Letters from Readers on Other Subjects

May 2001

Practicing Faith in the Inner City

Thanks for the interesting May/June issue. While I found Mark R. Gornik's "Practicing Faith in the Inner City" informative, his distinctly left–of–center political perspective compels me to offer comment based on an alternative view.

Gornik reveals his bias in several ways: criticizing our "winner–take–all" economy and an excessively "individualistic framework" in diagnosing the ills of urban poverty; praising egalitarianism, equality, and "jubilee justice"; blaming urban decay primarily on "structural injustice" rather than personal moral failure; and claiming all Christians should feel "indignation" at the gap between rich and poor. Although he acknowledges the need to preserve the spiritual message and relational core of ministry to the poor (government programs must always fail on both counts), he nevertheless calls for more government involvement, seemingly unaware of the sadly consistent results of such intervention: the breeding of corruption in government, while discouraging virtue and encouraging vice in citizens.

I appreciate Gornik's recognition (rare on the Left) of what Robert L. Woodson, Sr., terms "Pharaohs," those who have a vested interest in keeping the poor down, and of the tough fight that will be necessary to dislodge them in getting voluntary help to those who need it. Gornik cites the Hebrew prophets, who, when discussing the plight of the poor, focused on the behavior of the privileged and powerful rather than of the poor. But this obscures the clear biblical emphasis that ALL bear responsibility for sin and must repent and change. "The cross deconstructs moral superiority," he says, apparently failing to see that the cross leaves intact (and fulfills) the eternal formula of justice that virtue will/must be rewarded and vice punished (here and hereafter).

Gornik says more than once that the gospel is good news for the poor. It is, in fact, good news for everyone, rich and poor, strong and weak, powerful and powerless. Like some early converts, who tried to coopt Jesus in their project to overthrow Roman oppression, latter–day social gospelers try to coopt Him in their push for their version of "social justice." Gornik claims "for Christians, social and economic inequality is a distinct gospel challenge. It must be if divine reconciliation makes all things new." But equality of outcomes is not (and never has been) a properly Christian goal. Rather, it is a utopian vision based on fantasy and is the underlying reason for untold worldwide suffering during the twentieth century, as forced leveling schemes have imposed misery on trapped populations, all in the name of equality, egalitarianism, and fairness.

Gornik flatly states that "voluntary compassion will not transform the fallen systems and structures of the inner city." This questionable axiom, for him and others on the Left, somehow morally justifies the employment of government force to resolve this issue. This puts them in the awkward moral position of Robin Hood: advocating immoralities (coercion, theft) in support of (dubious) morality.

In summary, I applaud churches and others who voluntarily offer assistance to those in need. Indeed, this is a fundamental responsibility for Christians. But when they demand access to the public trough to finance these activities through coercive taxation, they've left the realm of biblical principle behind and are venturing into a set of ideas and practices of very different origin. The fruits of Christianity (in theory and in history) are individualism, liberty, the rule of law, progress, voluntarism, community, and justice in an atmosphere of limited government, while those of paganism are collectivism; total regulation; the rule of man; fear; repressed civil society; centralized, top–down power; and eventually total oppression in the absence of Christian mercy and restraint.

Steven P. Sawyer

Fountain Hills, Ariz.

The Roots of Hitler's Evil

Both my husband and I are historians who have spent our careers enjoying teaching university students, not least in discussing with them the still very engrossing and taxing questions raised by the Nazi years. It was then especially interesting to read Richard Weikart's analysis of Brigitte Hamann's Hitler's Vienna: A Dictator's Apprenticeship and Ian Kershaw's two–volume biography of Hitler ["The Roots of Hitler's Evil, March/April 2001].

May I comment on two aspects? First, Weikart warns us not to quarantine the years of Hitler's rule: "not to make the mistake of treating the Nazi era as the expression of an anomalous, incomprehensible evil." He concludes that, by "doing so, we keep the Nazi experience at a safe distance from our own historical moment." This seems to me—and many of the students I talk with—to be a central message for anyone studying the erosion of values that Nazism involved.

Second, Weikart later says: "If Hitler had died in 1938, Kershaw claims, he would probably have gone down in history as a great German leader. No moral opprobrium would be attached to his name. Germans might have regarded him as another Bismarck." Kershaw is not alone in such a view. I first read it in a (still remarkable) book a generation ago: The Tragedy of Nazi Germany (Praeger/Pegasus, U.S.; Routledge, U.K.; 1968). There, on p. 77, the author argues: "Had he [Hitler] died early in 1939, or the autumn of 1940 [after the Fall of France], he would have been acclaimed by most Germans—and many historians inside and outside Germany—as one of his country's greatest statesmen fit to stand beside Bismarck." This is only one singular view in what remains in many ways a singular book. The author, a trained historian, wrote to provide an explanation of Nazi "evil" and to help him come to terms with his own imprisonment by the Nazis in both POW and concentration camps, so the book is partly autobiographical. (The title of the last chapter—indeed, the entire book—bears on one of your reviewer's concerns; it is called "There but for the Grace of God . …"). The author is Peter Phillips, my husband. But the views speak for themselves.

Janet Phillips

Senior Lecturer

Department of History

Flinders University,

Adelaide, South Australia