Systemic Poverty Needs Systemic Solutions: A Response to Religious Conservatives

[0:00] This is Glass City Humanist, a show about humanism, humanist values, by a humanist. Here is your host, Douglas Berger. A local court recently ruled that Ohio’s voucher scam is unconstitutional. And we also get an update on a suit filed by LifeWise Academy that would let them ignore labor laws. And finally, we will all be surprised to learn that our elected lawmakers have been learning in Bible studies that God doesn’t want our government to help the poor. Glass City Humanist is an outreach project of the secular humanists of Western Lake Erie, building community through compassion and reason for a better tomorrow.

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[0:59] Okay, I just wanted to take a moment or two to do a couple of quick news hits, as it were. The first one is that a Franklin County court here in Ohio ruled that the voucher program that the Christian Nationalists in the state legislature instituted, called EdChoice, they ruled that it was unconstitutional. and all.

[1:28] And not for the reasons that you think. It wasn’t ruled unconstitutional because of church and state issues.

[1:36] The state of Ohio in its state constitution says that the state shall fund a common school for everyone. So they’re required by the Ohio constitution to fund public schools. And the Ed Choice Voucher Program was actually taking money from funds that should go to a public school and distributing them to private schools. And that was what the what the lawsuit was about. It was about violating the Ohio Constitution.

[2:10] And they got a judge, Judge Diazza Page in Franklin County Common Police Court, issued a 47 page decision on on June 24th. That agreed with the public schools that had sued the state about this. And here’s a comment from the judge’s decision. It says, The plaintiffs submit that the Ed Choice program unconstitutionally creates a second system of uncommon private schools in violation of Article 4, Section 2 of the Ohio Constitution, wrote Page. Defendants argue that ed choice is not unconstitutional because the state has always funded private schools. Though this may be true, the state may not fund private schools at the expense of public schools or in a manner that undermines its obligation to public education.

[3:08] And so that was a very good decision because that’s exactly how I’ve always imagined that this voucher program operates is it takes money from public schools that should be going to public schools. If they want to create a fund to fund private schools that are separate from public school funds, great. But they haven’t been doing that, and they’ve been doing more so recently up until this point. Almost a billion dollars has been shunted over to private schools. And in the proposed state budget that’s still being discussed this week, they want to cut $500 million from public schools. Thank you. So I think that’s wrong. And in this case, the court agreed that the Ohio’s voucher program was unconstitutional.

[4:04] Now, we know that the Christian nationalists and the other conservatives are going to fight this tooth and nail. So this was just the first round. And that’s what a member of the Vouchers Hurt Ohio lawsuit said in a statement. It says, we’ve always known that the Vouchers Hurt Ohio lawsuit will be a match of three rounds, and today we won round one, said Dan Heintz, a member of the Cleveland Heights University Board of Education. That district was one of the first to join Vouchers Hurt Ohio and is among the lead plaintiffs in the lawsuit.

[4:41] So the next step is the state’s going to appeal, obviously, to the 10th District Court of Appeals. Then it goes to the Ohio Supreme Court.

[4:52] And yes, the Ohio Supreme Court is dominated by Republicans, but the lawsuit people are not worried about the high court tossing the case because it should be pretty obvious what the language in the Constitution says. And it is. And so that’s a good thing. And then the other bit that I wanted to mention, too, that’s developing a developing story is, you know, I’ve consistently talked about LifeWise Academy, and that is the Christian nationalist group that takes children out of public school to take them to Bible class and how that inherent work disrupts the public school day and should be allowed. But, of course, here in Ohio, they passed a law that mandates it, et cetera, et cetera. Well, it seems that, like most employers, life-wise, has an issue with an employee that blew the whistle on them for, I think it was labor shenanigans. Uh, according to the employee.

[6:07] Uh, she was asked to put down times, work times that she did not work and, and some other shenanigans, some other labor shenanigans in a program in, uh, in the, I believe it’s the Eaton, uh, school district in, in Ohio.

[6:25] And she refused to do it and they fired her.

[6:30] For not doing what they wanted her to do. So she filed a complaint with the Equal Opportunities Commission here in Ohio that they unfairly fired her. So what LifeWise has done is they’ve filed a court case in the Ohio Supreme Court where they want to be able to declare that they could give this woman a ministerial exemption to the labor laws that supposedly this woman says that they violated.

