Editor’s note:  This is a must-read for all who are concerned about the family — and the future! Richard Eyre is in the process of writing a much longer series on the topic of how we can all help to save the family, which will appear on the Family Leader website in the near future.  Today’s article will focus on the problem.  On Monday, read Meridian to find a solution.

Two Three-Word Mission Statements for Modern Mankind

Two Old Testament Prophets looked across time, saw our day, and issued powerful, provocative warnings that cut to the core of what today’s world needs and of what today’s leaders need to do. Each warning is in the form of a three-word admonition, and they are the challenges of our time, because if they are not met, civilization as we know it will end.

Isaiah saw our time, these past 200 years when world population has jumped tenfold to more than 6 billion, and when the gap between the earth's richest 10% and the poorest 20% has exploded from an income ratio of 2:1 to a more than 100:1 ratio.  "Repair the Breach" Isaiah said in chapter 58, or face the inevitable micro shared guilt and macro revolution and terrorism that will come as the extreme poor watch (because they do have television) and envy the rich.

Malachi saw these same past 200 years of ours and how the new explosions of population, urbanization, materialism and amoral media would couple with the emergence of larger, substituting institutions and begin to subtly sabotage the smallest institution of family.  "Turn the Hearts" he said on the last page of the Old Testament — of parents to their children and of children to their parents — or the whole earth (and God's plan for our happiness) will be wasted.

Repairing the breach — or closing the rapidly widening gap between rich and poor — and Turning the hearts and our priorities from the world to our families are the two greatest causes and challenges of our time, and the two tasks most relevant (and most prerequisite) to the Lord's second coming.

Many (although not nearly enough) are aware and tuned into the first challenge.  People like professor and author Jeffery Sachs (The End of Poverty) are rallying people to the possibility that globalization and public and private aid and philanthropy can virtually eliminate extreme poverty on the planet in the next 20 years.  As the world shrinks (and gets "flatter" in author Tom Friedman's terminology) and develops a whole-planet economy, the gap between rich and poor will begin to close again as globalization utilizes the valuable human resources of the earth's 1.5 billion extreme poor.

Ironically, the same shrinking world phenomenon that may repair the breach is also turning the hearts — but in the wrong direction. The materialistic messages and paradigms of globalization, from advertising, marketing and media undermine family values and make independence seem more important than commitment.  And the new, larger institutions of globalization, from corporations to governments and from educational institutions to aid organizations, tend to substitute for and supplant families rather than supporting and supplementing them, making families seem superficial and superfluous rater than significant and substantial.

Even as everyone seems to be writing, speaking and becoming aware of the need to repair the breach, no one is talking effectively about turning the hearts.

The family is and must always be the basic, fundamental institution of society, and if families cease to function in that role, none of the larger, usurping institutions can substitute for it.  These larger institutions, the engines that move our society, need to realize that they are not only created to serve families, but are dependent on strong and functioning families for their very survival.

The Breach (How the Rich-Poor Gap Got so Wide)

Twenty thousand people, mostly children, die every day because of extreme poverty.  Most of them are killed by malaria, tuberculosis, diarrhea, measles, and other easily preventable and easily treatable diseases.

Of the world’s six billion people, one billion — the bottom sixth — are so desperately poor that death is literally and daily at their door.  They exist on less than a dollar a day, have access to little or no medical care, education or even clean water and have a life expectancy of only about 40 years.  They go to sleep hungry every night on dirt floors and have no expectation of escaping their plight.  About a third of the extreme poor live in sub-Saharan Africa, another third in South Asia, and another third in East Asia. Much smaller but still significant numbers live in Latin America, the Caribbean, Eastern Europe, and North Africa.

Another one billion people, the top sixth, are so disproportionately rich that they earn more money in a day than most of the extreme poor earn in a year.  They sleep in comfortable beds, live in houses the poor cannot imagine, take things like hot running water, education, and vaccinations for granted, and have never, ever felt real hunger.  They live mostly in the U.S. and Canada, Western Europe, and Japan and Australia/N.Z.

In between the rich billion and the extreme poor billion live the middle four billion, poor by some standards, rich by others, but advancing economically, benefiting from globalization, and at least a step or two above starving, desperate poverty, with income, education and life expectancy all going up.

The breach that Isaiah saw and prophesized and warned of is the gap between the rich sixth and the extreme poor sixth. And what a gap it is! The rich sixth earn a per capita average income of more than $20,000, while the poor sixth earns under $200.The rich sixth has cell phones and computers; the poor sixth has no toilets, beds, or drinking water.  The rich sixth shops and goes to college and plays and watches sports and drama.  The poor sixth searches for food and builds makeshift shanty shelters.

The Breach is new!  It has happened mostly in the past 200 years.  Before 1800, virtually the whole world was poor.  Except for kings and a tiny percentage of very large land owners, everyone in the world lived at essentially the same level. Life was as difficult in much of Europe as it was in China or India. 

The past two centuries constitute a unique era in economic history, a time period when world population exploded by six-fold, from a billion to more than six billion people; and when the world’s average per capita income rose even faster — a nine-fold increase. 

But the increases in the US and Europe and Japan (Japan’s mostly in the past 60 years) were much higher — disproportionately higher — a 25-fold increase compared to a two-fold increase or less in parts of Africa and Asia, opening up vast gaps or “breaches” between rich and poor.

