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An Open Letter to Cal Thomas
Dear Cal Thomas,
In my early years as a college English instructor at a Christian college, I would receive in the fall a mailing from a Christian organization (I have forgotten the name of it) urging me to have my students enter a contest to write an op-ed piece that presented a Christian perspective on a current issue, included a Bible text, and was published in the mainstream press. The winner would receive a significant monetary prize.
So I had my students attempt to write such an op-ed piece—and I even submitted a piece myself one year. But neither I nor my students ever won. Most years, as I remember, you were the winner. You were, apparently, the gold standard for Christian op-eds.
I have read your columns in my newspaper over the years, but a funny thing happened on the way to the present: your columns became less and less recognizably Christian and more and more bitter, fearful and negative. Often it seemed that you were concerned much more with promoting a conservative Republican agenda than with a critique of current events from a biblically Christian perspective.
Let me illustrate with a brief look at your column that appeared in The Sioux City Journal on July 13, 2011, titled “Obama Promotes Class Division by Seeking to Punish the Successful.”
washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/2011/07/obama-democrats-make-war-successful
You write that President Obama and his fellow liberals frequently “disparage millionaires and billionaires,” are “preoccupied with pulling down the strong,” and “trash the rich.” Mr. Thomas, you know that’s not true. When President Obama and other Democrats talk about taxing the wealthiest among us, they are not disparaging the wealthy. They are simply saying they should pay more taxes.
In fact, every time Obama mentions rescinding the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, he includes himself in that wealthy group. So by your logic, Mr. Thomas, Obama must be “preoccupied with pulling down . . . himself,” and also countless other Democrats who are among the wealthiest Americans.
I do not believe, Mr. Thomas, that you are really this illogical. Rather, it seems to me that you are so concerned with painting President Obama in an unflattering light that you entangle yourself in this absurd illogic.
If you argued that the wealthy should not pay more taxes, you might make a legitimate economic argument. But that’s not your concern. You attack Obama as a despiser of the wealthy, going so far as to say that Obama’s “war on achievers” is “repulsive” and “un-American.” Here you take your contrived “war on achievers” and use it as an excuse to call Mr. Obama some nasty names. I don’t understand how a Christian columnist can engage in this kind of vituperative journalism. It is unfair and unbecoming behavior for any columnist.
(Incidentally, when you continually say Obama promotes “class warfare” or creates “class division,” you are simply echoing what virtually every conservative pundit and politician has been saying for the past several months, a talking point based not in truth but in the desire to demonize President Obama. The fact that the 400 wealthiest families in this country hold as much wealth as the bottom 50 % of the population combined tells us that we, indeed, have class division. And if we want to blame a president for that, we should acknowledge the fact that in 20 of the 28 years prior to Obama we have had Republican presidents.)
But my concern here is with how avowedly Christian columnists conduct themselves as Christian writers. And what bothers me most about this piece is the way you ignore what Christ has said about wealth and poverty and instead fashion from conservative, capitalistic values a religion of wealth that holds up the accumulation of wealth as just about the noblest ambition of humankind. You write: “In their hearts most people who are poor would like to be rich, or least self-sustaining, but this president never talks about how they might achieve this goal. Instead, he criticizes those who made the right choices and now enjoy the fruits of their labor. . . . Wealth is a sign of achievement, a reward for risks taken.”
Anyone who reads your entire piece would conclude that you want poor people to make wealthy people their role models. This reader would assume that you believe that almost nothing is more noble or virtuous than making lots of money and then enjoying it.
You seem enamored with the principles of classical economics, but I wonder if you know what Adam Smith, the father of classical economics, would say about your blatant admiration of the wealthy? Here’s Mr. Smith in his The Theory of Moral Sentiments: “The disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect, persons of poor and mean condition . . . [is] . . .the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments” (58).
What would Jesus say about your earnest attempt to make the accumulation of wealth seem so desirable and poverty so undesirable? He might begin with “Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust corrupt and where thieves break through and steal.”
And he would tell a little story about a man who had such abundant crops that he built more and bigger barns. But God said to him “You Fool! This very night your life will be demanded of you. This is how it will be for those who store up things but are not rich toward God.”
Or he might invite the wealthiest of our land to leave their gated communities and gather in one of our poorest neighborhoods and then he would quote the prophet Isaiah: “Loose the chains of injustice . . . set the oppressed free.” “Share your food with the hungry, provide the poor wanderer with shelter. When you see the naked, clothe them and turn not away from your own flesh and blood.”
I do not believe Jesus condemns all wealthy people, but he clearly shows that those who accumulate great wealth or make the accumulation of wealth the goal of their lives tread a treacherous path. So he says to the rich young ruler, “Sell all you have and give it to the poor and follow me.” And he says to all of us, “If you want to be my follower, deny yourselves, take up your cross and follow me.”
Recently a friend of mine walked into a local business and was greeted with “Well, what do you think our moron of a president will do next?” My friend said, “Hey, that’s no way to talk about a brother in Christ.”
I tell the story because I want to ask you, Mr. Thomas, in reference to the op-ed piece I have been critiquing, “Is that any way to talk about a brother in Christ?” And because I want to challenge you with a broader question: What should characterize biblically-informed political speech in this time of frightfully polarized political atmosphere which finds Christians in political camps that seem to be in hostile opposition to one another? If you know that President Obama is, as Jesus called the Pharisees, “an offspring of vipers,” then, I suppose you should continue to write as you do. But if you don’t know that, if you think it is possible that President Obama’s confession of faith in Jesus Christ is genuine, then you are obliged to speak of him in quite a different tone of voice.
Sincerely,
David Schelhaas
Work Cited
Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Mineloa, NY: Dover Publication Classics, 2006,original publication 1759), 58.
