You’re a Puzzle, Adrian Rodgers
“You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity. What one person receives without working for another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for that my dear friend is the beginning of the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it.”
― Adrian Rogers
Dear Adrian,
I know you’ve been gone since 2005, but I’d just like you to know that in all your decades of preaching the Gospel, your most famous passage is the one above. You know, the one you stole without attribution from Gerald L. K. Smith, the noted Holocaust denier, as found in his magazine The Cross and the Flag. That magazine was a right wing white supremacist isolationist publication. I dunno, maybe you didn’t know the origin or your editors were lazy and didn’t research it. After all, you quoted it in 1984 and Google didn’t get going till 1998.
Too bad your most famous quote never mentions Jesus or the Scriptures. Anyway, jut wanted to catch you up. First: Nobody is or ever was proposing legislating the wealthy out of prosperity. Nobody. We just want them to pay their fair share.
The year you cribbed the quote, the richest person in the US was Getty, worth $4.1B. All the Forbes 400 together were worth $125B. Rookie numbers by today’s standards, even with inflation. Today with inflation Getty would be worth $12B. He wouldn’t even crack the top 50 now. Each person near the top of the list is worth more over ten times that. I know you’re concerned about people not getting what they work for, but there’s really no way anybody can “work for” a billion dollars. The math just doesn’t add up. If you were to have worked every single day between when Columbus landed in the New World and today, including weekends, for $5,000 a day, you still wouldn’t be a billionaire. So we’re really not talking about people working. Billionaires don’t get their fortunes by working for them.
More catch-up: President Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act in 1996, which ended generational welfare, which I gather is what you’re railing against. Funny, you were still around then. Looks to me like you’d have addressed the changing times. Guess not.
On your WIkipedia page, the most discussion was about if you were racist or not. I guess quoting a racist as you did above didn’t help that. Other than some third-hand accounts, there’s not much evidence if you were a racist or not. Shame. Looks like one of the most prominent pastors in the nation would’ve found something to say about one of the most pressing moral issues of the nation. I know that at the time there was backlash against the “social gospel” by evangelical pastors, who only wanted to preach the word and not get involved in social issues. I get it. But then why’d you take a swipe at welfare, a social issue for sure, with the above quote? Puzzling.
All in all, the tone of the quote seems very much to be pro-wealthy and anti-poor, which is the opposite of how most people read the Gospels. Maybe you’d say that you were actually anti-lazy, but there’s probably more lazy rich people than poor people, since they can afford to be. You know the “idle rich”? Maybe you were only against lazy people as far as they cost rich people something. Again, hard to get that out of Scripture. You’re for sure a puzzle, Adrian.
We can and must help the down-and-out by requiring the wealthy simply pay their fair share.
When one in six children in our nation goes to bed hungry, when one in five citizens have mental illness, when one in eight citizens live in poverty, while the wealthiest 1% own more than the poorest 90% we have failed as a society.
The take-home point from your stolen quote seems to be all about “multiplying wealth” which you say can’t be done by dividing. Dunno, the main example in scripture of multiplying goods is that afternoon the multitude was fed with the five loaves and two fishes. You remember, when Jesus broke them? I’d say that qualifies as “multiplying by dividing”, which you say can’t happen. You’re a puzzle alright, Adrian.
