The Solution

There is a clear two-fold solution as modeled by Jesus’s Kingdom vision to be done “on Earth as it is in heaven.”

First, the negative, or negating, part of the solution:

Reject voting for any politician or law that maintains any laws within their office’s reach that criminalize nonviolent behavior through the confiscation of property, income, and incarceration.

Also, exercise your right as a member of a jury to judge the morality of a law by rendering a Not Guilty verdict for any nonviolent person being considered for a rape and assault prison cage. It’s not taught in school or courtrooms any more but jury nullification is a lawful tool designed specifically by the architects of our federal government to protect people from oppressive laws. Use your right to set captives free who have physically harmed no one.

Second, the positive part of the solution:

So much of what the state provides is created by the vacuum of churches and voluntarily-funded groups’ inaction. Whether it’s food stamps, drug prevention, medical care for the poor, or workplace accountability, so much of what the state does is a shortcut to heaven that leads to hell: they offer charitable goals but because they use coercion and threat of violence to execute them, it creates more violence, abuse, poverty, and polarized resentment.

Christians must use voluntarily-funded and organized alternatives to state programs and laws to render their failed, violence-based approaches redundant and unnecessary to keep.

Christians should seek out or establish health clinics, accountability groups, and recovery programs for drug abuse.

Christians should support programs that help sex workers find alternative, dignified alternatives to their professions.

Christians should create voluntarily-funded technology that provides food assistance in more effective and accountable ways than EBT or other state programs.

Christians should support nonprofit health clinics that provide quality care for the poor and uninsured.

Christians should hold each other accountable with church discipline for owning businesses run by runaway profit envy, discriminatory hiring practices, derogatory management, verbal harassment, or unfair employee treatment. This is not solvable with top-down template solutions but through personal involvement and social pressure.

Christians should reform and improve crisis pregnancy centers, orphanages, and adoption programs to make it easier for families to care for vulnerable children.

These are just seven foundational principles of positive nonviolent, creative systems for loving our neighbors as ourselves.

A Neighbor’s Choice would love to hear your creative works, market solutions, technology, and nonprofit work to address these issues.