Washington Post attacks Christians on poverty poll with biased headline
The Washington Post published a piece provocatively titled, “Christians are more than twice as likely to blame a person’s poverty on lack of effort,” a clear attack on people of faith, attempting to paint them as hypocrites, unforgiving and uncharitable.
Christians, especially white evangelical Christians, are much more likely than non-Christians to view poverty as the result of individual failings.
The article states: 46 percent of all Christians said that a lack of effort is generally to blame for a person’s poverty, compared with 29 percent of all non-Christians. The gulf widens further among specific Christian groups: 53 percent of white evangelical Protestants blamed lack of effort while 41 percent blamed circumstances, and 50 percent of Catholics blamed lack of effort while 45 percent blamed circumstances. In contrast, by more than 2 to 1, Americans who are atheist, agnostic or have no particular affiliation said difficult circumstances are more to blame when a person is poor than lack of effort (65 percent to 31 percent).
“There’s a strong Christian impulse to understand poverty as deeply rooted in morality — often, as the Bible makes clear, in unwillingness to work, in bad financial decisions or in broken family structures,” said Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. “The Christian worldview is saying that all poverty is due to sin, though that doesn’t necessarily mean the sin of the person in poverty. In the Garden of Eden, there would have been no poverty. In a fallen world, there is poverty.”
Ben Sharpiro of the Daily Wire cites Brookings Institute, which “has said that if people don’t get pregnant before marriage, graduate high school, and hold a job, they won’t live in permanent poverty in the United States (“of people of American adults who followed these three simple rules, only about 2% are in poverty and nearly 75% have joined the middle class”); Christians and other Bible-believers promote those standards every day to their children, and don’t blame the vagaries of ‘The System’ for individual failures to abide by those standards.”
“Christians aren’t uncharitable or mean. They give far more charity per capita than the non-religious. Christians are more likely to demand that individuals act in beneficial ways. And that’s both compassionate and useful,” Shapiro asserts.
The article doesn’t stop, bringing in politics: “The question is, of course, not just an ethical one but a political one, and the partisan divide is sharp: Among Democrats, 26 percent blamed a lack of effort and 72 percent blamed circumstances. Among Republicans, 63 percent blamed lack of effort and 32 percent blamed circumstances. And race mattered, too: Just 32 percent of black Christians blamed lack of effort, compared to 64 percent who blamed circumstances.”
photo/ Gerd Altmann via pixabay
