Pass the offering plate: Congress wants every church to cough up $50,000

April 30, 2012 By 91 Comments

Bread for the World: “Congress Wants Your Church to Spend $50,000”

The House of Representatives just proposed to cut more than $169 billion from SNAP, formerly the food stamps program. Some representatives argued that feeding hungry people is really the work of the churches.

These representatives are essentially saying that every church across America — big, small, and tiny — needs to come up with an extra $50,000 dedicated to feeding people — every year for the next 10 years — to make up for these cuts.

The Hartford Institute for Religion and Research estimates there are 335,000 religious congregations in the United States. If the proposals by the House of Representatives to cut SNAP by $133.5 billion and $36 billion are enacted, each congregation will have to spend approximately $50,000 to feed those who would see a reduction or loss of benefits.

* * * * * * * * *

This shouldn’t be so confusing:

You can argue that working in Career X is more difficult than raising children and managing a household.

You can argue that raising children and managing a household is more difficult than working in Career X.

But you cannot argue that either one of those is, by itself, more difficult than doing both at the same time.

* * * * * * * * *

More like this, please:

Speaking at the University of North Carolina about a bill to prevent some interest rates on some student loans from doubling, President Obama let loose with a lengthy dig at the state’s Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) for comments she made dismissing student’s complaints about their debt load.

“She said she had ‘very little tolerance for people who tell me they graduate with debt because there’s no reason for that.’ I’m just quoting here,” Obama said. “The students who rack up student loan debt are just ‘sitting on their butts having opportunity dumped in your lap.’ I’m reading it here. I didn’t make this up.”

He continued: “Now, can you imagine saying something like that?”

 

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  • nirrti

    I’ve got a better idea. Why don’t we get the churches to pay for these two wars the U.S. is involved in and just let congress keep the SNAP program?

    That way, all our troops will be home in no time and our needy people will get fed. Win-win.

  • PurpleGirl

    What would people who are not church members do for their food assistance? Would they have to join a church? 

  • EllieMurasaki

    Entirely possible. Which is why the thought terrifies me.

  • RickRS

    The feeling of the Republicans and those Republican churches is it won’t be $50,000 per church.  No, they are going to do a better job than the government and weed out all those undeserving people already getting assistance.  Showing up in their damn Cadillacs!  Really!

  • Matri

    “Now, can you imagine saying something like that?”

    That was simply brilliant!

  • Jessica_R

    “But you cannot argue that either one of those is, by itself, more difficult than doing both at the same time.”

    Oh sure you can. All you have to do is hate women and therefore make it so they can’t win. Staying at home? Welfare Queen! Chosing career over having kids? Selfish bitch! Both? Why do you not love your children?

  • http://lifebeforethebucket.blogspot.com/ Adrian Waller

    I shudder at the thought of having to receive food benefits from a church. We receive food stamps (I’m disabled & my wife is a full-time student about to graduate), but I can just see about a million different people saying, “We don’t do handouts here” (even though Scripture seems to indicate that we should).

  • Münchner Kindl

    Yes, I too take it as far too naive to belief that private charities like Churches will pay out the same amount as the govt. – leaving aside the meme of how the govt. is always wasteful, obviously the duty of the Good Christians at the local church is determining first who’s worthy. And of course worth is proved by converting to that religion and showing up for service regularly, having a job instead of being lazy (God will probably create jobs out of thin air, like manna from heaven) and being married (a drunken father who beats the kids is better as the Bible says than a strong indepent mother). You’ll see how quickly the number of worthy receipents dwindle.

    Next step: Churches get exempt from Health Care and pray for sick people instead. Saves a lot of money!

  • LMM22

    I can just see about a million different people saying, “We don’t do handouts here”

    The other complication is, churches which have members who are in need of charity are far less likely to have the (collective) money to support them. I’ve read that churches are among the most segregated institutions in American society — and I doubt that the wealthy are going to be attending the churches which draw in the most needy segments of the population.

