything and have it come directly to your door in a matter of days is revolutionary. I don’t have to go out shopping anymore! Incredible. Think of all the gas saved. All those hours and hours of time. Are you likewise going to try and tell me that Musk hasn’t provided the world with a lot of genuine benefit? That making electric cars that work isn’t a big deal? And who do you think’s done more for The Third World and its poor? Christian charities, or Starlink, the service enabling even a random goat farmer in Botswana to have access to banking? I’m not saying that rich people are de facto innocent, or that they never abuse their power, or that there aren’t legitimate concerns. No. I’m just saying that it’s by no means clear that they’re de facto guilty either, and the Christian impulse to valorize The Poor over The Rich seems misguided when you realize The Rich tend to rape less.

And they do.

Listen, part of the reason people are so enamored with Jeffrey Epstein is because it puts the problem of child abuse on Rich Guys, “correct” targets that it’s socially acceptable to hate. It also puts it far away, on an island in the Caribbean, a distance where everyone can get Big Mad about it without ever needing to take any sort of action to fix the problem.

Little Saint James island?

Brother… you ain’t got to go that far.

Auntie Pearl’s right over there… chillin’ on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

…

.

Of course,

Then you’d actually have to do something.

It’s easy to get mad at Evil far away.

Everyone applauded when this man was killed for no reason.

Because of the legacy of Jesus, we’ve been taught to assume that Crime and Poverty go together only because Crime follows Poverty. That The Poor are only doing what they do because they’re desperate and lashing out. They have no other option you see. Riots are the language of the unheard.

But…

Think about what that says for a moment.

What’s the claim being made here, exactly?

Are we saying that all of us are just a few missed paychecks away from stealing? That if the number in our bank accounts gets too low, we’ll suddenly start wanting to murder, or start selling drugs? If your house burned down tomorrow and you had to live on the street, do you think you’d suddenly develop a taste for sexual assault? If you lost your job and burned through your savings, do you really think you’d become a crime lord? Turn into Walter White?

…

I don’t think you would, actually.

I just don’t buy that narrative.

From what I can tell, most of you are more or less decent people and I’m not persuaded that losing your income would cause many of you to also lose your morals.

So what if Crime doesn’t follow Poverty?

What if Poverty follows Crime?

What if Poverty follows Evil?

Share

---

Listen.

I didn’t grow up in a favela, or a ghetto, but neither do I speak from a place of total ignorance on the subject. In purely economic terms, I have been “poor” for long stretches of my life… at least according to how most of the affluent on Substack would understand the term. I am not from a wealthy background. I was born into a situation that didn’t have a ton of money. My mother came from a family who lived in a literal shack in Louisiana. Like, the kind a guy in overalls hunts gators out of. My father grew up in rural Alabama. My own childhood occurred in a house in the middle of a cow pasture, surrounded on every side, 360 degrees, by horns and manure and tails swatting at flies. My mom didn’t work. To make ends meet, My dad sold used cars. Our local economy was a place called “Lu-Lu’s Tanning Bed and Chainsaw Repair” and an old 76 gas station that also sold groceries. Every year, we’d have a tractor pull. That was the entertainment. Rednecks competing to see whose custom modifications could make their farm equipment pull weight the fastest. We had a 1983 Ford Thunderbird that we kept parked on the lawn beneath a tree to keep the interior from melting in the sun, and the only real connection to the wider world was a freight train that passed by four times a day, including at about six in the morning, when it woke up all the chickens.

It wasn’t Beverly Hills.

Now, I’m not trying to make it out like we were destitute. Not at all. In fact, I never even felt poor because, unlike my best friend, my parents could afford to take me to the dentist and we didn’t have to cut our grape juice with water to make it last longer. I’m just saying that, objectively, by the standards of the time and, especially today, we were nowhere close to “upper class” and I was not unacquainted with The Poor.

I can say therefore, with some confidence, that many poor people are just shitty.

As people.

Not all of them. No. Of course not.

A lot though.

Again… 30% of the inner city before turning 13. That’s… that’s a lot.

My own parents were great. Exemplarily even. Over the course of my life I watched them more or less do the boomer thing of pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps and I would argue that this was only possible because they, unlike so many others around them, had strong moral compasses. They worked hard. They went to church. They stayed away from drugs, alcohol, gambling, and didn’t get divorced. They never did anything violent. Neither ever cheated on the other and they did their best to do right by their kids. And now, in retirement, they have a beautiful house on a beautiful lake, one built in no small part by their own hands. Today they spend their time sitting up there, watching the water and cruising around on the boat, or sitting by the fireplace in the winter listening to the hooting of the owls.

