Where there's a Will, there's a way

A friend emailed me Jim Wallis' response to Glenn Beck's crazy rant on the evils of social justice in religion. Thankfully, it saves from having to watch Beck's show by quoting his definition of social justice.

"My definition of social justice," he wrote in chalk, is "the forced redistribution of wealth, with a hostility to individual property, under the guise of charity and/or justice."

Apparently, Beck went on to argue that anything but individual acts of charity are a slippery slope to socialism/communism/nazism. I think its time for Beck to have another lesson in the history of his own Mormon church.

The religion Joseph Smith founded in the mid 1800's wouldn't be recognized by many who know of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints today. Few American religions have been so violently persecuted as the Mormons and few have engaged in such widespread collectivist income redistribution.

Joseph Smith taught that caring for the poor was a commandment from God. As part of this mission, he created what was called the "United Order." Church members would donate all of their wealth and property to the church. People were often made "stewards" of their own land with ownership belonging to the church.

By commandment of God, anyone who refused to participate could be "cast from the church," which raises the threat of eternal damnation. So it's difficult to call it a voluntary system. In fact, anyone who was deemed "unworthy" could be expelled from the church without the right to get back their individual property they had given.

Even profits and harvests beyond a persons basic needs were donated to the Church for collectivist redistribution. The purpose was to care for the poor and redistribute wealth, "every man equal according to his family, according to his circumstances and his wants and needs." Joseph Smith even taught that they had been driven violently from Missouri because church members had sinned by not adequately caring for the poor.

Modern conservative Mormons have created many tortured rationales for why this shouldn't be called socialism. But at best, they can only prove that it's a different type of socialism than the Soviet Communist boogie-man. They choose to ignore the historical reality of voluntary socialist societies and the Christian socialist tradition. I'll also point out that all of my links and quotes about the United Order are taken from Mormons sources.

The socialism didn't stop there. The Mormon migration and settlement of the mountain west was centrally planned by church leaders. As both Territorial Governor and church President, Brigham Young issued orders on where families should start new towns and requested free labor for public church buildings. It was probably the closest thing the American continent has seen to a socialist theocracy.

I hope Glenn Beck thinks about his church's history the next time her sermonizes about the slippery slope to totalitarian communism/nazism.

Beck's underlying assumption is that any form of government is a tyrannical oppressor forcing us to do things, especially when someone we don't like is in charge. That's why he characterizes any government act of caring for the poor as something done to the people against their will. Only individual acts of charity have virtue, in his view.

But, our government isn't caring for the most vulnerable in society because it's forced on us by a dictator. It's what a majority of citizens chose with our votes.

The health care bill passed as a result of those basic ideas about majority rule and representative government that our nation is founded on. Americans chose to deliver a mandate for universal health care to the President and a heavily Democratic Congress. I understand that Beck is angry about a majority of Americans disagreeing with his agenda, but in a representative form of government you're supposed to suck it up and act like an adult instead of crying that it's a dictatorship just because a guy you hate is in the White House (unless that guy stole the election).

It's not fascism or communism that Glenn Beck has a problem with. He hates our Constitutional representative democracy because the election didn't go his way.