‘The vast majority of professing christians claim to love God and love their neighbor as themselves, but they do not keep God’s commands and follow Christ’s instructions, nor do they build their neighbor up to love and good works, strengthen the hand of the poor and needy, bring justice to the fatherless, or plead the widow’s cause. They are more content to fatten their hearts in the day of slaughter under false gods, while outsourcing these responsibilities to their socialist bureaucracies that offer social programs and authoritarian administrations which pervert these weightier matters.

An easy excuse to justify not being our brother’s keeper is to imagine that he is someone else’s problem, and to raise up compartmentalized organizations and industries of employment to preemptively dismiss him as someone else’s problem, or rather to make him the problem of collective society through tax-funded benefits or interdependent and specialized examples of careerism in a socialist economy. This slothful and covetous attitude to dismiss the plight of one’s neighbor was just as common in the first century as it is today, especially among those who professed to be God’s people.