Christians and Politics

[Dill]

(01-25-2023, 09:08 PM)TheLeonardLeap Wrote: And the small ones are the ones that do things like soup kitchens, food pantry, emergency shelters for the homeless, and even some extremely affordable low income housing aimed towards poor working single parents.

Like all things, there's examples of terrible people/groups in any large sample size, but there's way more good than bad out there. There's just no rage-clicks or outrageous news headlines for good things.

They did a study awhile back in 11 cities and found that an average of 58% of the emergency shelter beds for homeless were provided from faith-based organizations. Less study-based and more personal experience, I had a friend growing up who only wasn't homeless because of a bunch of townhouses owned by a church that they used for low income working single parents. There's also church-run food pantries around here that would deliver some boxes full of canned and dried foods particularly for young children at risk of going hungry.

As I said before, I am not religious, but I think you'll find once you look past the politics, upper echelons of organizations, and headline scandals, that most of it at the lower (and significantly numerically superior level) is just people trying to do good and help others and doing it pretty quietly and without an attempt to be noticed for it. This kind of goes back to my problem with politics in general right now. We're letting small, vocal, shitty groups/examples define our perception of what huge masses of people are.

I very much agree with the first half of this. We don't "know" what religious groups are really like until we take a granular look at what they actually do.
Lots of church groups ARE helping people--one just paid rent for one of my renters in December. 

Second bolded though--we need to be more cautious. Religious groups can be used and manipulated by politicians and and unscrupulous ministers, especially at the grass roots level. Think of the Abramov scandal, when Repub operatives in Mississippi were able to protect their clients gambling business from competition by organizing Christians in Alabama to prevent legal gambling there, in the name of God. Evangelicals seem especially vulnerable to this, in contrast to mainline "Godless" protestants.