  • http://lifebeforethebucket.blogspot.com/ Adrian Waller

    Good call. We’re trying to be intentional about finding a church when we move that doesn’t look like us. I’m good enough at loving myself. I want to work on loving others unlike myself.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Alan-Alexander/502988241 Alan Alexander

    The most infuriating thing about the Hillary Rosen non-troversy is that it has forced lefties like me to come to the defense of Hillary freakin’ Rosen in the first place. The truth of the matter is  that nearly everyone on the Left actually aware of Hillary Rosen hates her for her sterling work at the RIAA in seeking to dismantle the 1st Amendment and to have huge corporations sue teenagers and grandmothers for downloading songs off Napster. In fact, quite a few people on the Left even remember when the evil witch tried to sneak a clause into the Sony Bono Act that would have created a presumption that all works by artists and composers were works for hire unless a contract specifically said differently! And now, the Left has to defend this corporatist stooge when she goes on TV and says something both perfectly true and socially unacceptable about Her Ladyship, Ann the Duchess of Romney!

  • EllieMurasaki

    Rosen did WHAT?

  • LMM22

    We’re trying to be intentional about finding a church when we move that doesn’t look like us.

    To be completely fair: There are a few competing factors. I have little data for this, but it’s quite likely that many denominations are heavily associated with a certain ethnicity — and so people seeking out groups with similar theologies to their own are going to wind up in churches filled with people who look like them. Different churches also have very different behaviors (e.g. I’ve been told by a UU minister that Rev. Pearson, a black evangelical preacher who became a universalist, has complained that white people don’t do the call-and-response that he’s used to).

    That being said, whatever the cause, churches are *very* segregated.

  • Jenny Islander

    Hey, we would love to fully and freely give $25,000 apiece to our two local food banks (which apply no religious tests) every single year.  That’s $1,000 per year per adult parishioner, including the retirees on fixed income, the college students who work every summer to help reduce the size of the loans they’ll have to take out for the next year, and the families who are already using  food aid so their kids won’t suffer malnutrition.  I know we’re not the only small congregation in America.

  • http://apocalypsereview.wordpress.com/ Invisible Neutrino

    You know, one thing that could be construed as problematic was the (apparently realistically portrayed) aspect of the 1930s that involved a churchifed speech before you could eat, even if it was from the likes of Edith Keeler.

    I know others here and on the old Slacktivist have raised concerns over churches using a captive audience to do some proselytizing, and I echo those now that SNAP is under serious threat of defunding.

  • Monala

     I’d really like to see some recent data to support the “churches are among the most segregated institutions in America” meme. MLK made that statement back in the 1960s, when it was most certainly true, and people continue to repeat it today like it’s just as true now as it was back then.

    But is it? I’ve visited a lot of churches, from a variety of denominations, over the last decade, and most of them were integrated. In fact, conservative megachurches were often more diverse than more liberal denominations, generally because their members tend to be younger.

    The caveat is that the churches I’ve visited have all been in MA, NJ, NY, RI and WA–in other words, the heart of blue state America, so I don’t know what’s happening nationwide. OTOH, in early 2011, the WA Post did a series of articles on changing demographics in the U.S., based on 2010 census results. On article featured the growth of interracial marriages in Mississippi. They visited a multicultural megachurh in MS to find couples to interview.

  • Green Eggs and Ham

    It seems we have to stop saying, “When fascism comes to America…” 

  • aunursa

    “She said she had ‘very little tolerance for people who tell me they graduate with debt because there’s no reason for that.’ I’m just quoting here,” Obama said. “The students who rack up student loan debt are just ‘sitting on their butts having opportunity dumped in your lap.’ I’m reading it here. I didn’t make this up.”

    President Obama misquoted  her.  What Rep. Foxx actually said was: 

    I have very little tolerance for people who tell me that they graduate with $200,000 of debt or even $80,000 of debt because there’s no reason for that. We live in an opportunity society and people are forgetting that. I remind folks all the time that the Declaration of Independence says ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ You don’t sit on your butt and have it dumped in your lap.

    According to one study, 94% of student debtors owe $75,000 or less. She was not referring to all students who take out student loans to pay for their education, but rather those students who amass an exceptionally high amount of debt.

