My Thursday with a liberal

I spent Thursday morning with a godly and politically liberal Christian woman, and came home with a new perspective on the national agony regarding President Obama's social and healthcare agenda.

There is something in people---something God-given and good---that senses that it is evil when men live in luxury and self-indulgence and have hearts hardened to the poor. People don't even have to be Christians to resonate with the following words of the prophet and apostle:

". . . loose the bonds of wickedness . . . undo the straps of the yoke . . . let the oppressed go free . . . break every yoke . . . share your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house . . ." (Isaiah 58:6-7).

"Come now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you. Your riches have rotted and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have corroded, and their corrosion will be evidence against you. . . . You have laid up treasure in the last days. Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, are crying out against you. . . . You have lived on the earth in luxury and self-indulgence . . ." (James 5:1-5).

Secondly, there is something in people that senses that a God in the heavens above is champion of the oppressed, the powerless, the alien, and the poor:

"I know that the Lord will maintain the cause of the afflicted, and will execute justice for the needy" (Psalm 140:12).

The people who intuit these truths---merely by virtue of their being made in the image of God---are perhaps not so tuned in to other things in God's heart: His displeasure with covetousness, ravenous feelings of entitlement, ingratitude, and "schadenfreude" toward the "haves." They don't see so readily that the sin of greed cuts both ways; the internal kind is as virulent as the external kind.

A perfect storm develops when the populace sees a patina of biblical truth and like it (i.e., it's a good thing to care for the poor), but a more sophisticated understanding of biblical teaching eludes them (i.e., it's a bad thing when the state appoints itself to be the source of all your good).

The problem for people who hate Obama's agenda (and I'm one of them) is that some of us never showed zeal for the poor, and Obama did. We never showed interest in fixing the small things, so now we are seeing America not only reformed but overthrown. Our sudden "religion" for healthcare reform doesn't look as appealing as a reaction as it would have as an initiative.

Dictatorships are the unpaid debts of social corruption. Socialism is societal discontent at the boil-over point. To take an example from the mundane world: If you are not loving your wife well, you had better watch out or someone else will do it. Obama is a lot of people's Sir Galahad.

Not much we can do about the past. But after my Thursday morning talk I understand liberals better, and their deaf ear to all things conservative. It will be harder now for conservatives to convince anybody that healthcare is about to get worse, not better; that poor people's lots are about to deteriorate, not ameliorate; that bureaucratic panels dispensing healthcare will shut you out, not bring you in; that we are about to get less free, not more free; and that the creeping statism of the last 50 years has just lurched forward a giant step.

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