Ryan Streeter
When I served in the George W. Bush White House and was involved in his "faith-based initiative" for awhile, we had quite a lot of interaction around the country with religious leaders, as one might expect. One of the leaders from whom I took a lot of inspiration each time we interacted was Buster Soaries, pastor of First Baptist Church in Somerset, N.J.
He always had a way of calling the audience to whom he was speaking to a higher place, above the political fray of the day. His was always a message of self-sufficiency, responsibility, honesty, optimism, and hard truths.
So his op-ed in today's WSJ caught my eye. In response to a statement by the head of the Conference of National Black Churches that excoriated the recent congressional decision to enact "tax cuts for the wealthy," he writes:
That's the best they can do? With all of the problems plaguing the black community, are tax cuts (including for wealthy blacks, I might add) really the issue that needs the CNBC's full attention? Clergy certainly have a responsibility to speak out on important social issues, and tax policy may be one. But the CNBC's familiar preoccupation with weighing in on matters primarily political, while remaining silent on matters within its ecclesiastical reach, makes it hard to consider the group distinct from the many other civil rights gatherings that do much talking but solve few problems.
Soaries proposes boldness instead on issues within the "ecclesiastical reach" of the church, suggesting - for starters - that CNBC churches recruit a half a million families to mentor a half million foster children in America.
After saying that a host of problems facing the African American community will not be "solved by government policies alone," he concludes his column thus:
When [Martin Luther] King announced on the eve of his assassination that he had seen the "Promised Land," he could not have imagined the levels of violence, school drop-outs, drug addiction and child abandonment that have become normal in black America. To get to the Promised Land, we will need to rebuild the infrastructure of the black family, the neighborhood and the church.
The question remains: Who will do this work?
What a challenging and refreshing statement from a man with a history of such statements. The same challenge could, and should, be issued from among a wide array of religious and secular community groups around the country, regardless of race. As we lean on legislators to clean up our fiscal mess, we will need to call on communities even more to help as they feel federal funds shrinking and slowing.
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As an afterthought, I was reminded of this fascinating CNN feature on Buster Soaries last October, when he provocatively said debt, not racism, was the greatest threat facing the African American community. He never pulls any punches, that's for sure.
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