[7:09] And what this means is, and this is part of the privilege for religions, well, mostly Christian religions in this country, is a lot of the discrimination laws don’t apply to churches. They don’t apply to priests. They don’t apply to preachers or people that work for them. It’s called the ministerial ministry exemption. I’m butchering that name. I am not good at that. But what that means is that if your primary job is to minister to people, then basic discrimination laws and labor laws don’t apply to you. The state cannot force those laws to apply to you because of separation of church and state. And so LifeWise is going to the Ohio Supreme Court to ask them to issue a declaratory judgment that this woman could be exempt from those laws and it would make her complaint with the EEOC go away. The problem is that that exemption only applies to religious groups, official religious groups, ones that have filed the proper paperwork. You know, just because you read the Bible doesn’t mean that you’re a religious group.

[8:32] You actually, when you file with the IRS as a 5013C charity, you have to say what your mission is. And if your mission is religion, you have to state that that is what it is. If you want to be a church, you have to indicate that you want to be a church for tax purposes. And then also you have to do that when you file to incorporate in the state of Ohio. You have to indicate your mission. And in none of the paperwork that I’ve looked at has life-wise indicated anything about religion. They don’t even mention religion. Yes, they are evolved from a ministry called Stand for Truth. But when they issued their incorporation, when they updated their incorporation papers, their mission never mentions religion.

[9:28] And the other thing, too, is they file tax forms 990s. Those are what charities file every year, 990s. They’ve filed them every year. Churches aren’t required. Religious groups are not required to file 990s. That’s part of the religious privilege for having a tax exemption. If you’re a church or religious group, you don’t have to file tax forms about it. So basically life wise wants the benefits of a church without actually having to declare that they are a church and if they declare that they are a church then that could cause some issues down the line when they’re working with public schools if they become officially a church or recognized as a religious organization and that’s going to cause some extra steps that they have to go through, that they normally wouldn’t have to go through if they were, as they are now, declared an educational program. Because that’s what they say. They say that they’re about character building and education. It doesn’t mention the Bible. It doesn’t mention religion or anything. Yes, they are a religious group, but they have not officially declared that they’re a religious group in government paperwork that’s required for them to operate legally in the United States.

[10:54] And so it’s going to be interesting how this case turns out.

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[11:07] Yeah, that story about the LifeWise lawsuit was a developing story. Since I recorded that segment, there was an update in the case. I had reached out to the American Humanist Association, which is our parent organization. We’re a chapter of the AHA. And they have a new legal director. And it’s Amitai Heller. I’m bad. I’m telling you, I’m bad at pronouncing names. And basically what I did was I reached out to him, and I wanted to talk to him about possibly filing a friend of the court brief on that case, should it come to the court. Pointing out that LifeWise is not a religious organization, and they shouldn’t be allowed to use that exemption for ministry work in order to violate labor laws.

[12:11] And so he went through some of the process. Basically, the case is filed. Then the state has to respond. Then the state could drop the equal opportunity complaint and close the case, or they could respond to it and say, you know, we think that LifeWise is wrong, and then they would schedule a date to hear it. And at that point, then, we would figure out how to do that, and he offered technical assistance, and I appreciate that.

[12:47] However, it looks like it’s not going to be needed because on July the 1st, it came out that they, the state did respond to the lawsuit and they basically had the person who complained, The woman, the former employee of LifeWise that complained, withdrew her complaint from the Equal Opportunity Agency and was given a letter to permission to sue. So she’s I guess she’s probably going to go through the regular court process and sue for damages. And so she had to withdraw her complaint. And so the state responded to LifeWise lawsuit that the case was now moot and that they asked for the court to dismiss it for that reason because the whole impetus, the whole reason for the suit was this woman’s complaint and since that complaint is no longer in existence, then why have a case?

[13:53] Now, Mr. Heller at the AHA did tell me that there was a small possibility that even though the state is asking it to be dismissed because it’s moot, it is possible that the court could still take it up. Very small, very slight, especially for what they’re asking. But, you know, we never know. But we’ll keep an eye out for it. But what was interesting is in the state’s response, they didn’t respond to the point about having the exception, exemption. They thought that that was a valid question, that they didn’t think LifeWise qualified as well.