This isn’t their house, but theirs is in a similar sort of location.

Great.

The American Dream.

It works.

But… a lot of other people in our community didn’t turn out so great. Lot of people in our own family. And you know, for some, yes. For some it really was just plain old bad luck. Disease. Accident or illness. Some tragedy or other that couldn’t have been prevented. One bright young fella got in a car accident during senior year and lost both his legs. That’ll set you back. Another’s husband got early onset dementia. He was the primary earner. That’s though. Hard to power through. For most of the people from our town for whom life didn’t work out though, you can pretty well pinpoint exactly how and when they, personally, threw their own lives in the toilet. How they made one or two… not just bad… but evil choices which derailed their whole future. I had a cousin who did time for running an eBay scam, for example. Another who died in his early twenties being drunk on a borrowed jetski and driving it full speed into a bridge. Deacon at the church we went to molested his own granddaughter. He was a poor fella. Prideful about it too. One of those “I’m just as good as any rich man” types.

He wasn’t though.

None of the “rich men” he was comparing himself to molested minors.

Is what it is.

My grandfather held my mom at gunpoint once and took her puppy, put it in a bag, and slammed it against the wall in front of her until it died. She was like seven.

That’s why he lived in a shack, see?

Not because of “socioeconomic factors”, but because he was a bad person.

People rightfully don’t like giving jobs to guys like that. Banks correctly see them as too risky to trust with a mortgage. Are you going to say they’re wrong in that? Would you give rape deacon insurance coverage? Do you think it’d be wise to sponsor eBay scam guy through college?

“EVERYONE DESERVES A CHANCE!”

… …

… Do they?

And so what if Africa is poor, not because of colonialism, or historical oppression, but because Africans are bad?

Is this not worth considering?

What if Latin America is run by violent drug cartels, not because of the economic policies dictated by the median U.S. voter, but because a large number of Hispanics are just sadistic and evil?

What then?

This isn’t that unusual of a scene in many parts of Africa. It’s not common, you understand. I don’t want to be unfair. Still… one sees it a lot more often than one would like.

These people are a problem. Not their socio-economic factors.

I’ve been to Juarez. Have you? 200 murders a month sometimes. It’s right across the border from El Paso. It’s fucking insane. One of the most violent places on earth and it’s because a lot of the people living there are straight up demonic.

…

What then?

---

As I said, one of the consistent messages of The Bible seems to be that The Poor are Holy Victims and The Rich are Unjust Oppressors and, I gotta’ be honest with you, I just don’t see it. In fact, my real life experience has shown me exactly the opposite, so much so that I’m fairly confident that yours has too, if you can find the courage to admit it. Everyone I’ve ever met that lives in a gated community has been exceedingly generous and kind, and people in upscale neighborhoods are simply not that prone to stabbing. Most everyone in The Hamptons are big fans of consent. Dads from the rich suburbs of Atlanta generally aren’t hiding pistols in their waistbands, waiting to draw on you if they feel disrespected. Our entire society appears to be living in an exact inversion of reality, where the nicest people are Bad and the worse amongst us inherently and unquestionably Good simply by virtue of the fact that they’ve kind of failed.

I mean… what?

Are the poor not also obsessed with money?

Of course they are.

They’re not poor voluntarily. It’s not a choice. They’d snatch it all up in a moment if they could… they just don’t know how. They’re certainly not keep down by an excess of sharing!

But, our Lord told a parable.

It goes like this:

There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and lived in luxury every day. At his gate was laid a beggar named Lazarus, covered with sores and longing to eat what fell from the rich man’s table. Even the dogs came and licked his sores. “The time came when the beggar died and the angels carried him to Abraham’s side. The rich man also died and was buried. In Hades, where he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far away, with Lazarus by his side. So he called to him, ‘Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire.’

“But Abraham replied, ‘Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony. And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been set in place, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us.’

“He answered, ‘Then I beg you, father, send Lazarus to my family, for I have five brothers. Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment.’

“Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.’

“‘No, father Abraham,’ he said, ‘but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.’

“He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’”

…

.

The rich man is evil.

The poor man, worthy of Heaven and eternal bliss… apparently just for being poor.

