Today, Glenn Beck made a rather profound theological analogy to the government bailouts of failed corporate business practices. I thought it was appropriate and rather brilliantly communicated.
He began telling a story about his son last night. His son was misbehaving before bed. Glenn was planning on reading the Grinch before bed, but he simply walked out of the room and told his son that when he wanted to behave, they could read the story. Sometime after his son came out of the room and said that he was ready. Then they rejoiced a bit and read the story. I cannot tell you how often I do this with my three year old. Our motto is that if our boys want to argue about something they cannot do, we simply ignore the tantrum and “let them punish theirself”. We reward good behavior when they choose to be good and act accordingly.
With God, forgiveness often comes after we repent and are driven to our knees in submission to the circumstances into which our sin leads us. Sin clasps us in the shackles that hold us down from being who we should be and who God wants us to be. For our sins, God does not just bail us out and reward us for being sinful, but requires that we get on our knees and repent. Then, no matter how awful we were in the past, that truly repentant heart is ready to be redeemed and the shackles of sin removed.
This is part of human nature. It is also a part of corporations and even nations. In order to be redeemed, you must be driven to your knees sometimes. The savior is not government. The government’s plan is to remove the shackles from the corporations and chain them on to someone else, namely the tax-paying public. It is as if the sins of the corporations are automatically remitted and given over to the workers and to the public to bear. That is not justice and that is not fair. These companies need to be driven to their knees in order for them to be the structures they need to be to make the economy work.
Freedom comes after repentance, and repentance requires you to be driven to your knees like the Prodigal Son, the woman caught in adultery, the tax collector, the centurion, etc. Bailouts reinforce destructive patterns of behavior by rewarding failure and harm that poorly run corporate structures inflict on the public good. Free markets work if failure is permitted. The government needs to protect the worker from the failures of lousy management rather than protecting the management in order to protect the worker. It’s backwards, unjust, and harmful to everyone. Unless we allow people to fail and reap what they sow, we will never learn how to do the right thing as a republic.
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