The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press recently released an interesting report. Entitled Public's Priorities for 2010: Economy, Jobs, Terrorism, it highlights the changing priorities of the American public.
What is interesting to me in this study is how nearly all of the issues on people's minds are so strongly correlated to the other issues (ex. Education > Jobs > Crime > Helping the poor...) yet graphs such as this encourage us to look at them as if they are all somehow disconnected from one another. I look forward to the day when Americans, especially Christians, accept and understand the inter-relatedness that the issues that concern us have to other issues that may not.
The great thing about the Christian faith is its understanding that all of life's civil 'domains' (education, government, economics, agriculture, etc.) are an intricate inter-related web, not single strands hanging from separate branches and that what happens in one will eventually lead to changes in another.
We can see this in God's instructions to Israel in the Old Testament for how to conduct themselves. Here are just a few examples from Leviticus 19, each of which speaks to healthy civil conduct:
- 'Each of you must respect his mother and father...'
- 'Observe the Sabbath...'
- ''When you reap the harvest, do not reap to the edges...leave them for the poor...''
- 'When an alien lives with you in your land, do not mistreat him...'
- 'Do not steal...'
- 'Do not deceive one another...'
- 'Do not pervert justice; do not show...favoritism to the great...'
- 'Rise in the presence of the aged, show respect for the elderly...'
- 'Do not use dishonest standards...'
When we look at each of the issues shown on the above graph and place them in the context of the civil life of Israel in light of Scripture, we can see that God had careful measures in place to ensure vitality of their economy, the defense of their nation, the education of their children, provision for the elderly, how to deal with immigrants, etc., all of which hinged primarily on their understanding of who they were in relation to a holy God.
And as with ancient Israel, it's only when we have gone our own way that we, as humans, have had to come up with stop-gap measures to slow the hemorrhaging of our society. And in the words of Dr. Phil, "How's that workin' for us?" Not so well, I'm afraid.
