Thursday, July 28, 2005

America: An UnChristian Nation

The excerpt below is from Harper's, and it's full of embarrassing and shameful statistics that you'll never hear Bush speak of. While the real 'state of our nation' is no surprise to many of us, it's interesting to see the deplorable image contrasted with the ceaseless ear-splitting Christian rhetoric.

It seems that the more unchristian our nation behaves, the more we doth protest:

"America is simultaneously the most professedly Christian of the developed nations and the least Christian in its behavior.

In 2004, as a share of our economy, we ranked second to last, after Italy, among developed countries in government foreign aid. Per capita we each provide fifteen cents a day in official development assistance to poor countries. And it’s not because we were giving to private charities for relief work instead. Such funding increases our average daily donation by just six pennies, to twenty-one cents. It’s also not because Americans were too busy taking care of their own; nearly 18 percent of American children lived in poverty (compared with, say, 8 percent in Sweden).

In fact, by pretty much any measure of caring for the least among us you want to propose—childhood nutrition, infant mortality, access to preschool—we come in nearly last among the rich nations, and often by a wide margin. The point is not just that (as everyone already knows) the American nation trails badly in all these categories; it’s that the overwhelmingly Christian American nation trails badly in all these categories, categories to which Jesus paid particular attention. And it’s not as if the numbers are getting better: the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported last year that the number of households that were “food insecure with hunger” had climbed more than 26 percent between 1999 and 2003. "

There's more . . .

Courtesy of Our Word



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