[14:34] Because one of the complaints that LifeWise made in their lawsuit was saying that the Equal Opportunity Commission didn’t have jurisdiction because of that. And they said, well, no, you can’t say that. It has to, you know, the EEOC determines if they have jurisdiction. And they said that they did. So it would have been interesting to see if that did go to court. But I’ll be keeping an eye out for it. I do want to thank, again, Mr. Heller at the AHA. Um, he’s just got hired in within the last few weeks and they have a very small legal office. It’s him and a part-time, uh, assistant. So they’re, they’re, they’re just ramping things up to where they’re going to start, uh, being able to assist people who want to report violations of the first amendment or, or anything else that’s church state related. Um, I heard him speak virtually during the AHA conference, and he was talking about that he’s worked a lot with civil rights issues. Uh, he was helping in Louisiana for, uh, children with disability issues, making sure that they got the services and, and benefits that they were due them through the state. So I’m very confident that he knows what he’s doing.

[15:56] And he was very interested in what I had to say. And there was another issue that we talked about. I think I’ve mentioned it before about LifeWise, where the state unilaterally decided to reimburse schools for school lunches that LifeWise students would take to their Bible class. And that is contrary to USDA regulations, the federal government that gives the state money to reimburse for school lunches. And so he was very interested in that question. So we’ll see how that turns out. He’s going to do some research on that and see what the issues are. But I just wanted to give an update on that LifeWise lawsuit.

[16:41] Again, it’s possibly going to go away because it’s moot, but there’s a slight chance that the state Supreme Court could possibly still take it up.

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[17:00] For more information about the topics in this episode, including links used, please visit the episode page at glasscityhumanist.show.

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[17:21] If you are a regular listener to this podcast, and if you are, thank you very much, or if you’re kind of familiar with a passing familiarity with the content that I do here, you know that I’ve been talking about Christian nationalism and the violations of separation of church and state that we see going on all the time. And one of the things that I am very much opposed to is enacting public policy and laws based on the Bible or religious thinking. I’m always the one that public policy and laws should be based on rational data, rational reasons for doing so, where you are hurting the least amount of people and helping the most amount of people. I don’t believe in punishing people who are struggling. Unfortunately, the U.S. Congress, which has dominated, or at least a majority of Republicans.

[18:29] Passed President Trump’s tax cuts, which in order to pay for them, They are cutting Medicaid and food stamps and environmental stuff and a whole host of other social justice priorities they are cutting in order to give people with the least amount to lose tax cuts.

[18:56] Now, I don’t need to go into an economic discussion about this.

[19:01] There’s been studies done over the last 50 years that show that no tax cut bill passed in Congress has ever generated jobs or revenue. There is no trickle down when you start cutting the social safety net. In fact, you just make people worse off, which means they are more of a burden on society. So I’m not going to talk about the economics of it because that’s just pretty obvious. But what I am going to do is I want to talk to you about a person who has the ear of many top Republicans in the Congress and in the White House. His name is Pastor Ralph Drollinger. He is the founder and leader of Capital Ministries, C-A-P-I-T-O-L. So it’s like the U.S. Capitol. And what he provides, the service that he provides, are Bible study classes for Congress people, senators.

[20:11] Cabinet members, agency heads. And he performs them regularly. And so he did a Bible study where basically the title of the study guide was God’s Design for a Societal Safety Net.

[20:34] And Pastor Drollinger took it upon himself to teach to the senators, because what I’m going to talk about is the Bible class that he gave for senators, that God opposes government helping the poor.

[20:54] And so I know some of my more liberal people, liberal Christians, people with more liberal religious beliefs will be gobsmacked about that. And so basically what it is, is there’s a study guide called God’s Design for a Societal Safety Net. And in it, he says, in the study, the rich and the poor, I touched on God’s design for a societal safety net as it pertains to how to best help the poor. In doing so, under the point in the outline, I reference this study and what follows, which is more biblically in-depth treatment of the subject. And then he goes on to suggest several, well, actually the count is seven, seven New Testament passages regarding the construction of a societal safety net. And I’m sure you’ll be surprised to know that government is not involved in any of this.

[21:56] And so he just starts spouting out. Now, the first thing I want, you know, I’m reading this study guide. I am an atheist.

