Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts has a great op-ed piece on some of the important values that most Americans expect would be universally recognized, and how those universal values have been discarded in the current health care reform debate. Pitts quotes Jim Wallis, of the evangelical organization Sojourners. Unlike most recent evangelical groups, Wallis focuses on social issues such as feeding the hungry, clothing the poor, and healing the sick. In fact, in the 1880s, when the American evangelical movement was founded, it was these fundamental welfare issues the evangelical community focused on, including issues such as child labor abuses, equal rights for minorities and women, and caring for the poor. It is that core of values that Wallis returns to.
Jim Wallis
It is not, says Wallis, his intention to accuse everyone who opposes health care reform of lying. Nor, he says, is it his intention to promote a given proposal. All he’s trying to do is reframe health care as the moral issue it is, and restore verities we all learned in Sunday School. Or Hebrew School. Or Islamic School. Or, heck, kindergarten.
That it’s wrong to lie, wrong to pick on the vulnerable. And that we have a duty to care for those who cannot care for themselves, the ones Jesus called “the least of these.”
Those are simple, sacred and profound principles. But you wonder if the simple, sacred and profound still have power to sway us. Obviously, Jim Wallis has faith they do. I hope he’s right. Yet what a spectacular leap it takes to believe the tiny whisper of conscience might be heard over the shrill outcry of America screaming at its mirror.
That is in itself a sobering measure of how far we’ve wandered from the things we once knew as kids.
