God's dream and the health-care debate

British Baptist journalist Jonathan Langley writes for the Associated Baptist Press that:

... in a week when Americans opposed to a large role for government in health-care reform have been attacking the United Kingdom’s National Health Service, mistaking American rights for “Christian rights” highlights a tendency in some American Christian circles to mistake the United States for the Kingdom of God.

He goes from that right to the heart of the objection some have to health reform. We Americans tend to believe one and all that God is on our side. Thus anything we feel is somehow un-American must be evil:

This, I think, helps explain why there have been such vehement denunciations of the British health-care system in America in recent days. Socialism, to those still brainwashed by Sen. Joseph McCarthy's legacy, is “un-American.” Why? Because, as an old colleague returning from a time in Chicago explained to me last week, the American dream is to work for yourself and your own betterment. And any attempt to make you pay even a little for someone else's health care is a violation of that dream.

Yet as Christians, he writes, "Our duty is to remember that the God Jesus Christ proclaims requires his children to give freely, love selflessly and sacrifice readily for the well-being of others."

Driven by that faith-based logic he concludes:

Let's pray that our American brothers and sisters can free themselves of any heresies that would see them deny the less fortunate among them health care for the sake of any false dream.