For years the justice ministries of the CRC have talked about root causes of poverty, hunger, and injustice. Yet you will search relatively in vain to find the CRC justice ministries talking about the failures of the welfare state and its nefarious impacts on family structure, the impact of the sexual revolution, feminism, no-fault divorce, and sexual libertinism on family structure, and the absolute runaway rates of fatherlessness.
Fatherlessness is the single biggest indicator of poverty, criminality, violence, school dropout, teen pregnancy and incarceration. In some communities/cultures/ethnicities the fatherlessness rate is approaching 70%. In the U.S. across the population somewhere between a quarter and a third of children grow up in homes without a father present. Can we imagine an injustice greater than depriving children of their father and relegating them to a life of poverty and crime?
The U.S. has both a problem with and a fascination with "mass shootings", as if the daily tick of one or two-off murders are somehow unimportant. Time after time what do we find out about the shooter(s)? Fatherless. Broken family. Huge warning signs of social disfunction but no one there to lovingly guide and correct the disturbed individual. We cry out for solutions. Gun control! Money for mental health care! More security! Tougher penalties!
But missing in all of that predictable outcry is a recognition that God has designed the greatest tool for gun control, mental health support, security, and discipline. It's called a family, and it needs a father to be present in order to function as God intended. We can adopt any and all sorts of societal reactionary policies and laws in the wake of acts of violence, but when we ignore the fact that the basic building block of society has been broken down beyond recognition we will strive in vain to halt violent tendencies. Why do we keep acting confused about societal breakdown when we whistle past the graveyard of the family as the basic building block of society? Total depravity should not surprise us, and one of God's gracious checks on our sinful nature is his provision of Dads and Moms. So, what type of fruit has been borne from the welfare state, feminism, easy divorce, and the sexual revolution? The church knows about reaping and sowing. Why has our church been so slow to talk about how we are reaping the fruit of what has been sown in our culture?
If the church won't place this important topic on the table and out front in national conversations, who will?
Comments
Exhibit A: How we can Travel the Pathway from Poverty to Rights and Well-Being | Christian Reformed Church
Notice several things about the article:
1) Posted on the justice blog of the CRC.
2) Recognizes the pitiful outcomes of fatherless families.
3) Does not even attempt to address the spiritual/cultural breakdown at the core of that problem.
4) Instead, this article only posits government policy and handout social programs as the solution.
Note, in particular, this quote: "Above all, what I have learned during my CPJ placement is that these experiences of poverty are neither natural nor inevitable; they are the result of policy choices, and we have the knowledge and the tools to choose better."
More specifically, note where blame is placed for all poverty: "the result of policy choices." This is simply and demonstrably not true in the totalizing way in which it is stated.
Interestingly, this article and so much of what passes for justice conversation in the CRC is anti-Kuyperian. Kuyper recognized the concept of sphere sovereignty. The church has no expertise in housing policy, economics, tax policy, etc. The church does have expertise in the gospel, family structure, reaping and sowing, morality, etc. So then why do we see the church calling for significant church voice into the former and little to no church voice on the latter when it comes to poverty and solutions to it?
One type of poverty not mentioned by the author: Spiritual poverty. And it is spiritual poverty that so often leads to a host of other poverties, including often a direct line to material poverty. The church's proper and more effective role would be to acknowledge its proper sphere and redouble its efforts within that sphere rather than assuming expertise in areas well outside our calling and strength.
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