More on Kristof, and health care

I discovered a website this afternoon that is very helpful on health care. It is run by the American Medical Association and has their recommendations for solving the health care crisis and also has links to the plans of various candidates. For those of you trying to figure out more about this debate, it could be very useful.

Also, see Meg's entry below and take a look at Nicholas Kristof's column on liberal attitudes toward evangelicals. It offers a very interesting perspective on how religious folks are perceived in the political conversation sometimes.

Two things about this article make me uneasy. First, though it is nice to see that evangelicals like Rick Warren are getting interested in these social justice issues, I notice that their attention to these issues is rather international. Although I'm convinced that it is important to work toward the elimination of both AIDS and genocide in sub-Saharan Africa, I wonder what these folks are doing for the poor in New Orleans, or Camden, or Los Angeles, or whatever their nearest urban center is. I wonder if this focus is about mission, which likely cheapens it a bit. But I suspect (and fear, in fact), that this attention has as much to do with a sense that the folks in Africa are somehow "deserving poor" in ways that the folks in our inner cities, having failed to achieve the American dream we deem we've handed them on a silver platter, are not. I'm not convinced that this interest in global poverty will translate into votes for a Democratic president and his/her aggressive social services plan.

Meg asked a very interesting question, which actually brought about my second concern. She thinks that Kristof is suggesting that faith influences politics. And I think that she is right. My concern is that I don't think that he thinks that faith should influence our politics. I think that he tends to think that the problem with "crazy Christians" is that they think that their private, personal, invisible and non-prove-able faith, means that they should force their non-rational beliefs on good reasonable liberals who know that every person should decide these things for themselves. The great insight he's sharing about the new Jim Wallis group of social justice evangelicals is "hey, fellow-liberals, some of these crazy faith-based folks might actually be into the right issues, though of course for the wrong reasons, but let's not be biased against them. If we're liberals, we ought to be tolerant enough to accept anyone, right?"

Especially after reading his blog, this seems really about partnering on particular issues where secular liberals and Christian conservatives happen to agree or see some common ground. I'm actually somewhat hopeful for the partnering, but not very hopeful that true secularists are giving Christian faith any real purchase in the public square. Fortunately for us Christians, we have no obligation to wait for them to cede it to us. Remember that "separation of Church and State" is really a limitation on the government not to establish any national Church or to interfere in the operations of churches. Churches and their members have the same rights to engage in the political process as any other citizen or group of citizens.