[22:04] I’ve had some Bible, not training, but, you know, I used to be religious. I used to go to church. I used to read the Bible. I don’t do any of that now. But I think I still have more of an idea about the Bible than this guy does, and he’s a pastor. because they’re using it to manipulate the government. And when you use the religion to manipulate the government, you’re violating the separation of church and state. And especially you’re being a hypocrite because you’re lying about it.

[22:36] So he starts out in the very beginning, he says, a caveat is in order before plunging into the following passages that serve to inform us regarding the mind of God on this matter. It is important to approach this discussion only through the lens of the New Testament, because God has clearly separated the institution of civil government from any and all sacerdotal responsibilities in the time in which we live, per the clear instruction of Jesus in Matthew 22, 21. Such was not the case with the Old Testament. This is a critical distinction to make since many liberal theologians who are pro-government entitlement programs use the Old Testament as the proof text. Well, Pastor Dollinger is wrong, according to a consensus of biblical scholars. And so, basically, he states that the New Testament doesn’t require government to help the poor, and the Old Testament does, but they can be ignored.

[23:39] And like I said, the biblical consensus is that neither point is true. The Bible does call for helping the poor and also calls to obedience to the government, which Reverend Pastor Dollinger kind of oversteps.

[24:00] And so what is the pastor’s agenda? Well, basically, it’s the old standby conservative politicians look that the government should not be helping the poor. And they have a herical order of God’s societal safety net. Number one, the meeting of one’s own needs. That means personal responsibility. Number two, the institution of the family. That means if you need help, your family should help you. Number three, the institution of marriage, which means that you should be married and your spouse will help you. And then finally, the catch-all at the end, if all those fall through, is the church. And this is just standard conservative political rhetoric that you should help yourself. You shouldn’t be dependent on the government. The government shouldn’t help you. Your family should help you. And then if not, then the church.

[25:10] And then the problem with that is that the reason why we have many of our societal safety nets, for example, Social Security, is because there was not any infrastructure to help people who were struggling before the 1930s. Because you were expected to help yourself or have your family help you, or if not, then the church or some other charity. And that was breaking down. One of the impetuses of creating Social Security back in the 1930s was how bad the Depression was for elderly people who had no families. They were basically living in shack. They weren’t able to work. They might have had disabilities, health issues. And many of them died because they had no help.

[26:09] And people thought, you know, we should use some tax dollars and put together a program and at least give these people money to basically live so that they can be on their own. And we know that they’re going to get healthy, they’re going to take care of their health, and they’re going to be able to eat and hopefully live in a decent place. The same with Medicare. That’s why Medicare was created, so that people, particularly elderly people and the disabled, could get help that wasn’t provided for in the community.

[26:47] You know, the community has limited resources. Okay. OK, think of it. This is how I explain it to some people sometimes is that think of the federal government as, let’s say, Kroger’s and think of your community as mom and pop store.

[27:09] Now, the reason why some place like Kroger or Walmart or any of those other large grocery stores can provide the selection that they do for the price that they do is because they’re able to purchase in bulk. They have the resources to do that. Mom and Pop store has trouble competing against some place like Kroger because they’re not able to get those economies of scale is what they call it. So what the federal government does is in providing the social safety net is it’s an economy of scale so that you can spend a few billion dollars and help hundreds of millions, you know, hundreds of people, millions of people. I know in Ohio, if the Medicaid cuts take place, roughly 500,000 people probably will lose their health insurance. and that is to give Jeff Bezos of Amazon a tax cut. You know, he’s one of the richest men in the world and he needs a tax cut when he hasn’t been paying his fair share of taxes anyway.

[28:19] So that’s why it’s better for the government to provide charity than it is for to depend on the community because of that economy of scale. You know, I know that they don’t do it today, but when I was a kid, we were on public assistance. My family’s on public assistance. And one of the things that the government provided was government cheese.

[28:47] And they also provided government peanut butter and honey. I think honey was another one and dried milk. And basically these were commodities that the government purchased from farmers to subsidize the farmers because their prices were tanking at the time. And they would buy up this product to raise the prices and give the farmers a better income. Then they would transfer these commodities to states and local food banks and welfare offices to distribute to people.

