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Woodlawn, Illinois - From around the beginning of this millennium, Pastor Corey Brooks has been preaching the Word of God at New Beginnings Church that he founded at 6620 South King Drive on the South Side of Chicago. In his ministry, he has seen first hand the destruction that has afflicted the black community by giving in to the progressive policy prescriptions of President Johnson’s Great Society programs. Government has replaced the family, and the results are devastating.
Pastor Brooks wrote an op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago expressing his conclusions. They are clear to any objective observer, not blinded by woke progressive nonsense, but if a white guy had written that article, he would be called a racist. In any event, as playwright David Mamet has pointed out, race is a delusion.
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In his article, Pastor Brooks proclaimed that “Trump’s Color-blind Message Energizes Black Americans: Self-reliance, stable families and education will lift” black neighborhoods in the inner cities. He is inspired by President Trump’s declaration in his Second Inaugural Address that his administration will “forge a society that is color-blind and merit-based.”
LBJ’s Great Society and Welfare Dependency
The height of the victory by the civil rights movement came in passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Thereafter, however, the movement succumbed to the temptation of President Johnson’s Great Society programs. These programs expanded the welfare state and thereby enabled people to become dependent on government for their food, housing, health care, schooling, and even the meaning and purpose of their lives through ethnic identify politics. No people succumbed more to these temptations than black folks.
During the civil rights march on Washington in 1963, Reverend Martin Luther King had expressed his longing for a day when his children would be judged “not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” President Johnson’s executive orders promoting affirmative action and preferential treatment based on ethnicity, which led to today’s campaign for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, represented a repudiation of the longing expressed by Reverend King for a color-blind society. Instead the progressive agenda has been to ignore individual character and promote group identity based on ethnicity and skin-color, even capitalizing the word.
The Great Society programs have effectively replaced the family as the basic unit of society with a secular social worker lording it over dependent and atomized individuals, adrift from their family and their faith community. Social workers are the slave-mongers of the welfare state. Almost the only asset that these individuals own is their right to vote, and that is assiduously harvested by progressive electoral operators.
In the Bible, Paul tells us that we are justified by faith alone, but James points out that faith without good works is dead. Today secular social workers tell us that they can do good works without faith, but in fact works without faith are also dead. They are not good and they don’t even work. Expertise without character, and knowledge without virtue, are both dead.
Pastor Brooks points out in his article that far too many black folks were seduced by the promise that government bureaucrats would lift them up through social programs, public housing, food stamps, school busing and racial preferences. He also points out that: “We didn’t believe in ourselves.” In the Bible, Paul also wrote to his colleague Timothy that: “God did not give us a spirit of fear or cowardice, but a spirit of power and love and self-control.” Pastor Brooks explains that: “We didn’t have faith in our own abilities. We deluded ourselves into thinking that entitlements were a form of reparations.”
Before President Johnson’s Great Society programs were launched starting around 1965, black folks in America had shown great courage in confronting segregation and Jim Crow. When black players were banned from Major League Baseball, the Negro Leagues were formed to provide a showcase for their talents and perseverance. The Tuskegee Institute trained world-class fighter pilots that took on some of the most challenging missions of the Second World War. The civil rights movement led by Reverend King and his colleagues showed tremendous courage in the face of racist violence from Southern Democrats. Fredrick Douglas asked for black folks to be left alone by solicitous abolitionists during the Civil War: “Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us.”
Pastor Brooks counts the price paid by black folks for “losing the culture of opportunity, self-reliance and meritocracy that prevailed before” the Great Society programs were implemented. He points out that today black folks are trapped in single-parent households, illiteracy in reading and math, street violence, and declining faith in the God of the Bible, while putting their faith in government as their savior.
They have come to worship Caesar. They have fallen for the fallacy, expressed by former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, that government is a force for good. The Bible tells us not to put our faith in princes or politicians. Government is a necessary evil.
Jesus told us to offer to Caesar what is due to Caesar, and to God what is due to God. On the other hand, if we depend on Caesar for our food, housing, health care, schooling and more, then what do we have of our own left to offer to God? That division of loyalties is the foundation for liberty and prosperity in Christian civilizations.
