The SoSA Perspective

Talk is cheap

Some days I think I read too much. Too much information can make your head hurt. But it can also lead to some significant insights, which, in turn, can make your head hurt. For instance I recently read two polls on American’s attitude toward taking care of the poor. One was the product of a fairly conservative polling and research outfit called “The Barna Group”. The other was the product of the more liberal group, the “Alliance to end Hunger”. These polls were fascinating and I encourage you to look up their respective websites (barna.org; and alliancetoendhunger.org) and check them out in detail.

What struck me was their common finding that American’s attitude toward the poor was basically not influenced at all by their religious convictions. This, it seems to me, is good news and bad news. The good news is that our people seem to be decent enough so that the majority of them consider taking care of the poor to be of serious importance just because it’s the right thing to do. In fact they consider taking care of the poor to be much more important than do our so called “leaders”.

The bad news is that being a self professed “Christian” doesn’t seem to change the attitude of anybody where poverty is concerned. You’d think with all the hype about Christianity, especially the “born again” variety that more religious folks would care about the hungry than do non-religious folks. Apparently not.

The lesson to me in all of this is that religion is much better practiced than talked about. Theology really doesn’t impress me much. If really practicing a particular religion makes you more Christ-like, that impresses me a lot. Maybe if we had more practice and less blather the poor folks would get fed more often.