[29:25] So we would show up, I think, when I was a kid, we used to go to the Salvation Army in Findlay, and have to stand in line, and we had to prove that we were poor. We had to show how much we were making, or I think they even had, some people had a card. And then they would give us a block of cheese, five pounds of cheese, and dried milk and honey and anything else that they had. And they would do this for everybody. Now, that’s the economy of scale. A local community could not do that. If you check some of these churches where they have food banks, this is food that’s being donated. That means their parishioners are buying it, and then they’re taking it and donating it to the church. So they’re limited. There’s only a limited number of parishioners that could do that. A federal government could supply that food bank with a semi-truck. Anyway, I kind of went off on a little tangent there, but what I was trying to do was talk about this Pastor Dollinger in D.C., and he does this thing.

[30:37] Well, this guy on Substack, his name is Jonathan Larson, did a whole article about it. I encourage you, I’ve got the link to it in the show notes. And the title for his article is Tuesday’s Senate Bible Lesson, God Opposes Government Helping the Poor. And it details this study guide. You can download it. And then he also goes and counters a lot of the stuff that this guy says. And a lot of it is stuff that’s been refuted for years.

[31:15] The main thing where he talked about that Drollinger’s proof that God created man to work, Drollinger writes in his June 27th guide, quote, The biblical pattern is for a person to work hard. Genesis 2.15 states the concept that hard work has always been his intent for those whom he created in his image. Then the Lord took the man and put him into the Garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it. This verse shares God’s original design for man. God wants him to be responsible for cultivating and keeping or maintaining the earth. Now, you could take that and say, interpret it to mean for environmental support. To taking care of environmental concerns. But in a video earlier this month, Drollinger said that when it’s environmental concerns, then it’s no longer humanity’s job. Like God’s really not in charge of the environment and we have to do that for him. So basically, Jonathan Larson points out how hypocritical these religious extremists can be is they cherry pick Bible verses that prove their point. Then when you say, well, if you interpret it this way, it means this, then they say, no, that’s not true. They just dismiss it.

[32:38] So what I wanted to do is I wanted to play a clip. This isn’t from this study thing, but it is Drollinger talking about what he teaches these political people. It says it’s from the Right Wing Watch from back in March. says, Pastor Ralph Drollinger is leading right-wing Bible studies on Capitol Hill. And in this clip, he talks about, I think it’s four categories of the devil, I think he’s talking about, that he’s railing against when he does these Bible studies. And I want you to take particular note of the first category that he mentions. So here’s the clip. Oh, and I should also inform you that it may include dehumanizing rhetoric, calls for discrimination or violence, misinformation, or other harmful language.

[33:33] It’s basically bigoted language, and it is not the Glass City Humanist. It is not our words. It is Pastor Ralph Drolinger, and I have a link to the video in the show notes. But I just want to warn you, you might want to skip over if you don’t want to hear him talking, because this is just wild. And then we’ll come back. I’ll be teaching this study to the Senate members on Tuesday morning. have about 15 Senate members in our Bible study. And then on Wednesday morning, I’ll be teaching it to the White House cabinet. Our first study back, we had 14 cabinet members and 10 different governors zooming in for that Bible study. And then on Thursday morning, I teach the House member Bible study. So this is what they can download is, what are the schemes of the devil? And I can think of four broad categories. One of the schemes of the devil is, in a broad sense, under the category one of four of secular humanism. And that would include like the battle for same-sex marriage, homosexuality, gender neutrality, abortion, the women’s lib movement, the new woke morality. These are all secular humanistic, I’ll say cauterized consciences approach to what’s right and wrong in culture, which goes against what we know from Romans one in our own, uh.

[35:01] Unaffected conscience that God gives us. And then the second category would be false religions. Another scheme of the devil is not just secular humanism, but false religions, like a work-based Christianity, where certain, we’ll call them churches, quote-unquote.

[35:19] Teach that it’s not just by faith alone and Christ alone, by his grace alone, you have to add your own personal works in order to be saved. Well, once you get into that, you’re running cross-grain to what Paul said to the church at Galatia, which was affected by the Judaizers who were preaching Christ plus Old Testament Ten Commandments type stuff in order to be saved. And then Paul reasons in Galatians that the law has only been a tutor from the start to lead us to Christ. It shows us our bankruptcy. It was never intended to save us. Another false religion would be Islam, where you’ve got to give your life for God’s approval, whether biblical Christianity is where God gives his life to you.