…

… …

Numerous problems with this of course, the first and most obvious being that it just reads as petty jealousy. Is no one bothered by the fact that, when the tables are turned, Lazarus and Abraham appear to be every bit as unconcerned with the suffering of others as The Rich Man was in life? In fact, they are arguably far more so since, you know, The Rich Man is now literally in hell, and they seem completely okay with that. Are we to imagine that the people in Heaven, The Blessed, are the sort of people who could enjoy Eternal Bliss even while staring across a chasm at others forever burning alive? Can we really call such people Righteous? Again, is that sort of indifference not exactly what The Rich Man was condemned for? Further, are Heaven and Hell, as Abraham here implies, nothing but a sort of Cosmic Irony Machine? Just flipping the script of whatever existed in life such that the last are first and the first, last? A ghost rising from the dead and warning people of Hell isn’t going to have any affect? Really? And what about Lazarus himself? I mean, was he paralyzed? Dogs? Bro… I get having dogs lick your wounds would be awful but couldn’t you have swatted them away or something? “So lazy he wouldn’t hit a lick at a snake”… old saying we used to have in The South.

We could go on. This is but one of the many places in The Gospels where Jesus’s teachings seem morally problematic.

None of that is the main issue I have with that parable though.

The main issue I have… is the fact that the poor man in my life, My Lazarus, just isn’t some humble, righteous man down on his luck and suffering for no good reason.

He’s just not.

On the contrary, my Lazarus is a guy who pulls his dick out in public.

My Lazarus is shitting in a public stairwell.

My Lazarus is a guy screaming on the subway, daring people to say something so he has some semblance of an excuse to stab them.

My Lazarus walks around shirtless, being intentionally threatening to men and harassing women and children.

The city advises me to leave me car unlocked so my Lazarus doesn’t have to break the windows when he wants to steal my stuff.

My Lazarus leaves bloody needles on the children’s playground.

My Lazarus just doesn’t seem like a good guy.

…

… … …

So why is domestic (and international) policy so hellbent on pretending that he is? Why do we continue to insist that The Poor are just one small act of kindness away from getting off heroin, going to college, becoming upstanding members of the community and no longer masturbating in the public park?

Is it because Jesus said so?

If it is, then, frankly, it just seems like Jesus was wrong.

---

I hear you.

“Yoshi,” you say to me, “if you feel this way, why are you still Christian?”

Well, I guess because I view religion like marriage. Indissoluble and all that. ‘Till death do us part” and, hopefully, not even then. I suppose that the conceit of Faith is this idea that you trust that it all makes sense somehow, even if you can’t see how it does in the moment, and I’ve worked through enough similar issues in the past to understand how such might be possible here. A marriage has rough patches, and look, maybe your wife will just never learn to hang up her towels. Whatever. So be it. You see it through. You trust somehow that it’s all how it’s supposed to be and that, one day, if you are patient and mediate and pray, the answers will come.

That’s my faith. Not to be cliche, but I do see it as more of a relationship than a religion.

Marriage is a two way street though, and if God asks me to give an account of myself then I must also do the same of him. Jesus seems wrong here, and I’m okay saying it, because I cannot call what seems to me Black, White, or White, Black. That would be lying and relationships can survive disagreement… but they can’t survive deceit.

So.

Maybe the answer will come.

When and if it does, I’ll tell you about it.

In the meantime though, much of the public, including many politicians and most of the clergy, appear to be operating off of Christian-inspired moral intuitions that just seem plainly false if you live with your eyes open. The Poor have become something of an idol for many of them. An abstraction. To hear them talk, The Poor are the source and summit of all Good, Righteousness, and Virtue. The Poor are, in fact, a god, and one which cannot be spoken against. I mean this literally, by the way. For such people, The Poor are Jesus, they are God.

And of course they must be.

Jesus himself said they were.

Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’ And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’ — Jesus, Gospel of Matthew

“In the poorest of the poor Christ continues to suffer and rise again… it is in them that the Church rediscovers her call to show her most authentic self." — Pope Leo

But, you know… is this Jesus?

Is this Jesus?

How about this?

Or this?

These are what a lot of actual poor people are like.

Again, not all. But, a lot.

So, if The Poor are de facto God in our society then maybe we have a problem.

Because that means we’re all worshiping Dysfunction, and so it makes no sense to start acting all surprised when things around us start breaking down.

I mean, if The Poor are righteous just for being poor, and the rich evil just for being rich, then…

How can we be surprised when a majority of Christian countries look like this:

Brazil.

…

How can we be surprised that America and the rest of “The West” is increasingly tending that same way?

Mostly Poor.

Mostly Poor.

See, the thing is, Trads are correct.