Dear Cal Thomas,
In my early years as a college English instructor at a Christian college, I would receive in the fall a mailing from a Christian organization (I have forgotten the name of it) urging me to have my students enter a contest to write an op-ed piece that presented a Christian perspective on a current issue, included a Bible text, and was published in the mainstream press. The winner would receive a significant monetary prize.
So I had my students attempt to write such an op-ed piece—and I even submitted a piece myself one year. But neither I nor my students ever won. Most years, as I remember, you were the winner. You were, apparently, the gold standard for Christian op-eds.
I have read your columns in my newspaper over the years, but a funny thing happened on the way to the present: your columns became less and less recognizably Christian and more and more bitter, fearful and negative. Often it seemed that you were concerned much more with promoting a conservative Republican agenda than with a critique of current events from a biblically Christian perspective.
Let me illustrate with a brief look at your column that appeared in The Sioux City Journal on July 13, 2011, titled “Obama Promotes Class Division by Seeking to Punish the Successful.”
washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/2011/07/obama-democrats-make-war-successful
You write that President Obama and his fellow liberals frequently “disparage millionaires and billionaires,” are “preoccupied with pulling down the strong,” and “trash the rich.” Mr. Thomas, you know that’s not true. When President Obama and other Democrats talk about taxing the wealthiest among us, they are not disparaging the wealthy. They are simply saying they should pay more taxes.
In fact, every time Obama mentions rescinding the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, he includes himself in that wealthy group. So by your logic, Mr. Thomas, Obama must be “preoccupied with pulling down . . . himself,” and also countless other Democrats who are among the wealthiest Americans.
I do not believe, Mr. Thomas, that you are really this illogical. Rather, it seems to me that you are so concerned with painting President Obama in an unflattering light that you entangle yourself in this absurd illogic.
If you argued that the wealthy should not pay more taxes, you might make a legitimate economic argument. But that’s not your concern. You attack Obama as a despiser of the wealthy, going so far as to say that Obama’s “war on achievers” is “repulsive” and “un-American.” Here you take your contrived “war on achievers” and use it as an excuse to call Mr. Obama some nasty names. I don’t understand how a Christian columnist can engage in this kind of vituperative journalism. It is unfair and unbecoming behavior for any columnist.
(Incidentally, when you continually say Obama promotes “class warfare” or creates “class division,” you are simply echoing what virtually every conservative pundit and politician has been saying for the past several months, a talking point based not in truth but in the desire to demonize President Obama. The fact that the 400 wealthiest families in this country hold as much wealth as the bottom 50 % of the population combined tells us that we, indeed, have class division. And if we want to blame a president for that, we should acknowledge the fact that in 20 of the 28 years prior to Obama we have had Republican presidents.)
But my concern here is with how avowedly Christian columnists conduct themselves as Christian writers. And what bothers me most about this piece is the way you ignore what Christ has said about wealth and poverty and instead fashion from conservative, capitalistic values a religion of wealth that holds up the accumulation of wealth as just about the noblest ambition of humankind. You write: “In their hearts most people who are poor would like to be rich, or least self-sustaining, but this president never talks about how they might achieve this goal. Instead, he criticizes those who made the right choices and now enjoy the fruits of their labor. . . . Wealth is a sign of achievement, a reward for risks taken.”
Anyone who reads your entire piece would conclude that you want poor people to make wealthy people their role models. This reader would assume that you believe that almost nothing is more noble or virtuous than making lots of money and then enjoying it.
You seem enamored with the principles of classical economics, but I wonder if you know what Adam Smith, the father of classical economics, would say about your blatant admiration of the wealthy? Here’s Mr. Smith in his The Theory of Moral Sentiments: “The disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect, persons of poor and mean condition . . . [is] . . .the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments” (58).
What would Jesus say about your earnest attempt to make the accumulation of wealth seem so desirable and poverty so undesirable? He might begin with “Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust corrupt and where thieves break through and steal.”
And he would tell a little story about a man who had such abundant crops that he built more and bigger barns. But God said to him “You Fool! This very night your life will be demanded of you. This is how it will be for those who store up things but are not rich toward God.”
Or he might invite the wealthiest of our land to leave their gated communities and gather in one of our poorest neighborhoods and then he would quote the prophet Isaiah: “Loose the chains of injustice . . . set the oppressed free.” “Share your food with the hungry, provide the poor wanderer with shelter. When you see the naked, clothe them and turn not away from your own flesh and blood.”
I do not believe Jesus condemns all wealthy people, but he clearly shows that those who accumulate great wealth or make the accumulation of wealth the goal of their lives tread a treacherous path. So he says to the rich young ruler, “Sell all you have and give it to the poor and follow me.” And he says to all of us, “If you want to be my follower, deny yourselves, take up your cross and follow me.”
Recently a friend of mine walked into a local business and was greeted with “Well, what do you think our moron of a president will do next?” My friend said, “Hey, that’s no way to talk about a brother in Christ.”
I tell the story because I want to ask you, Mr. Thomas, in reference to the op-ed piece I have been critiquing, “Is that any way to talk about a brother in Christ?” And because I want to challenge you with a broader question: What should characterize biblically-informed political speech in this time of frightfully polarized political atmosphere which finds Christians in political camps that seem to be in hostile opposition to one another? If you know that President Obama is, as Jesus called the Pharisees, “an offspring of vipers,” then, I suppose you should continue to write as you do. But if you don’t know that, if you think it is possible that President Obama’s confession of faith in Jesus Christ is genuine, then you are obliged to speak of him in quite a different tone of voice.
Sincerely,
David Schelhaas
Work Cited
Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Mineloa, NY: Dover Publication Classics, 2006,original publication 1759), 58.
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