[36:05] Islam’s just the opposite, and it’s a rank religion that spreads itself by the sword. And then there’s liberal Christianity, which isn’t Christianity whatsoever, but it’s the social gospelers who say, and they wear the same name on their shirt sleeve, this is one of Satan’s schemes. But people who hold to a social gospel, theological liberalism are not Christians whatsoever, but they’ll come across like they are. But when you start examining their bibliology or any other doctrine of scripture, you can see that it’s contrary to what the Bible teaches. And then the third major category would be political ideologies. And we’ve already talked a little about that. There’s political parties that will tie themselves to certain ideologies that are not.

[36:54] Tethered to scripture. And so that’s the scheme of the devil is to empower political parties to.

[37:03] Promulgate political thought or political solutions that are contrary to scripture, which lead a culture to bankruptcy. So if you didn’t skip over it, or maybe if you did skip over what he was talking about, as he notes, in the first category of the devil, it’s secular humanism. And he talks about because we support same-sex marriage. He says homosexual rights. Well, it’s LGBT rights, gender identity, and woke stuff. And so, and that’s old. That’s like from the 80s. This guy went to Bible school in the 80s. He played professional basketball, believe it or not, for one season in 1980, and then he went to Bible school.

[37:58] So he’s learning this 1980s version of secular humanism. I mean, we support all that stuff, but to call us out as being evil and work of the devil, that is so 1980s.

[38:13] Now, the other thing I wanted to point out about this is this Capitol Ministries just isn’t in D.C. Of course not, because a lot of these extremists, they like to percolate through the country and through the world. On their website, they proudly proclaim that they have Bible studies in almost all of the state capitals in the United States. And I did look it up, and yes, they do have one in Ohio, down in Columbus. It’s run by two pastors, and basically they get free reign into the statehouse to have these Bible studies. Yeah, the pastors that are leading the Bible studies in Ohio is Pastor Brian Hanson and Pastor Brian Solomon. Now, the interesting thing is this was founded, the ministry in Columbus was founded in 2016.

[39:15] And our good buddy, the Reverend Gary Click, wrote a very nice thank you to them that they feature on their website. And so he says, even though I’m a pastor, you know, sometimes I like to be fed even though I should be feeding other people, whatever that means. I don’t know whether, I don’t, I, yeah, that’s how these people talk. But the interesting note too, is they had a thing from back in May. Brian Solomon had a brain bleed and he ended up in the hospital and they had to perform a surgery on him. But of course, they kind of sugarcoat that part of it. And they talk about how everybody prayed for him and that worked.

[40:06] So it’s good. You know, I don’t like to see people get hurt, but it’s just interesting that that happened to him. And so, like I said, this capital ministry, they’re pretty much in every state except for Michigan. Michigan hasn’t had one yet. Massachusetts doesn’t. New Jersey doesn’t. And ironically, Kentucky or Tennessee does not. Huh. And we know why Utah doesn’t, because that’s run by the Mormons.

[40:37] But, yeah, it’s just interesting that Kentucky and Tennessee does not have one. Huh. I wonder what that’s about.

[40:43] Anyway, so I just wanted to talk about this and explain how this works, how these religious extremists work, and how they misinform and try to justify hurting people, especially struggling people that need the help. Because just think of it. who decides if somebody is lazy and won’t work so they shouldn’t eat? Because that’s one of the Bible quotes that they say. The biblical people that I read that talked about it said that it could mean the idle rich because they don’t work. And that’s how that works. But most of these pastors, they just turn it around and ignore that interpretation. And that’s all it is. The Bible is always open to interpretation. It was written by people over a millennia or a couple of millennias in different languages and different agendas and things like that. So they claim it’s the word of God until you interpret it the way they don’t like it, and then they say that you are getting it wrong. So I just wanted to point that out and keep an eye out for this Capital Ministries, and I’ll keep an eye out for it, too. Thank you for listening.

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[42:09] For more information about the topics in this episode, including links used, please visit the episode page at glasscityhumanist.show.

[42:18] Music. . Glass City Humanist is hosted, written, and produced by Douglas Berger, and he’s solely responsible for the content.

[42:24] Show Lee can be reached at humanistswle.org.

[42:42] Music.