  • EllieMurasaki

    Define ‘exceptionally high’. Then note that in-state tuition at a state university runs about twenty thousand a year for four years (I’m looking at http://www.udel.edu/admissions/finance/ ) and not everyone can attend an in-state state university, and some people can’t finish in four years, and some people do grad school. Then redefine ‘exceptionally high’. ‘Cause I’m telling you right now, eighty thousand in student loans is rock fucking bottom.

  • Worthless Beast

    I think the problem here is that the Congress seems to be woefully unaware of what I like to call “Rich Person Syndrome.”  Now, don’t get me wrong, there are generous and kind wealthy people out there – I have an independently wealthy boss who’s bailed me out of things, but from what I’ve seen in life, she’s an exception to the rule. (And even she sometimes forgets to dole out the paychecks on the right day because she seems to have simply forgotten the timing-urgencies when it comes to money under which other people live). 

     Rich people, in general, don’t get that way from being generous.  They get that way by being convinced of their own entitlement – (whether by birth, luck or genuinely working hard).  The wealthy megachurches that can tow the load? Yeah, everybody there got their prosperity because they “prayed hard enough” and “had enough faith,” or were just plain “God’s chosen.”  The  little churches that know that God doesn’t hand you everything on a silver platter just because you wish hard enough and are actually more inclined to follow some of the commands in the Bible about assisting the poor? Full of poor people – who can’t.

    In my experience, the food stamp system is kind of crap, anyway.  You really have to come to the government guys on bended knee with flowers and chocolates and crying. I never qualified in Pennsylvania because I live with a person who technically always made too much money (even when on unemployment, and like… by a *few dollars*. We really could have used the help at many points).  When I lived alone in Arizona, I was on them, but almost didn’t get them because the board was all “(Dour face) You have a car.” I’m serious. Have transportation that enables you to go to work or to go find work and they’ll think you’re “too rich” to need help eating.  I squeaked by on that one because there was a clause for people who lived in extremely rural areas (which I did – 20 min. drive to anywhere, nowhere to walk to work or grocery-wise).  My church at the time – couldn’t help me, as in, physically impossible plus a touch of me being too proud to ask (being a burden when I *knew* people, Mexican-American families and such, who were more needy than I).    And I don’t have a church anymore. I’d feel weird asking for help from one.

  • Monala

    Food stamp rules, like unemployment rules, differ by state, even though the funds are federal. When both my husband and I were unemployed two years ago, we were on foodstamps. WA State only asked us to verify income, and didn’t look at assets or car ownership.

  • Kubricks_Rube

    Oh, so Foxx’s contribution to the debate about student debt was to attack a strawman? She only seemed to be calling young people with student loan debt entitled and lazy and only appeared to be utterly ignoring the dismal job prospects currently available to new college graduates, all in an effort to valiantly prevent the President from doing anything about any of it? Much better.

  • LMM22

    I squeaked by on that one because there was a clause for people who lived in extremely rural areas (which I did – 20 min. drive to anywhere, nowhere to walk to work or grocery-wise).

    Wow. So, in essence, AZ *encourages* poor people to live in exurban areas (where there are the least services and gas prices are going to hit them the hardest). No wonder we have problems coming up with a remotely sensible transportation policy in this country.

  • The Lodger

    Our congregation provides food baskets to 20-25 households per month, and doesn’t require anyone to join or attend (although we do encourage non-English speakers to sign up for our ESL program.) Two or three actually attend.

  • aunursa

    The statistics in my post give a good indication of what an ”exceptionally high” student debt would look like.

    Regardless, the president should have quoted her accurately.  Certainly he (or his speechwriters) should have doublechecked the accuracy of the quote before he said, ”I’m just quoting here … I’m not making this up … You guys can Google her.”

  • aunursa

    No, the point is she wasn’t calling young people with student loan debt entitled and lazy.  The president misquoted her.

  • http://redwoodr.tumblr.com Redwood Rhiadra

    Recent data (from last year):

    There are currently between 300,000 and 350,000 congregations in the U.S., according to Michael Emerson, a sociology professor and co-director of Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research in Houston, Texas. Ninety-two percent are homogeneous, meaning at least 80 percent of the congregation is comprised of a single racial group.

