of Conservative Christian "Philanthropy" :
from http://www.endtimesnetwork.com/oldnews/cap_christ.html
Take Charles Fuller, for example; Fuller was a great Christian philanthropist of the 1930s and 40s, and underwrote many Christian projects of that era including Cam Townsend's Wycliffe Bible Translators, Lewis Sperry Chafer's Dallas Theological Seminary, Bill Bright's Campus Crusade, and a myriad of Henrietta Mears' evangelistic projects at UCLA. He was also the founder of Fuller Theological Seminary in Southern California (to which he gave his name), and the prime mover behind the establishment of the National Association of Evangelicals. He is held up today as a model for all good Christian businessmen to shape their lives after. But a closer examination of Fuller's life might lead to another conclusion. The fact is, Fuller's philanthropy RESTED ON A FOUNDATION OF HUMAN MISERY of the worst kind! - the kind that was forever immortalized in John Steinbeck's heart-rending novel, The Grapes of Wrath.
Fuller's wealth derived from his immense citrus grove holdings in Southern California. He was director and leader of the California Orange Growers Association in the 1930s, a group of farmers whose neat white-fenced farms and Christian churches rested on a foundation of CHEAP LABOR. Fuller also owned a chain of department stores in Santa Ana and Riverside. During the Great Depression, a steady stream of displaced farmers from the impoverished "dustbowl" states of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Arkansas (known derisively as "Oakies" and "Arkies") trekked across the deserts of west Texas, New Mexico and Arizona to find work as "day-laborers" in the citrus groves of Southern California and California's San Juaquin and Sacramento Valleys.
There they ran smack into the "slave labor camps" of the California Orange Growers Association and other assorted grower organizations. The camps the growers provided their workers with - and for which they charged a small fortune, sometimes up to half their worker's paychecks - often had no toilet facilities (laborers were forced to dig holes in the ground) or if they did, they were totally inadequate to the number of laborers who had to use them. In addition, the camps often had no running water (laborers had to get their water from polluted creeks in the area), and no electricity of any kind. All the workers received from the growers was a patch of empty ground - all that for half their paycheck! In other words, Fuller and his cohorts were charging workers for a plot of dirt to put their tents on - and that's all. Laborers who gave the growers trouble or who complained were labeled "communists" and "black-listed."
FULLER AND THE STRIKE OF 1936
In June 1936, 2,500 of Fuller's citrus workers went on strike in Orange County for a wage increase. They wanted to increase their wages from twenty-five cents to forty-cents an hour [and here one needs to be clear, the actual wage many of Fuller's workers received was only half this amount (i.e., about 15 cents) - the other half Fuller deducted from their paychecks for the little bit of ground the workers pitched their tents on]. The California Orange Growers Association, which Fuller headed, refused to bargain.
Supported by local Protestant clergy and the Associated Farmers of California - a grower's organization financially backed by Standard Oil of California - the growers instead pointed to the supposed presence of Communist party members among the organizers of the farm-workers' union. That was all Fuller needed to justify calling in the Orange County sheriff. Four hundred armed deputies descended on the farm-workers' shantytowns with tear gas and clubs. Men, women and children were mercilessly beaten and gassed. Santa Ana, the quiet town where Cam Townsend had biked to high school as a child, was transformed into the site of a "concentration camp," where hundreds and hundreds of workers were herded into a stockade that Fuller had built BEFORE the strike commenced. Fuller, it seems, had actually planned for his use of clubs, guns, tear gas, and his use of concentration camp-like detention centers. The strikers were then marched into court and summarily found guilty by judges and juries who had been "bought and sold" by the growers. They were then jailed: husbands were separated from their wives, and children torn from the arms of their mothers and placed in "receiving homes" where many of them were later "adopted out," despite the anguished cries of their mothers and fathers who had no one to turn to for help.
Fuller repeated this process throughout the 1930s and '40s, not only in his citrus groves, but in his chain of department stores in Santa Ana and Riverside. For example, in the late 1940s Fuller ruthlessly put down a strike at one of his department stores, and after successfully winning the strike against the workers, he sent that portion of the strike fund (about $3,000) that he had not used to Wycliffe as a "Thank-Offering" to God for his success against the workers.
CHRISTIAN PHILANTHROPY AT THE
EXPENSE OF THE WORKING POOR
Christian philanthropy founded on the bashed heads of workers - many, if not most of them, fellow-Christians? What an unbelievable disgrace and shame to the NAME of Christ! And this is not some process that ended in the 1930s and '40s - this heartless and cruel system is presently going on now in the "slave-labor camps" established by the corporate elites (and supported by their minions in the Religious Right as well as Protestant missionary groups like WYAM and Wycliffe) in the Philippines, Thailand, Saipan, El Salvador, etc.
Is that where our form of Christianity has taken us? Is that what we are engaged in? - building up the Kingdom of God based on the misery and anguish of the poor? Many Christians today seem to find nothing wrong with this - they believe that it's okay to bash people's heads in for the sake of corporate profits so long as the one doing the bashing is not a homosexual, is against abortion, and is for "family values." God help us all if that's the kind of Christianity that we are involved in today!!
{ Isaiah 32: 5-6 } profesied long ago that at some future date . . . : "In those days the ungodly, the atheists, will not be heroes! Wealthy cheaters will not be spoken of as generous, outstanding men! Everyone will recognize an evil man when he sees him, and hypocrites will fool no one at all. Their lies about God and their cheating of the hungry will be plain for all to see. The smooth tricks of evil men will be exposed, as will all the lies they use to oppress the poor in the courts. But good men will be generous to others and will be blessed of God for all they do."