The tragedy is that the rich sixth has done (and is doing) so little to close the gap — to help the poor sixth climb even a little out of desperation and away from death’s door.  Globalization and the constant search for new, cheaper work forces have reached much of Asia, putting people at least on the lowest rungs of economic advancement (even working in a sweatshop is better than starvation).  But other parts of Asia and most of sub-Saharan Africa cannot reach even the bottom rung, and have no way out of their desperate plight unless someone gives them a hand up. 

The United States spends $500 billion on its military each year, and just $15 billion to address the plight of the poorest of the poor.  That $15 billion is less than a fifth of one percent of our Gross National Product — less than 15 cents of every $100.00 we have to spend (the smallest percentage spent on the poor by any of the world’s 40 most industrialized nations).

With that in mind, it becomes obvious what Colin Powell meant when he said, “The war against terror is bound up in the war against poverty.” 

Terrorism is not caused by religious fanaticism (that is just its mask).  It is caused by the frustration and jealousy of the world’s poor who see (via the TV they have access to, despite their poverty) the vast gap between what they have and what rich nations have.  Through television, they can see what we have and don’t deserve and use so selfishly. 

We would fight the roots of terrorism better if our budgets were reversed — if we spent $15 billion on military and $500 billion on poverty! (Actually, the shift would not have to be that dramatic.  It has been estimated that if we merely doubled the small percentages we spend on the plight of the poor, we could end extreme poverty by the year 2025.)

But the situation we find ourselves in today, the yawning breach between the world’s rich and poor, is intolerable, unconscionable, and impossible to justify or rationalize.  Barbara Kingsolver put it into a parable:

It is easy to see the gross injustice and the huge potential problems posed by the “breach,” easy to recognize how essential it is to close the gap, and easy to see why Isaiah urged us to become “repairers of the breach.”  Malachi’s prophecy was equally provocative and his warning perhaps even more dire.  “Turn the Hearts” he said, “lest the whole earth be cursed.”

One powerful way of working at both scriptural admonitions at the same time is to bring the very rich together with the very poor.  Doing so solves the problems of both.  The rich overcome self-centeredness and hedonism by helping, thus turning their children from spoiled brats to serving and world-aware stewards.  And the poor begin to receive the help they need on a personal level.  Each time it happens, the breach is repaired (even if just a little) and the hearts are turned. 

The Hearts (How Families Lost their “Tensile Strength”)

“Tensile strength” is a chemistry term related to a substance’s ability to hold itself together.  During the past half century, families throughout the world have lost much of their tensile strength.

Too many kids today can rap but cannot read.  Too many know everything about drugs but can’t pass chemistry.  Too many have sex but have no love.

In America today, more teenage boys go to jail than join the Boy Scouts.

A generation ago, a survey revealed the seven biggest problems in one high school to be: 

1. Talking Out of Turn
2. Chewing Gum
3. Being Disruptive (Making Noise)
4. Cutting in Line
5. Running in the Halls
6. Dress Code Violations
7. Littering. 

A recent survey at the same school provides the stark contrast. Today the seven biggest problems are:

1.       Alcohol Abuse
2.       Drug Abuse
3.       Robbery
4.       Teen Pregnancy
5.       Assault
6.       Rape
7.       Suicide

Social problems have placed this nation on the literal brink of demise.

And “social problems” is far too tame a description — too academic, too theoretical, too political.  What we need is a word that suggests how dramatic and deep the dangers are.  Why search for that word?  The scriptural prophecy already gave it to us.  It is, as Malachi predicted, a curse.  A freedom-threatening, economy- threatening, life-threatening curse.

The social problems that are overwhelming this country must be cured.  But the medicine we’re using isn’t working.  We’re treating the symptoms.  We’re taking aspirin.  And in this case the aspirin is incredibly expensive and seems to have negative long-term effects — actually making the problems worse.  Our welfare system and tax laws, even as they threaten to bankrupt us, actually destroy initiative and encourage people not to work.  Our expensive criminal justice system doesn’t rehabilitate, doesn’t deter, and actually creates a culture of crime (especially in our prisons which are an inbred training ground for living outside the law).

The reason we look for causes is to permit the intelligent search for cures.  In medicine, in business, in sports, if something is wrong, we have to isolate the cause before we can find a cure.

It is common (and popular) to blame problems on poverty or on the growing gap between rich and poor.  But to say that economic conditions cause the social problems may be a little like saying that the rash and the fever cause the illness. 

Economic conditions are a result rather than a cause far more often than popular thinking (and popular media) suggest.  All of our social problems have economic costs and financial consequences. But whether economic problems cause social problems or social problems cause economic problems (or whether the two repeatedly cause and exacerbate each other in a cause-and-effect spiral) is a moot issue.  The bigger question is, what underlying cause is there for both of them? What brings to pass the social and economic curse? What is the deeper spiritual crisis?

It’s only recently that sophisticated academic statistical analysis has begun to take us toward where common sense has pointed all along: The cause of our social problems is the breakdown of our most basis social institution — the family.

Proof of this premise requires only two things:

1. Evidence showing how much and in what ways American families have declined
2. Evidence showing clear causal connections between that decline of families and the rise of social (and economic) problems. 

With census and other recent (and vast) increases of available data, there are more than enough reliable statistics to serve as evidence on both points.

The ever-growing evidence of statistics combines with straightforward logic to help us understand that social problems are never really solved with social programs.  The solution lies in stronger families.

The solution, of course, lie in the home, with parents and with families, but parents and families need help from the larger institutions of our society — lots of help and lots of support.  Instead, it seems that the world around us is conspiring to weaken our families and to undermine parents.

For the conclusion of this article, read Monday’s issue of Meridian Magazine.