    (Emphasis mine)

    That’s from this news story: http://newsone.com/1556655/churches-remain-highly-segregated-in-21st-century/

  • Tybult

    I had to look around to double check that figure of $133 billion, but Reuters confirms it:
    http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE83H16320120418?irpc=932

    These representatives are essentially saying that every church across America… needs to come up with an extra $50,000 dedicated to feeding people

    Well, that’s a pretty gross misreading. What the House (or rather, the teabagging shit heads and the corporate stooges* within the House) is pretty clearly saying is “Let the parasites starve.”

    *But I repeat myself.

  • EllieMurasaki

    The statistics weren’t there when I read your post. And not everyone can get scholarships or grants.  I frankly do not believe your study.

  • Monala

     I guess I don’t consider 80% homogeneous; it’s not that much different than the demographics of the U.S., which is 72% white according to the 2010 census. I say this as an African-American. If I walked into a predominantly white congregation but 1 in 5 people are people of color, I wouldn’t feel out of place the way I would if, say, only one or two people were non-white in a congregation of 100.

  • Ursula L

    I wonder how that $50,000 per church divides up per church-goer?

    How much money, every week, would each adult in the pews need to give, in order to collect enough to feed those who are loosing their benefits?  

    Just dividing it evenly among the number of churches is misleading.  Because for the typically-conservative mega-churches, the extra $50,000 might actually be reasonable on a per-person level.  But for a smaller church, it would be impossible.  

    Wikipedia defines a “megachurch” as having at least 2000 members.  For a church with 2000 members, $50,000 is only $25 per member, or about fifty cents a week. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megachurch And it gets less, per person, as the church gets bigger.

    The problem is, most people don’t go go megachurches.  But megachurches, due to their size, tend to have a lot more political influence than smaller congregations.  If a politician wants the point of view of a large number of Christians, it is easier to ask the pastor of a 2,000 member megachurch than to understand the nuances of the different points of view of 10 different 200 member congregations.  

    So I can see the leaders of prominent megachurches saying “no problem, we can spend $50,000 to feed the poor.”  

    But the voices of smaller congregations won’t get heard, and even if each megachurch meets the goal, thousands of people will starve because typical churches can’t meet the standard set by a few extraordinarily large churches.  

    ***

    Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church claims to have 20,000 people attending weekly, according to Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddleback_Church

    That means that to meet the $50,000 standard, each member only needs to give about an extra $2.50 per year, or $0.04 per week. 

    So I can easily see Rick Warren stepping up and saying “$50,000 to feed the poor each year? No problem!”  And because, as the leader of an extraordinarily large church, he has the implicit power of being a “prominent” pastor and spokesperson for America Christianity, a task that is impossible ($50,000 from every church, big or small, every year) will get measured as easy, just because it is small change to his church.  

    ***

    Focusing on $50,000 per church, per year, feeds the political power of conservative megachurches, at the expense of the starving poor and the typical congregation.

  • AnonymousSam

    Heck, I had about that much from a community college. I can readily believe going into the hundreds of thousands in debt when I look at a single class costing nearly $800 just for the books. A person has to live and take these classes too, so which is going to get paid first — food and rent, or loans?

    And then the economy collapses, and paying for food and rent is impossible, let alone loans…

  • Michael Pullmann

    No, she was just accusing them of sitting on their butts and waiting for opportunity to drop into their laps.

  • Jessica_R

    I really should ignore you, but yes, she was calling young people with student loan debt entitled and lazy.

    Her exact quote, “I went through school, I worked my way through, it took me seven years, I never borrowed a dime of money. He borrowed a little bit because we both were totally on our own when we went to college, totally. [...] I have very little tolerance for people who tell me that they graduate with $200,000 of debt or even $80,000 of debt because there’s no reason for that. We live in an opportunity society and people are forgetting that. I remind folks all the time that the Declaration of Independence says “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” You don’t have it dumped in your lap.”

    (link to her saying that here, http://thinkprogress.org/education/2012/04/13/464154/foxx-tolerance-student-loans/ )

    She is a terrible, oblivious clod ignoring her privilege, her circumstances, how much less expensive it was to go to college in her day, and today’s miserable job market to say that students struggling under loan debt are lazy whinners. There’s no other way to parse that.

