The Sin of Shutting Down USAID

The Sin of Shutting Down USAID

According to reliable news reports, Elon Musk has called USAID (United States Agency for International Development) a “tremendous fraud” and a barrel of worms. I know people who work for USAID and it is perhaps America’s greatest agency, saving millions of people, including children, from starvation in places like Sudan and Haiti.

So far as I can discover, no evidence has emerged to support Musk’s (and others’) claims about USAID.

So why is this happening? I can only guess that this is another step, or giant leap, of Social Darwinism. I have warned about the role of Social Darwinism in especially the American “Right” for about a decade now. I am convinced that this is the underlying philosophy that nobody wants to admit or even talk about, but is driving so much of the “Right” in America.

What is Social Darwinism? It is the idea that the poor should not be helped because helping the poor to survive corrupts the gene pool.

When I was a graduate student at Rice University, I saw many students carrying around books by Ayn Rand. I read some myself—in high school. I was appalled by her philosophy which was called “objectivism” and amounted to a version of Social Darwinism.

You cannot be a Christian and embrace Social Darwinism, whether explicitly or implicitly by your attitudes and actions. The great irony is that many conservative American Christians who strongly opposed biological Darwinism (“natural selection”) embrace Social Darwinism. They rarely know that, but their attitudes towards the poor the world over, not necessarily “at home,” reveal it.

I have had face-to-face conversations with church leaders, elders, deacons, others, who espouse Social Darwinism without knowing to call their philosophy that. One elder opposed our church having a food pantry for the poor. He said that if we give food to the poor, including poor children, which I did, from the food pantry, it would only make them dependent. His personal attitude toward the poor was negative; he preferred for them to die rather than be given help.

Most Social Darwinists are not open about it and many are inconsistent with it. I do not know if Elon Musk is a Social Darwinist, but shutting down USAID, rather than reforming it, if it needs reforming, is evidence that he may be.

Shutting down USAID rather than reforming it, if it needs reforming, is a sin. Those who support it sin.

Thousands upon thousands of children depend on USAID for survival. Some have probably already died of starvation and disease as the resources begin to dry up.

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