Jesus also told us to pray to God for our daily bread, but if instead we accept our daily bread free from Caesar, then what need do we have to pray to God? Roman rulers often provided free grain to the city’s residents, so that thereafter they could count on the support of the mob. God does not answer our prayer directly by providing us with bread, except one time when he provided for the Israelites in the wilderness. Instead, God ordains the institutions of the church and the family, which invest in our human capital so that we can earn our daily bread through our own efforts. Then we can honor Caesar by paying what taxes may be due to him, and also we can worship God by providing for ourselves, our families and the truly needy, and stay independent of Caesar.
As Thomas More observed at his execution, he remained the King’s loyal servant, but God’s first.
The Streets of the South Side
On the South Side of Chicago, Pastor Brooks observes that the streets have lost the prosperity that they had from the Second World War in the 1940’s until the coming of the Great Society in the 1960’s. Businesses like McDonald’s and Walgreens left long ago. Some Walmarts and a Whole Foods were lured back during this millenium, but the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020 persuaded them, and many other businesses, to close shop.
Your columnist lived in the South Side from 1974 to 1981 while attending college and law school at The University of Chicago in the Hyde Park neighborhood. UChicago has the largest private-sector police department in the world, after the Vatican, except that the Vatican is not a private-sector institution. Hyde Park is mostly safe but very boring, and any fun or shopping must be sought in the Loop or on the North Side. The surrounding neighborhoods have gotten worse since your columnist lived in Hyde Park.
The black residents of the South Side complain that they live in a retail desert, but they have only themselves to blame for the reluctance of retailers to set up business on their streets. The only establishments near Pastor Brooks’ church are, as he describes them: “housing projects, liquor stores and murals to dead rappers.” Uber drivers are reluctant to drive passengers there, even on Sunday mornings when the gangbangers are sleeping off what they did the night before, and the drivers are eager to drive way when they pick you up.
Pastor Brooks confesses that his “heart aches to see how a once God-fearing and hard-working people betrayed itself into poverty and, worse, into mental enslavement to the government.” He is grateful to President Trump for issuing what the good pastor calls a “challenge to my people to make something of themselves.” He urges black folks to join all Americans in building our “new golden age.”
In order to accomplish this objective, Pastor Brooks insists that black folks must shed their generations-long view that “government is your parent.” Instead, he says that they must: “take the path of upward mobility; take responsibility for their lives; marry and stay married; have children after marriage; [and] read to their children.”
Black children in the inner cities are trapped in the Government School Cartel, which is made of, by and for politicians, bureaucrats and union bosses. They receive consulting services from experts in academia. This cartel does not care about students, their parents and even many teachers.
Pastor Brooks condemns the Chicago Public Schools for producing “graduates who are illiterate and innumerate. These children have no future.” He is an ardent advocate for “school choice to ensure that children are not locked into systems of failure.”
Overall, Pastor Brooks believes that: “Stable families and education will lift our people to untold heights.” Why not? It has been done that way over the years by penniless immigrants to Chicago, and many arrived barely speaking English.
Sunday Church on the South Side
The church space is a converted warehouse holding around 500 seats. It was mostly full last Sunday morning, with a late-arriving crowd. Your columnist was almost the only white person there (although white Latino), worshiping with brothers in Christ. He commanded us to make disciples of all nations, none excepted. It takes courage to be a Christian conservative Republican, but to be a black Christian conservative Republican requires an extra dose of courage.
The opening lesson on Sunday was that our Creator is the type of shepherd who, if he has 100 sheep, and 99 of them are home safe and dry, but one of them is lost out there, then he goes looking for that lost sheep, and does not rest until he finds it and offers it a chance to return to the fold.
The vestments of the celebrants included a Black Hawks jersey. Even the Vatican doesn’t have vestments so bright and stylish. Dietrich Bonhoeffer drew inspiration from attending church in Harlem, and this church on the South Side does the same. The Creator of the universe knows his people and their voices, irrespective of their skin color. He does not abandon or forsake them.
Pastor Brooks’ sermon was a warning to be careful with what we say, because words can be powerful weapons. We must speak the truth, but in a loving way and at the proper time. Your columnist needed that message.
Onward Christian Soldiers
In 2008 the Pritzker family made available a room in their Park Hyatt Hotel on North Michigan Avenue for Barack Obama. There he spent a couple of days writing his acceptance speech for the Democrat National Convention. Today owners of condominiums in that same building “can’t give them away.” The value of residential and commercial real estate in Chicago has dropped during this millenium. Get woke, go broke!
Pastor Brooks has not won a Nobel Peace Prize, and probably never will. Nevertheless, he is the most consequential guy, black or white, to come out of the South Side of Chicago in this millenium.
