President Obama simply can’t resist taking shots at Republicans anytime something bad happens (to foreclose any response from those who will reply that Republicans do it too, I will challenge that if you wish).  In this case it was the Baltimore riots, which by now everyone knows about.  In his press conference today, the president said that if the Congress had adopted his proposals, much of what happened in Baltimore would not have occurred (in fairness, he did call the perpetrators “thugs”).  He went on to suggest that the rioting would have been largely foreclosed if the Congress had spent more money on early childhood education, job training and criminal justice reform.  The education and job training are related to the larger anti-poverty agenda, while the criminal justice reform is a long-sought policy among liberals who argue that we shouldn’t treat criminals so badly by sending them to jail (unfortunately, most people in jail are black, so his ideas are even more broadly connected to racial issues).  Now, taking the last first, I have some sympathy for decriminalizing some offenses or making jail terms shorter, but this is not a racial problem.  It is a problem of the rule of law generally.

It is the first two proposals I have trouble with.  Since the “War on Poverty” began in 1964 (Johnson’s “Great Society”) the Federal government has spent some $22 trillion on poverty relief programs, overwhelmingly in urban areas.  And this does not include Social Security and Medicare.  Since 1930, all levels of government have spent over $10 trillion on education, most of that in the last twenty years.  And the education figure is not adjusted for inflation.  We continue to pour money into cities. We continue to implement a myriad of programs, changing every few years or so, moving from one odd idea to another.  And still the culture of poverty persists.  Could it be that it is not money that makes a difference but something very different, something it seems none of the government programs want to acknowledge or have anything to do with?  That “something” is virtue, or, as some said a few years back, traditional values.  Dare we even say Christian values and virtue?  I am talking about the simple values that express themselves as respect, mutual toleration, discernment or wisdom, honesty, integrity, self-discipline, and several more.  These kinds of values lead to self-motivated people who have a purpose in life beyond destructive behavior.  As they are taught and “caught” these values produce young people and adults who are responsible and thoughtful, but also impeccably trustworthy.

Now why don’t we see those values as we did many decades ago in the urban inner cities?  I think there are good reasons.  First, I blame the civil rights movement run amok.  What I mean is that its early leaders had exactly the right vision and method—Martin Luther King for example.  His successors either joined for selfish motives or over time shifted in that direction.  They began to become “racemongers.”  They adopted the victimization mantra.  They amassed a pretty good fortune and fane doing so.  And in the process, they helped undermine the older traditional, community values held by blacks in cities.  They worked hand-in-hand (to their benefit) with politicians who also saw benefit for themselves in pandering and in spending massive amounts of money for programs that clearly have not worked.  So  what we had was a kind of cronyism between demagogue black leaders and politicians.  At the same time there has been an effort on the part of certain groups over time to expunge traditional ethics as irrelevant. To be sure, in some cases the result was to undermine traditional values but with genuine, albeit misguided, motives.  Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference (I think of the cases that gradually eroded explicitly religious teaching in schools, but also churches which were liberal and that replaced theology with “therapy”).  This is not even to mention the rise of modern liberal ideology in America after World War II, which was certainly welfarist and which over time since the 1960s has increasingly opposed the explicit inculcation of many traditional ethical principles.  Modern Liberals have always favored regulation by “experts,” who would of course know better than the average person what was best for him or his community.  But especially after the 1960s, this expert rule has dominated policy-making and implementation with regard to cities.  At the same time, the experts had little use for the old ways.  The result was cities with no “moral soul.”  They had plenty of money, thanks to liberal advocacy of more and more spending on social programs as the solution.  But cities declined morally, and black communities were part of that decline.  Witness the lack of fathers as but one example.  No fathers, research has indicated, the  greater the chance of delinquency, unemployment, failure in school, children out of wedlock, etc.

What is the solution?  Unless traditional ethical teaching can somehow be re-introduced into communities, and reinforced by united families and churches that teach the same values, not to mention schools that actually aid those families instead of undermining them, the problems will continue.  I believe also that Christianity can be a part of the solution, but only if with our material aid, we bring real and lasting spiritual answers to those communities, beginning with the Gospel itself.  There was a time, not so long ago, when black community churches actually preached the real Gospel—and their crime rates were low in spite of high unemployment and relative poverty.  They didn’t spout victimization, racism, and entitlement mentality. Now we hear all too much Social Gospel at best, radical Liberation theology or its variants at worst.  This has to change and I hope some black leaders will see this—the change must begin with them.