I have many Christian brothers and sisters whom I love, and I agree with their dedication to helping those who are less fortunate than ourselves.

However, I cannot agree with their politics, particularly with the policy of 'distributionism' which increasingly is beginning to be upheld as an end of itself. The so called "Gospel to the Poor" should be more about lifting up people and helping them find their way economically and spiritually, and less about any abstract notion of creating a more socially just society here on earth.

One of the failures of western progressives is their refusal to adapt their policies or ideologies to the changing demographics in their countries (i.e., lifespan, education levels, lifestyles, etc.) or account for our current technological innovations. Their refusal to adapt their beliefs and their clinging to their old ideas about distributionism is the surest driver of Western financial instability and insolvency.

 If only we could have a real conversation about this...and we could if we were a true community of faith as we claim. However, I fear we have long lost our way. Too many (though hardly all) of the Sandinista branch of Christianity are steeped in their prejudice and they are unwilling to adjust their ideology. Otherwise, they would be open to at least considering this question:

What if our large-scaled distributive policies are actually making the poor poorer and breaking them spiritually so that they are no longer merely poor (which is no shame or judgment against them, as Jesus shows us) but that they give up and let later generations become hopeless and deviant?

Case in point: I live and work in Mississippi, which ranks at the bottom of almost every national statistic (though I expect parts of the old Rust Belt will join us soon). If you take one region out of Mississippi, the Mississippi Delta, the state ranks about in the middle nationally in most categories. I'm not from that region of the state, but my wife comes from a small city just on the edge of it, and I know Episcopal ministries that work there.

The Delta is a place that is (except a few islands in a sea of dependence) almost totally hooked on federal aid. I haven't seen the most recent numbers, but it is probably around 95%. That would be close to the normal numbers I've seen previously.

What happened to the Delta?

Well, that's a complicated answer that I can't do total justice to here, but here is a brief commentary:

The Delta is very fertile farm land (rich black soil) and its adjacent proximity to the Mississippi River makes it easy (and cheap!) to ship farm products on barges down the river to the port of New Orleans where it can be transported anywhere. For maybe 150 years, the Delta (like much of the south) was a one-crop economy...cotton. Indeed, the Delta stayed that way long after much of the Deep South had moved on to a more diverse agriculture.

As we should know from history, cotton (unlike wheat, corn, etc) is a very labor-intensive crop and requires a lot of attention and care both to grow it and prepare it for market. (That's the reason why slavery appeared in places like the Deep South and West Indies...it had nothing to do with the moral superiority of the people living in Northern States prior to 1860.)

For generations, that's how most of the population of the Delta (mostly African-American) made their living: there was a need for low-skilled agriculture laborers, and there was plenty of work to go around. Well, that has all changed. One reason is automation: machines do much (though not all) of the work that was once done by hundreds of hands. Second reason is that the Delta is no longer a single-crop economy: cattle, catfish, soy, corn, and other products are as important as cotton (much of which is bought in Egypt and India where it is cheaper). This was not a new change. King Cotton has been retired since the 1960s, and so the economic/labor crisis in the Delta has been a long-existing one.

I am not anti-government per se. What needed to happen in the Delta once the economy changed was that the labor in the region needed to change with it. We should have encouraged people to move to the cities (there is no major city in the region that anchors it, so this could have changed that). We should have encouraged the people to be retrained, and then we needed to lobby for new industries to come to the region that produce the types of things the new agro-economy needed. Government could have (and should have, if it is the panacea that the Brotherhood of Obama claim it to be) played a part in such a transformation, partnering with local governments, businesses, farmers, charities, and religious institutions to make this come about. As we all know, this did not happen.

What did happen was almost Egyptian...the mummification of the Mississippi Delta.

In effect, what the federal government has actually done is hold in place a way of life that has been dead for 50 years. These people need new skills, training, and education so that they can make a living for themselves and raise their children out of poverty and into new opportunities like our parents and grandparents did for us.

Sadly, people seem to live a life in stasis in the Delta, and I don't think that poverty (as the progressive chorus in academia, activist circles, and on MSNBC would have us believe) is the only reason.

Labor is one thing God intended men to do...to tend the garden, etc. Now I don't fault anyone for taking government assistance who needs it, but generational dependency is quite another thing. As far as I can tell, whether we're talking about the Delta or the USSR, the results are always negative.

In the Delta, the damage has been multi-generational as children and grandchildren who have never seen a parent leave and come home from a job now place no value on work or labor...in fact, it becomes something to sneer it and treat with contempt. My brother is a police officer, and he worked in a Delta community for awhile, and some of the stories he told me would shock anyone. Indeed, no one would think that rural communities and small towns could be the places where all sorts of gangs and criminal activity could be happening, but the murder rates in some of these tiny Delta communities is higher than Chicago, and crime and disrespect for the law or private property (with the exception of a few islands or eddies that I previously discussed) is common.

It seems to me that our government assistance programs where thought out by middle-class Ivy League types for people like myself (skilled, professional, third generation university educated, etc) who might fall on hard times but could eventually find a job within at least 6 months, etc. However, federal assistance seems ill-equipped to work out the problems I described that plague the Mississippi Delta...indeed, the problems of the Delta in 2013 are far, far, far, far different than the problems of 1963, and I think poorly thought out federal policy played a big part in transforming the Delta into what it is today.

Frankly, I don't see how the service the federal government did to the citizens of the Mississippi Delta squares with any "Gospel to the Poor." While it is true that some of our most respected voices within Christendom (like G.K. Chesterton) have argued for a unique Christian Socialism that included distributionism as a means for larged-scaled charity, most of them lived in a different time and had no access to the scenes and data we now have.

Furthermore, for these earlier more socialist brethren, distribution was only a means to helping others, not the end in itself. I think if G.K. Chesterton saw the Mississippi Delta, he, being the objective and fair-minded voice he usually was, would have rethought the means of achieving Christ's mission to the poor of spirit.

Sadly, many of those who followed him and do works in his name, cannot and will not. And the misery will continue.