The Economics of Apocalypse

It is frustrating to watch liberal Christians become their own worst enemies by twisting an important biblical principle into an absurd political ideology. The principle is that in God's eyes, the needs of the poor and the oppressed come first. The ideology is that God loves poor and oppressed people more than (she) does anybody else.

Conservative Christians ideologize differently about economics and theology, but no less one-sidedly. Their starting point is promising: God helps those who help themselves. But then they confuse matters with the decidedly unbiblical notion that God helps the poor best through the rich. That is when things really begin to get weird.

Unlike the rest of us, the very rich are not having to help themselves at all; others who aspire to be so are doing it for them. They have already secured disproportionate tax cuts for the upper-upper classes along with the repeal of their estate tax obligations; they have gotten their cronies on corporate boards; and they are well along the way toward privatizing Social Security and health care, as well as reconstructing Iraq with eyes fixed fondly on their companies' bottom lines. God is hardly in these equations at all.

This latter does not seem to have troubled either liberals or conservatives all that much. Perhaps it is because both groups have convinced their followers that they have had at their beck and call a divinely prescient economist standing in God's stead. Surely it is time for both groups to rethink their idealization of a man whose wisdom is anything but God-like.

Remember when Alan Greenspan said all those nice things about how things were going in the really, really big Bull Markets? Later on, he got worried about the resulting and long predicted surpluses in the federal budget, and jumped on the tax cut bandwagon, assuring the soon to retire that nothing bad would ever happen to their Social Security benefits as a result. The cuts --- along with a couple of wars --- have not only wiped out the surpluses; they have encumbered the government with huge deficits that Mr. Greenspan now recommends dealing with not by reversing tax cuts for the wealthy, but by --- you guessed it --- cuts in Social Security and Medicare benefits. Has God finally fallen out of the equations altogether?

Perhaps not. The more I talk with self-proclaimed conservative Christian friends about both their theologies and their economics, the more I see behind their views a decidedly apocalyptic view of life in this world. One friend is very clear about this: Leroy, none of us is going to be here for very long, you know. And when Jesus comes back, and it's going to be soon, it won't matter whether we're rich or poor. All that will matter is whether we have believed in him. When I asked my friend how he was doing with divesting himself of his assets and giving them all to the poor --- for that is the way the earliest Christians went about preparing for the End --- he stared at me as if I had started speaking in tongues. After he recovered, he said something to me that still leaves me with chills: You're not getting it Leroy; Jesus won't count my holdings against me, so I can keep on holding them. When I stammered out, And even increase them?, he said, with an ever wider grin on his face, Of course!

Now, I do get it. While we wait around for Jesus to return, we can keep on granting a few privileged people the right to take advantage of everybody else, because at the literal end of the day, what they pile up for themselves in the interim will not be counted against them. And neither will the enjoyment they receive from it. Since there will never be enough to go around anyway, why shouldn't at least a few people get some good out of life before time runs out for everybody, themselves included? And if Armageddon is even slightly delayed, maybe at least some of the rest of us can grab enough for ourselves to make our own transition to the next world a little easier.

This kind of thinking is what a lot of Republicans and Democrats have been engaged in these past few years, making what Paul Krugman calls "the great unraveling" of America a truly bi-partisan effort from first to last. It takes a lot to get politicians to agree on almost anything. But against this unraveling, there are few protesters. Too many people have been too busy championing the cause of the winners, the richest, and the most powerful instead of that of the last, the least, and the lost.