{"id":28285,"date":"2013-12-02T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-12-02T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=28285"},"modified":"2013-12-02T00:41:16","modified_gmt":"2013-12-02T05:41:16","slug":"the-fourth-point-caring-for-the-poor-and-needy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2013\/12\/the-fourth-point-caring-for-the-poor-and-needy\/","title":{"rendered":"The Fourth Point: Caring for the Poor and Needy"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 2009 the \u201cthreefold mission\u201d of the Church was extended to include a fourth point<\/a>: \u201cto care for the poor and needy.\u201d Obviously practical charity is not a new concept for Mormonism. The very same chapter that included the famous \u201cIf any of you lack wisdom\u2026\u201d verse that led ultimately to the First Vision also contains this emphatic assertion:<\/p>\n

Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world. (James 1:27)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This New Testament precedent was echoed in modern revelations. For example, Joseph Smith revealed the link between poverty and spiritual unity in the definition of Enoch\u2019s Zion:<\/p>\n

And the Lord called his people Zion, because they were of one heard and one mind, and dwelt in righteousness; and there was no poor among them. (Moses 7:18)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Next year came an even more stark revelation:<\/p>\n

It is not given that one man should possess that which is above another, wherefore the world lieth in sin. (D&C 49:20)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Clearly, Mormon doctrine has had an economic aspect from the very beginning. And of course it wasn\u2019t just a matter of doctrine. The focus on economic welfare was maintained out of necessity throughout the Church\u2019s early history. Persecution and the hardships of frontier life and intercontinental immigration ensured that temporal needs were always in focus. What\u2019s more, this focus has not been lost in modern times. The Church\u2019s welfare program continues to be central to the institution and our perception of it, and modern programs like the Perpetual Education Fund<\/a> (initiated in 2001) obviously were not being held back by the lack of formal emphasis on economic concerns prior to the 2009 change.<\/p>\n

This raises two related questions. First: why wasn\u2019t the temporal aspect included in the original threefold mission revealed in 1981? Second: why was it added in 2009?<\/p>\n

\"2013-12-02<\/a>Part of the answer is revealed in a talk President Kimball gave in 1978 (three years prior to the unveiling of the threefold mission<\/a>) called Becoming the Pure in Heart<\/a>. In it, Kimball followed the Mormon pattern and paired a discussion of the “building of Zion through sacrifice and consecration” with a discussion of Church and state welfare programs. While emphasizing the importance of practical charity, he also espoused a deep distrust of centralized, government-run programs. He argued that government programs are prone to handouts (which are spiritually corrosive to the recipients) and also that their impersonal, bureaucratic nature can crowd out individual participation (which is spiritually corrosive to the donors).<\/p>\n

Kimball\u2019s talk presumed that the only redress to poverty is the re-allocation of physical wealth. This re-allocation can be private and voluntary (good) or it can be public and coercive (bad). Given only those two options, it\u2019s no wonder that when Kimball subsequently unveiled the missions of the Church, poverty-relief was not among them. Within the paradigm in which all public policy efforts were suspected of being dangerous spiritual counterfeits, there was nothing further to consider beyond the welfare programs already in place (or subsequent offshoots to them, like the modern PEF).<\/p>\n

But what if there is an alternative? What if there\u2019s another view of poverty\u2014what causes it and how it can be alleviated\u2014that steps outside the dichotomy of private donations vs. public bureaucracy?<\/p>\n

There is, but it\u2019s not an alternative that would have been obvious in the 1970s and 1980s when the world was still dominated by the Cold War. At that time, ideology seemed starkly divided between capitalism and communism. We now know, however, that communism was never a viable economic policy. Although China and Cuba continue to pay lip service to the rhetoric of the revolution, both have learned that economic liberalization is the essential key to survival. North Korea alone remains a staunch adherent of the ideals of communism and a tragic but convenient reminder lest we forget.<\/p>\n

We can now see that it is capitalism and only capitalism that has ever succeeded in lifting large populations out of absolute poverty, raising standards of living, creating a prosperous middle class, and so forth. This is not seriously debated among economists, but just as an illustration here are key findings from The Rational Optimist<\/a>:<\/p>\n