The e-Caths, the Ortho Bros… none of them luxuriate in the thought of 8th century peasant life for no reason. Living under a thatched roof with some sheep and a trad-wife in a sundress. Historically, for all the very obvious reasons described above, Christianity and Poverty have gone hand-in-hand, and, as a place gets more wealthy, it tends to have less faith. When folks like Paul Kingsnorth or Jay Dyer or whoever else say that the policies and economics of Western, Protestant countries are less Christian than those of Latin America, or Eastern Europe, or even Africa, they are correct. Absolutely correct. It is in fact very hard to find a justification for laissez faire capitalism in the gospels. One just doesn’t encounter a lot of rugged individualism in The New Testament. In the Bible, you will not find Ben Franklin’s assertion that “The Lord helps those who help themselves,” but rather almost the exact opposite, that the Lord helps the helpless and that each of us has a moral duty to not own more than one coat. The Church in The Book of Acts was basically a commune for goodness sakes. I don’t think it’s fair to call Jesus a Socialist… there’s a lot in that definition that probably wouldn’t apply to him, but he’s closer to that than he is to, say, a Libertarian, or a whatever economic system was preferred by Rush Limbaugh. The problem is though…

We’ve tried all that.

The countries with economics more faithfully informed by Christian ethics suck and it sucks to live there.

Catering endlessly (my God… can they talk about anything else??) to The Poor and “The Common Good” simply does not make a place prosperous. The data is in. We’ve ran the experiment and we can say that definitively. For all its faults, Usurious Capitalist America with its Puritan Roots totally untethered from Christian tradition is where much of the world is desperate to move and, if you’re going to bring religion into politics and let it shape your moral assumptions and your worldview…

You have to do something about that.

You have to somehow square Jesus being wrong.

The easy out, of course, and the one which I suspect many will try to take, is to simply pivot and claim that Jesus’s teachings are for The World to Come, and not for this one, and that materialistic concerns and outcomes are of no account.

Great.

Try selling that to the public though. Be honest. Say, “We’re going to implement Christian informed economics and, yes, that’s going to mean a lot less material prosperity but, trust us, it’s better for your souls.”

See how that goes.

‘Cause, the favela isn’t optional actually. People don’t want a thatched roof. They like going to the dentist. They like having clean water and plenty of food and cars and a T.V.

You simply can’t have it both ways. Either Christ’s teachings are only about preparation for The World to Come, and have no relevance for how we govern The World Now, meaning, we should not use them to inform our governance, OR they were intended for This World and we have to deal with the fact that The Fruit that they produce when implemented just isn’t very good. The Christian position today is really rather tenuous. They’re trying to stand there and scream “Usury Bad!” amidst the most prosperous era the world has ever known. One funded almost entirely by banks and loans. For nineteen centuries The Church went on endlessly about our duty to the starving poor. It was only the 20th century’s godless capitalism which cared to actually grow enough food to feed them.

And so, as I see it, The West is arguably destroying itself trying to adhere to Christian morality.

To Welcome the Foreigner.

To Give to all Who have Need.

To Have Mercy on the Criminal, and Be Lenient and Forgiving of All Crime.

And we have to ask ourselves if we really want that because, listen, maybe destroying yourself is the point. Christianity is a religion about dying and being resurrected after all. Have you forgotten that? The whole premise is that you die to self and, in so doing, find a life more true.

It’s just no longer obvious that that’s actually a good idea though. Not on a political level at any rate.

Seems like all its causing us to do is to pretend that the schizophrenic with a knife on the streets of San Francisco is somehow more holy and good than the suburban mom in her house peacefully watching Bluey with her kids and, I gotta’ be honest, that sounds insane. That assumption is simply false, and building public policy around it probably isn’t a good idea. See, everyone is terrified of being The Rich Man and going to Hell, and therefore we find ourselves catering endlessly to the whims and decrees and desires of every Lazarus.

But, unfortunately, Lazarus is kind of a shit.

He’s kind of a problem.

We’ve hung out with him for a while now and we’ve realized that maybe there was a reason he was homeless to begin with and it’s maybe because nobody could stand to work with him because he was a deeply immoral, selfish, and insane. If The Rich Man had let Lazarus into his house Lazarus would have immediately turned into a giant, scary, problem. Everybody knows it. That’s why you don’t let your Lazarus into yours now.

So I dunno.

My Lazarus seems different that Jesus’s.

As I say, me and God are in a discussion about it.

In the future, I’ll let you know what he says.