Ann Coulter’s column of last week was scathingly critical of Dr. Kent Brantly for going to Liberia to serve the poor and needy rather than doing it right here at home. Citing the litany of the massive cultural problems we face in our country - 15,000 murders every year, 38,000 deaths from drug overdoses, 40 percent of babies born out of wedlock - she argues that Dr. Brantly’s mission to Africa was an exercise in “narcissism,” just sort of a meaningless, feel good excursion which ignores the crushing needs in the U.S. Here’s how she put it:
"Not only that, but it's our country. Your country is like your family. We're supposed to take care of our own first. The same Bible that commands us to "go ye into all the world and preach the Gospel" also says: "For there will never cease to be poor in the land. Therefore I command you, 'You shall open wide your hand to your brother, to the needy and to the poor, in your land.'" Right there in Texas, near where Dr. Brantly left his wife and children to fly to Liberia and get Ebola, is one of the poorest counties in the nation, Zavala County -- where he wouldn't have risked making his wife a widow and his children fatherless. But serving the needy in some deadbeat town in Texas wouldn't have been "heroic." We wouldn't hear all the superlatives about Dr. Brantly's "unusual drive to help the less fortunate" or his membership in the "Gold Humanism Honor Society." Leaving his family behind in Texas to help the poor 6,000 miles away -- that's the ticket.
Coulter here is arguing in essence that Christians in America must decide which of God’s commands we are going to obey, which is a manifestly silly and dangerous position to take. Picking and choosing which parts of God’s word we honor is how we got sodomy-based marriage and men using women’s locker rooms while the women are in them. No, Christians can walk and chew gum at the same time. We can both help the poor in our land and take the gospel to the darkened corners of the world. In fact, we not only can, we must, because, as even as Coulter acknowledges, Christ commands it.
In fact, it is impossible for Christians NOT to seek to take the gospel of Christ to all the world. Not only does Christ command it, but his Holy Spirit compels us to do it with an inner voice that cannot be denied without engaging in disobedience.We must obey God rather than Ann Coulter. God has a calling on nations just like he has a calling on people. His calling on the United States is to fulfill the Great Commission. To this point in our history we have been faithful to that calling. The United States has sent more emissaries of the gospel to more spiritually blind people in the world than all the nations in history combined. We must continue to do it. Ms. Coulter wants America to put the light of Christ under a bushel and abandon the assignment we have received from him. He did not call us to be just the salt and light of the United States. He called us to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world.
Ann Coulter knew, of course, that her column would get a lot of attention and generate heated discussion. That might even be the reason she wrote it. Narcissism anyone?