Christian Conservatives and Charity, Part 1

I have been listening to someone on another forum who appreciates fiscal conservatism, but would discard social conservatism. That would be a grave error. Liberalism is like a cell, locking us in a small room and telling us that within that small room we may do as we please. Conservatism is setting us free... but a free man must have constraints on his behavior, or it is an act of unkindness to give him his liberty. Social conservatism is made up of those restraints, while fiscal conservatism is our freedom.

Conservatives Christians have been instructed by God Himself to see that their society cares for the poor. While liberals, even liberal Christians, would seek government seizure and redistribution towards this end, Conservative Christians consider the myriads of Bible passages confirming the importance of owning your own property and being personally responsible for it's use. Even slaves in the Old Testament could own their own property, and even married women, under the guidelines of submission, were encouraged to own and profit from their personal holdings apart from their husbands.

This theme of voluntary generosity is carried into the New Testament, in which we find that the sin of Ananias and Sapphire was not merely greed, but lying to put on a false show of piety. The words I find telling in this passage, found at the end of Acts chapter 4 and the beginning of Acts chapter 5, is the following explanation: "Before you sold the land, was it not your own? And when you had sold it, was the money not in your control?" Peter was making it clear that the 'socialism' shown by the early Christians was entirely voluntary. I have mostly abandoned for now my effort to get all the way through the Koran, but as an interesting contrast, the beginning parts of the Koran insist that mandatory charity is one of the necessities to earn paradise.

Why is charity urged, but not detailed and coerced, in the Bible? Christianity is a bit more complicated than most world religions. Rather than being a simple to-do list, it is about transformation into a certain kind of person. Instead of constantly going to a 'well' to draw out virtues of the soul, we are to be a 'spring of water' out of which these virtues naturally bubble out and overflow. Telling us exactly what we must give and why would do us little good if we are ever to be mature Christians seeking Jesus of our own accord. That is why the kind of control shown by a socialistic government is absent from the Bible, leaving us only with the command to become a generous people, and the sense that if we do so, proper care of the poor will naturally follow.