WWJD? For many evangelical Christians -- including President Bush -- "What Would Jesus Do?” offers a reassuring mnemonic when faced with challenge. But if we’re to learn anything lasting from the murderous tsunami that swept the Indian Ocean after Christmas, it’s that theological shorthand is never enough. For there’s a horrible but simple truth lurking behind the reassuring pageant of aid that’s flowed in to meet the disaster: the stark realization that we never do what Jesus would really do.
Consider: 2,000 years after Christ’s death, we’re among the approximately one billion human beings who live on this planet in almost unimaginable comfort and security, beneficiaries of unprecedented improvements in living standards in the West these past two centuries. Most of us spend precious little time thinking about the nearly three billion who live on $2 a day or less; even fewer of us contemplate how our own lifestyles, political choices and social and economic systems impede an end to global poverty -- and in some cases worsen it.
To be sure, there’s been a lively debate in the press about the West’s response to the tsunami disaster -- by some measures, more lively than many of us who work in economic development ever expected. The issues of what could have been done beforehand (creating an Indian Ocean alert system, restricting growth along certain parts of vulnerable coastlines, precoordinating relief efforts within and among states in the region, etc.) all have been raised. And, more impressively, there’s even been some sharp debate not only about the early “stinginess” of wealthy donor countries (the United States in particular), but also about the media’s role in driving attention to disasters such as this, only to leave behind an unresolved backwash of misery when the cameras are turned off and the reporters fly home.
But the fundamental fact we still can’t seem to honestly confront is larger. It is that we -- you and I and other well-off Westerners -- inflict far more misery than we relieve. Far more human beings die prematurely each year as a result of human cruelty rather than natural disaster. We, whose relative wealth and access to power oblige us to listen even more carefully to Christ’s call, comfort ourselves with “we didn’t know” when told this, but of course we’ve been told this time and again for years -- and after hearing, we did not act. What would Jesus do indeed?
As many as 200,000 died from this tsunami and its aftermath, but in the week that followed, throughout the Third World, at least 200,000 children under the age of 5 died of preventable malnutrition and disease. Tsunamis don’t happen weekly, but this murder of infants does -- week in, week out, 10 million a year last year, 10 million this year, 10 million the next. Wars and insurrections and ethnic conflicts and terrorist attacks are, contrary to headlines and TV screens, only a small part of that homicide -- and yet the world spends nearly $1 trillion on its militaries (nearly half of that, incidentally, is spent by the United States). For what the United States has expended so far in Iraq, we could have funded world anti-hunger campaigns for the next six years, global AIDs efforts for the next 16 or immunization of all the world’s children for the next half century.
Five years ago, the United Nations, World Bank and International Monetary Fund formulated the “Millennium Development Goals,” a practical, concrete, detailed step-by-step plan for what even 50 years ago would have sounded unthinkably utopian: how to reduce global poverty by half in just 15 years. Remarkably the cost was put at $40 billion to 60 billion in net new aid per year.
Under such circumstances, it seems clear what Jesus would do -- but what have we done? Cut taxes, swell deficits, spend more on SUVs and giant suburban McMansions. By one estimate, Washington’s repeal of the estate tax produced reductions on the wealthiest 5,000 estates per year that would have more than funded America’s share in meeting those Millennium Development Goals.
To be sure, the Episcopal Church is officially on record as in favor of the MDGs -- and in fact it’s called on its member dioceses, churches and parishioners to donate at least 0.7% of their income toward achieving the MDGs. But the little we can do alone as one church -- even if we met those goals -- comes nowhere near being enough.
Perhaps it is time for more of us to ask not WWJD but HWFC -- How We’ve Failed Christ. The harsher edge to that question might at least serve as the starting point for answering why -- and set the stage for actually doing what we know Jesus would want us to do.
To respond to this column, write to Episcopal Life or e-mail commentary@episcopal-life.org. We welcome your own commentary.
His latest book, John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics, has just been published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
