A Reader Writes: You Call That a Christian Response to Health Care?

A good reader of this blog recommends to me today an op-ed statement in the Charlotte Observer, asking where Christians are as health care reform is debated.

Walker Lundy argues that, though three out of four Americans claim to be Christians, you'd never know it by listening to what folks are saying as health care is debated.

In Lundy's view,

Health care is, of course, a political issue. But when 18,000 Americans will die this year from lack of health care, when health care is the major reason for personal bankruptcies, when tens of thousands of people can't afford health insurance and when even laid-off Americans can lose affordable health care, then it is also a moral issue.

Christians of every political stripe should be asking themselves that age-old most difficult question: “What would Jesus do?”

The silence of many Christians as health care reform is relentlessly attacked is a testament to where we've ended up after several decades of adroit media manipulation of our minds by the right-wing noise machine serving the interests of rapacious economic elites. Those elites set out some decades ago very systematically to blunt the powerful social witness of Christian churches, and they found that the best possible way to do that was to divide the churches over issues of sexuality, while shifting attention away from other compelling moral issues such as health care, war and peace, and economic justice.

Sadly, those groups have been wildly successful. The Christian voices that do now speak out in the health care debate are frequently arguing against the core moral imperative of universal coverage for all citizens, and seeking to silence the voices of their own brothers and sisters who point out that access to health care for all is a moral imperative for those of us who live by the gospels.

We've let the noise machine, with the interest groups who constructed that machine to serve their economic interests, set the terms of the debate. And they've done so with amazing ease, while our moral discourse within the faith communities grows ever narrower and ever less pertinent to the really crucial moral issues of the day.