Of saints and sinners

It’s not the first time his policies have had an almost miraculous effect. When he removed rent caps, rentals in Buenos Aires actually dropped by 20-30% and rental listings increased 50%. The poor were cheering that too.

With results like these, why do so many prominent Christians brand the policies and the politicians that implement them as “heartless”?

The answer is in the confusion at the heart of contemporary Christianity that has given us Wokeness.

If love is the pre-eminent force in the cosmos, and Christians are called to follow the example of the Good Samaritan, then the not just the downtrodden, but anyone less fortunate than oneself, has to be embraced and elevated.

Unless of course one can squeeze into one of the categories of marginalization, and then happy days, you become the recipient of all that love.

It’s often said that if Jesus were alive today he’d be a socialist. That’s wrong. At the heart of socialism is redistribution and that requires coercion.

But at the heart of Christianity is free choice. You can choose well, or poorly, but that choice is yours.

When people can act freely, they make better decisions for themselves than people who are controlled – the Catholic church even has a much-neglected doctrine for this called subsidiarity.

Jesus was also the preeminent cutter of red tape and rules and regulations, reducing the 613 laws that a strict Jew was supposed to keep to just 2 – love God, and love your neighbour as you love yourself.

There is no justification in Jesus’ words or deeds for expropriation – you are the one who is supposed to love your neighbour and it is not a duty you can transfer via taxation to anyone else.

Indeed, the issue of forced charity only really arises once when the woman, traditionally thought to be Mary Magdalene, breaks a bottle of perfume and pours it over Jesus’ feet before wiping it away with her hair.

Judas is scandalised – “Why wasn’t this perfume sold and the money given to the poor? It was worth a year’s wages.”Jesus responds “You will always have the poor among you, but you will not always have me”.