Cash or Christ

 Modern man believes money can solve past mistakes.  To do so, he impoverishes his neighbors to make himself feel righteous.  -Practical Parson

This week, the head of the institution formerly known as the Church of England announced that he was earmarking 121 million dollars (100 million pounds) to address the Church's apparent past benefiting from the transatlantic slave trade.  This is a new step in the modern notion of reparations; one that ignores truth, while enshrining hatred as a foundational value of the modern church and hierarchy.  

Were there people in the church involved in the slave trade?  Undoubtedly.

Were there donations that came from the success of the slave trade?  Most assuredly. 

The trouble with demanding that money today be spent in reparation for what those men did is that you are not taking money away from those who committed the act; but rather from your own neighbor.  It is akin to a judge sentencing a criminal for theft, but making another take his place in prison instead.  We spend so much time judging the past and claiming to want to "fix things", that we sacrifice the good of our own communities and neighbors in order to make ourselves feel more righteous about ourselves.  We deprive those most in need of the love and comfort the church can provide; so we can alleviate our social justice warrior minds from what people in other places and other times did that is out of our control.

Depriving your neighbor of their livelihood just so you can feel better about hating the past and those who lived then, is a sin against both God and neighbor.  Giving someone financial benefit because of what someone else, somewhere else, at some other point in time went through: solves no problem, repairs no relationship, and only serves to breed future resentment between members of the community who are forced to bankroll these payments.  The best way to move forward is to acknowledge past mistakes, yes but to work together to ensure that such mistakes do not happen in the future.  Money cannot solve every problem, and modern man and churchman alike need to learn that taking money from your neighbor to give someone else so you feel more "righteous" is exactly the same spirit of the men who gave money to the church they made off the slave trade.  

Here endeth the lesson.

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