Dear Focus On The Family

Here's a letter I'm getting into an envelope to send off to Focus on the Family:

Dear Focus on the Family:
As a fellow evangelical, I’ve been amazed at the impact you’ve had on potential and actual Supreme Court nominations. You and your more right leaning friends even managed to get Harriet Miers’ name pulled from the running. Even though I might not always agree with you, it’s good to see people of faith trying to exercise their responsibility to be the salt of the earth in our culture.

That’s why your silence regarding the Federal budget has been deafening. Poverty and cost of living are rising and programs like Temporary Aid For Needy Families, Food Stamps, and Medicare are being cut. I wonder with great concern why you don’t focus on those families.

Tens of millions of families are in serious need in America. The precise numbers are obscured by differing means of data collection. But whatever the exact number, that’s a lot of kids. I wonder why you haven’t said anything about them. It wouldn’t take much: a blurb in one of your many newsletters, five minutes of a radio broadcast, a press release, anything that would let people know about the catastrophe of hunger in our country. You already have the mechanisms in place to help people contact their congressional representatives and demand action. You’ve used it in the past. It wouldn’t cost much. In the save to save and improve lives, such measures could be very effective.

You’ve spent a lot of money and political clout over the nominees for the Supreme Court, mostly, it seems, in the vague hope of a court that might someday possibly have a slim chance to maybe rule on something that could potentially have an impact on abortion in our country. Today there are millions of people who are directly threatened by cuts to social services. Their lives must be worth something to God.

Maybe you hold the biblically dubious opinion that government has no place in public welfare. Maybe you believe that compassion can’t be legislated. You might be right. So, with the cracks through which the poor slide growing ever wider, why not ask churches and followers of Christ to step up, to open food pantries and feeding programs, to adopt unwanted children, to open their homes or churches to families in need? It seems the least you could do.

I know what it’s like to be stuck with a label of “liberal” or “conservative”. Maybe, in the best scenario, you could do both: encourage you listeners to demand action from Congress and to act on their own in behalf of the poor.

I hope the answer to these questions is that you simply didn’t know, that these things haven’t been part of your horizon. Jesus has a lot to say regarding our treatment of and advocacy for those he calls, “the very least.”

Your Friend,