I think Christian conservatives are charitable, they give to their church. That's charitable, isn't it?

They're demonstrating loyalty to their tribe.

I am starting to think that just about every major negative in the human psyche finds its roots in old primate instincts: tribal loyalty, schadenfreude, getting angrystupid when encountering obstacles, and so on. Useful on the savanna two million years ago, a little less so today.

It's been my experience that the vast majority of donations to churches never fund the feeding of the hungry or care of the sick or what have you.

Most of the money donated to churches goes towards "Gods work" which can be anything from resurfacing the church parking lot to sending the Sunday school kids to a creationist museum to buying crates of little bibles to give out and "spread the good word."

Also to cover "administrative costs" which can mean keeping the lights turned on or big fat paychecks to the administrators.

On a different scale, my family and I were driving through rural Southwestern MO on one of the fairly major highways. We passed through several flyspeck towns, many of which had dilapidated and vacant houses, yet we could count 5+ different churches in each, all with billboards with "witty" religious slogans that read like a mix between a bad pun book and Rush Limbaugh.

I'm wondering where the money to have that many churches in the middle of nowhere was coming from.

Were they Baptist churches? Baptists seem to always be the biggest believers in "clever" billboards.

I think we saw Baptist, Pentecostal, and 7th Day Adventist, all well-known for "y'all a-goin' to HAY-el when Jeebus REE-turns next week with FAHR for the SAW-domites" fire & brimstone banter.

If there were other denominations, they didn't display their sect's title or they were "normal" Protestant denominations that were just trying to keep up with the crazy so they didn't lose parishioners.

Thankfully he is not interviewing anyone at any point in this video.

I know several christian families who try to help others when they can and are, for the most part, actually trying to follow what Jesus was suppose to be teaching. Sadly, the dumb obnoxious racist and homophobe christians are the louder beasts in the pack.

Ain't it the truth. Take a look at this photo from Billy Graham's 95th birthday party:

http://wp.patheos.com.s3.amazonaws.com/blogs/slacktivist/files /2013/11/Billy.jpg

Sarah Palin? Rupert Murdoch? Donald Trump? Billy doesn't look to be pleased with the company he is forced to keep these days.

I love the Rupert Murdoch is the only one wearing a name tag in that pic. Like he's the special kid at the party who keeps going up to people and introducing himself over and over.

yeah, Billy's birthday crew caused a bit of a stir in his pretty liberal home town: http://www.citizen-times.com/article/20131110/COLUMNISTS09/3111000 65/Boyle-Franklin-Graham-sullying-Billy-s-legacy-

I'm not sure I would say there was a time Christians understood the world was an unjust place, OR that they don't understand it now. I suspect it's always been the way of things that Christians with power tend towards assholery, while Christians without power tend to be truer followers of Christ. And a LOT of American Christians have a lot of power, or at least believe themselves to.

Bob Jones University used to consider it their Christian prerogative to practice discrimination, while MLK Jr stood against racial discrimination and later (the part everyone forgets) against poverty and war in general.

160 years ago you'd find Southern Baptist preachers championing slavery and Northern abolitionist preachers railing against it; John Brown got a bee in his bonnet after a particularly stirring sermon.

You can even go back as far as the Eastern Roman Empire, where monks would condemn aristocratic women for wearing earrings in church that could feed multitudes. (I mean if you sold them; they weren't magic earrings that could create food out of thin air. We need to be extremely clear on this point.)

As Archbishop Hélder Câmara was famous for saying, "when I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist."

@Bort, it seems to me that it's only more recently that Christianity as a whole is swinging back around to actually worrying about poor people and where their former allies in government are steering the nation/world.

I think it was when their old buddies, Fox News and Bill-O, started using the phrase "social justice" as a slur. This was followed by the realization that if social spending was done away with, the wingnuts in gov't somehow thought churches could handle the load. Then, I'm sure, they noticed more and more of their congregants were losing their homes/jobs thanks to various banking, taxation, and overseas employment jobs that favored the wealthy, and that meant less dosh in the collection plates.

Maybe conscience and a heartfelt return to humanitarian principles was at play, but I think the bottom line is what really got the ball rolling on what appears to be a swing away from supporting the assholes who say Jesus wants more tax cuts for the Koch Brothers.

I won't deny that the Religious Right got really bad there for a while, like an infection that nearly killed the patient (who BTW is not out of the woods yet). I just don't know that we can speak of Christianity as a whole, or even American Christianity as a whole. American Catholicism, for example, never quite went "libertarian" the way that fundamentalists typically did; nor did they go anti-science. Anti-abortion and anti-gay, sure, but the Catholics were there first; prior to the 1980s the Catholics were the only bunch that gave a damn about the unborn.

Then there's the matter of generational differences: hating on the gays is a hard sell to the young, even among fundamentalists, and the fundamentalist community is not sure what they can do to hold on to the young.

It's a matter of different tendencies that manifest to different degrees depending on which Christians you're talking to. But yeah, it feels like entitled asshole Christianity is on the downswing right now, and it's still got a lot of downswinging to do before I feel like they're no longer a threat.

The "professional bum" is a largely fictional conservative scapegoat to justify their social darwinist view that poor people are always to blame for their problems and the only thing they deserve is to be shamed into trying harder.

And even if a few welfare queens really do exist, so fucking what? I don't care if some asshole with a trust fund applies for a food stamp card so he can rip the government off for a few hundred dollars a month. That's not even remotely close to the most offensive thing the government spends my tax payments on.

I give without question and without expectation of behavior or reciprocation. I don't do this because Jesus said to, but it's not lost on me that he did.

I have zero problems with welfare. I'm personally below poverty line, so I'm unlikely to give money to street bums. I find it fairly bizarre that it's always the same bums on the street corners on my commute route, though.

Problems that make you unemployable (mental illness, addiction, criminal record, antisocial behavior, etc.) are hard to shake and tend to keep you unemployable.

Every time I hear the "welfare queen" trope as a reason to cut social aid, I think we should probably de-fund all firefighters, since lots of people pull false alarms every day.