  • Beroli

    No, the point is she wasn’t calling young people with student loan debt entitled and lazy.  The president misquoted her.

    Dear me. I was wrong. Your reaction to President Obama saying “graduate with debt” rather than “graduate with $200,000 of debt or even $80,000 of debt” isn’t to spin wildly to defend President Obama at all, it’s to inflate a small misquote which doesn’t meaningfully change the substance of the quote into a huge distortion.Why the difference, for one so dedicated to making sure no public speaker is held responsible for what he says? I am scratching my head in utter mystification, for I cannot imagine what the answer would be.

  • aunursa

    Federal Reserve Bank of New York: Grading Student Loans
    Institute for College Access and Success: Student Debt and the Class of 2010

  • Kubricks_Rube

    The president misquoted her.

    I’ll give you that.

    Given the current national discussion on student loan debt, however, it still sounds to me like Foxx, in an attempt to downplay a real issue, is saying “all these people going around complaining about having lots of student debt, they need to go get a job and stop asking for handouts, or they shouldn’t have taken all those loans in the first place.” Especially because she starts by saying that she didn’t borrow any money, she worked her way through school. Granted, I don’t know what question this quote was answering, so I may be wrong. But you’re right, even if we disagree on exactly what she meant or was implying, the President- while making a wholly valid point overall- implied she was talking about any debt, not just a lot of debt. Fair enough.

  • aunursa

    I can’t believe you guys are defending President Obama on this. Of course it changes the substance of the quote.  Even the FactCheck website says it does:

    “President Obama misrepresented the position of Republican Rep. Virginia Foxx on college debt…  Obama cut out a key part of her statement, changing the meaning of what she actually said… Obama twisted Foxx’s words by omitting a crucial part of her quote, making it sound as though she was saying any amount of student loan debt is a sign of laziness. That is not accurate.”

  • Worthless Beast

    Don’t think I don’t complain about it. 

    When the only place you can afford to live is the house your parents paid off that they let you live in for free after they moved (with your abusive brother who threatens you all the time because Mom and Dad want him to pay a very modest rent out of his Disability and don’t make you pay anything because you can’t find work), and all you’ve got is a beat up truck that breaks down and needs repair work you can’t afford all the damn time,… and while you have a little garden, you can’t live on it (again, shared with the brother who makes sure he muscles the lion’s share of everything), and even that jacks up your water bill because you live in the damn desert… 

    …Psychotic relative, some houses belonging to “quiet neighbors” I suspected of being meth-labs AND a domestic-dispute murder next door and I *still* considered living there safer than living in downtown Phoenix.

    Breathe, breathe now…

    My only escape from that was the guy I fell in love with on the Internet. He whisked me to the magical land of Pennsylvania and to – more problems. He’s great, the shit the world gives us workwise and government wise isn’t.  I currently live in an area, a town where I can walk to places if I need to, but still need a car because I *work* rural.  I just won a Disability** case, but haven’t seen my funds yet and *want* to work insomuch as I am allowed to.   I *wish* the local bus had service to the farm, that would have saved me a lot of headache when transportation was tight.

    **That’s a whole other ball of wax, too. My brother and I have the same “teh crazy” and he got his case through after a year – I took six years and almost had my law firm drop it on me. I had to *fight.* I wonder if it’s because I’ve *tried* to work while my brother kind of never wanted to, or becuase he’s been to prison and I haven’t. *Shrug.*  

  • JustoneK

    y’all, aunursa’s quoting factcheck.org – thread over

  • Beroli

     aunursa…

    All right. Just because there are more people here than the two of us. Looking at the totality of the President’s speech, he said that she said she had no patience for people who graduate with debt, when what she said was that she had no patience for people who graduate with big debt. That is not an accurate quote.

    The full text of what she said makes it unambiguous that she’s an absolutely horrible person, of course. And for you to be screaming about President Obama’s misquoting her, rather than making excuses and saying “I’m trying to understand what he meant…I wouldn’t advise him to use those words,” is still hilarious.

