Warfare, Welfare, Lawfare, Ecofare

Dichotomy now has four ugly heads

Dr. Charlie Self, a man with three History degrees, shared on a recent Kingdom Business Community call that politics in the USA split along two lines in the early 1990s: the Welfare state and the Warfare state. Was this a consequence of a dichotomy in the Church with “the social gospel” on the one side and “the evangelicals” on the other? Or did the Church mimic politics? The dichotomous fault lines continue today about whether (as an example) to keep sending billions to the Ukraine (a decision that feeds the Warfare machine in the USA) or to rather put resources into helping US citizens. But, sadly, it is even more sinister, and if not sinister, then still sad because today we can clearly add two more “fares” to the fight.

Lawfare has reached new proportions. Instead of fighting for votes in the courts of public opinion politicians are resorting to the legal system to try to discredit, if not take out, opponents. This can be through simple acts of suing for some grievance or the more nefarious route of politicizing the court system and using it to remove someone who is a political obstacle. If the USA saw a sitting president do this in another country we would cry “Foul!” The nation would be labeled a Banana Republic and the sitting leader a dictator. Back home we call it justice.

The fourth unfair “fare” is what I am labeling “Ecofare” where proponents of a worthy cause—caring for the environment—have become radicalized and made it a religion. Then they have declared war on their own citizens who don’t subscribe to the radical extremes of their green ideology. Farmland is taken away, farmers can no longer sell certain products and even farmers who practice regenerative agriculture are in the cross-hairs of the Ecofare militia. You have to look no further than the situation in the Netherlands and Germany for examples, not to mention the confiscation of grazing lands in the USA under the misguided notion that it is better for the planet to return the land to wilderness rather than have it carefully stewarded.

Workfare: a better way 

It is usually the case that the bad movements—the four “---fares”—come into existence because good has vacated the public place. I would like to suggest that we return to a healthy understanding and practice of work. This is “Workfare”! In my book, Work Like God in 31 Ways, I outline the nature of work and seven of work’s utility. In its original intent, work and worship shared the same word (avodah) and were integrated. Work was there to serve God, build relationships with people, take care of the planet for the common good, and discover and deploy Divine purposes.

Over time, to skip many chapters in the narrative, work became a way to amass wealth for a few. This got mislabeled as “capitalism” when it was really unbridled greed. Business, which in the Hebrew (melakah) shared the same word for ministry, became distorted. In the minds of many today, it is synonymous with corporate greed, and those who should have been proponents of Workfare left the arena with their tails between their legs. (Some even left business (melakah) to go into ministry (melakah)... which doesn’t really make sense, does it?) History goes through cycles of believing that business is bad, corporations are “the man” that must be taken down. They see the modus operandi of work is to get more for themselves at the expense of others.

Return to a Righteous Cycle of Work 

Can Workfare overcome these four curses? Anyone with a thread of decency would not want to do exploitative work. Yet, we as humans, are designed to create, to build, to bring order and to flourish. In my book, Transforming Society, I outline a Societal Value Chain that is positive. This cycle of work is integral to human joy and societal harmony.

• Raw materials are identified (or, in God’s case, spoken into being). Sometimes this includes Inspired Innovations^TM, sometimes research, sometimes experimentation. The George Washington Carver question comes to mind: “Mr. Creator, why did you make the peanut?”
• Raw Materials are then collected into a critical mass: one ounce of gold does not constitute a refinery; one needs a critical mass to have Resources.
• Resources are transformed into Products through work. A bunch of grapes, to a winemaker, is not a Finished Good. Lots of work has to take place to transform a ton of grapes into bottles of wine.
• When winemakers get together and begin to market their wine to willing buyers, whether in their country or a faraway land, a market is developed. (Of course, it could be a buyer/agent or a customer that creates the market.) Nowadays, the markets for many goods and services are global and your customers can be anywhere.
• Markets give rise to Trade.
• Trade leads to Profit, and raw material + sweat + intellectual capital has led to money in the bank.
• Money can get wasted, so in order for Wealth Creation to happen, there has to be Stewardship. Advanced leaders (those who have been successful and are asking, “What else do I do with my life to benefit others?”) realize their job goes beyond making money, to stewarding what they have, to generate wealth that will be multi-generational.
• Stewarded wealth can then be invested for the good of humankind (that sounds grand, but insert your neighborhood, town, local hospital, or a collaborative of social entrepreneurs, and you get the idea), resulting in the creation of Societal Assets. This is where we spin out of the greedy cycle of thinking that what we can make is only for “I, myself and me.”
• When a city or nation has created so much wealth that they are then able to bless other cities and nations, then they are finally getting to the promise of Genesis 12 where God shared his purposes with Abraham. “I will bless you, and you will be a blessing to all nations.”
  
  

  [Source: Transforming Society, by Brett Johnson (2016) – pages 114-115 ]

Someone asked (when I shared this with a working group at the Christian Economic Forum), “How has this righteous cycle of work been corrupted?” It’s the right question because a value-creating cycle has become a value-extracting cycle that benefits a few at the expense of the many. In essence, instead of capital being reinvested in real work the majority of financial transactions in a day are money chasing money. (The motivations, schemes and mechanisms of the dark side of economics are illustrated below.)

[Source: Kingdom Economics, by Brett Johnson (2021)]

Warfare plays right into the hands of corporate greed. People are paying with their lives while the military-industrial complex makes money. Welfare, Lawfare and Ecofare all promote greater government control over the daily affairs of citizens. (Don’t believe the media rhetoric that the other political party will kill democracy: warfare, welfare, lawfare and ecofare are already on the way to killing democracy.)

Occupy until I come

The Occupy Wall Street movement protested corporate greed. What if we had a positive occupying of the workspace again? Jesus told a parable in which a master “called his ten servants, and delivered them ten pounds, and said unto them, Occupy till I come.” Luke 19:13 Modern translations say “do business” or “engage in trade” or “invest this money” or “see what you can earn with this while I am gone.” If faith-driven businesspeople occupied Main Street we would not need occupy Wall Street. If businesspeople recaptured the essence of work and its inherent wealth creation by all and generosity towards all we would not need welfare. If businesses had a holistic view of their ecosystem that included stewardship of the environment, Ecofare would not need to become a political or religious movement. If those in the judicial system feared the Judge of all and sought to live in truth without malice or overreach, Lawfare would give way to justice. 

Who am I? Do I claim to overcome the secular-sacred dichotomy, yet its divided fruits are still apparent in my approach to life? Have I drifted into one of the truth’s tributaries that sound right but are far from good? Do I have shades of a warfare capitalist, a welfare socialist, a lawfare statist or an ecofare elitist? Or am I recapturing work-as-worship and working for the good of my fellow man and producing a good ROI on my faith? Am I doing real work that adds value in the Societal Value Chain? Is my work-as-worship breaking the strongholds of Warfare, Welfare, Lawfare and Ecofare?