Opus 2015-159: Monday Pulpit: Sources of Poverty, part 1 of ?, Absentee Fathers

A couple of months ago, in his comments about marriage and the family, our pastor pointed out that the one sure ticket to poverty is for a man to leave his family.  It is poverty for the family, not for the man.  That got me thinking about why people are poor and the lies that our common culture tells about this.  Our socialist/Progressive culture only sees oppression as a cause of people being poor.  The Bible gives many causes.  I am going to work through those in a series of posts.  Today we start with the point the pastor made.  The most obvious, and ignored, source of poverty is children without fathers. 

The Bible targets two groups as in special need of help and support:  Widows and orphans.  A clear example of this would be,

(James 1:27 KJV)  Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.

In modern American culture the number-one cause of poverty is single parent families.  The vast majority of cases involve the absence of the father.  There are three major sources of this situation:  Death of a parent, divorce and unwed mothers (or irresponsible fathers).  Death cannot be avoided.  It is a natural part of life and it seems that children hammered by this tragedy adjust and move on.  It is different when the father walks away, legally through divorce or morally through abandonment.  That is more like an all day cold remedy.  The chemicals just keep being released.  The poverty is not only financial but emotional and intellectual.  Remember that Dan Quayle was right, even if no media talking head would admit it at the time. 

To be continued...

homo unius libri