  • Lunch Meat

    According to one study, 94% of student debtors owe $75,000 or less, and the average debt burden is about $25,000. Foxx was not referring to all students who take out student loans to pay for their education, but rather those students who amass an exceptionally high amount of student loans.

    Okay, so, let’s pretend that there really is “no reason” why someone would need >$80,000 in student loans. Why is she complaining about the 6% of people who are lazy and entitled and ignoring the rest of us who took out loans legitimately and legitimately can’t pay for them? My husband has $5000 in loans. His minimum payment for a ten-year repayment is only about $60/month. But if we didn’t have jobs, we couldn’t afford even that. Deferment programs usually continue to apply interest and keep you in debt longer. So why isn’t Rep. Foxx addressing our problems? If only 6% of people have an exceptional amount of student loan debt, why is she making it sound like they are the only people complaining about student loan debt?

  • aunursa

    I understand now:  Fake, but accurate.

  • http://twitter.com/FearlessSon FearlessSon

    Wow. So, in essence, AZ *encourages* poor people to live in exurban areas (where there are the least services and gas prices are going to hit them the hardest). No wonder we have problems coming up with a remotely sensible transportation policy in this country.

    I spent a week in Tucson a few months ago on business.  If that place is indicitive of the rest of the state, then no wonder.  There was absolutely no public transportation options there, and the population density was so low that one has to drive for the better part of an hour just to get across town.  In a place like that, a car is essential because without one a person has no other transportation options and almost certainly has no oppertunities for shopping and employment within walking distance. 

  • Lori

     

    Food stamp rules, like unemployment rules, differ by state, even though
    the funds are federal. When both my husband and I were unemployed two
    years ago, we were on foodstamps. WA State only asked us to verify
    income, and didn’t look at assets or car ownership.

    In Indiana they look at income and some kinds of assets. Having a car doesn’t disqualify you, but having purchased one very recently can. Living with someone who has income doesn’t disqualify you. Married couples or parents with minor children are evaluated as a unit, but if you’re single only your income counts even if you share living space with someone. You have to swear that you keep your food separate, but that’s it.

  • LMM22

    There was absolutely no public transportation options there, and the population density was so low that one has to drive for the better part of an hour just to get across town.  In a place like that, a car is essential because without one a person has no other transportation options and almost certainly has no oppertunities for shopping and employment within walking distance.

    It’s a chicken and egg situation, of course. If the city weren’t so car-centric, fewer people would need cars … but as it stands, the need for cars leads to a need for car-based infrastructure (major arteries, large parking lots, etc.), which means that everyone has a car….

    … which, in turn, means we can’t have a reasonable transportation policy, because that would penalize the poor who, in most places, rely on cars to get to work.

    Is it too late to start hanging up posters which read “If you ride alone, you ride with bin Laden”?

  • Lori

    Virginia Foxx is obviously a terrible person (her comments on student loans being far from the first time she’s demonstrated that) and if you look at the her entire quote she was obviously being nasty to more than just the top 6% of student debt holders. Part of the problem with her statement is that Foxx is in her late 60s.  The fact that she thinks that the experience she & her husband had 40-some years ago is a reasonable standard by which to judge students today is ridiculous. She’s either very, very stupid or seriously oblivious or both. In any case she really should have kept her mouth shut. “Now, can you imagine saying something like that?”, indeed. 

  • Monala

     

    The fact that she thinks that the experience she & her husband had
    40-some years ago is a reasonable standard by which to judge students
    today is ridiculous.

    I just want to echo this, because I think this is the crux of the problem with her statements.  I know I can’t even judge students today by my college experience, and I graduated in the late ’80s and went to graduate school in the late ’90s. A four-year degree at my college costs 4x as much as it did when I was a student, while real wages for most Americans have declined since then. It’s not comparable.

  • seniorcit

    I once belonged to a church which wouldn’t participate in the local food bank because……well because it was secular and liberal.  So we ran our own food pantry.  You wouldn’t believe some of the strange and outdated stuff that people donated.

  • JustoneK

    Boxes of croutons and jarred capers?

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