And though Poppa was a believer and could quote large sections of Scripture from memory, he had by that time little use for the institutional church. As he explained it, the church was “full of do-gooders now.” Of course, this was a very strange statement to my young ears. Aren’t Christians supposed to do good, after all? But in time I came to understand his meaning. He wasn’t criticizing genuine good. Just the opposite: his distaste was for those who in their philanthropic zeal confused Christian priorities to the point that they actually inverted Christian ethics.

Such, he said, was demonstrated in the telethon phenomenon where supposed Christians pled for American believers to give their children’s inheritance to heathen cannibals. He explained that aside from impoverishing our own by such misguided philanthropy, it never helped the starving Africans on TV either. Even in the rare case when some donated seed made it past the tribal government or warlord, the intended recipients wouldn’t allow it to be planted. They just ate the seed corn out of the bags in week-long feasts, after which they returned to starvation. And rarer still, if White people were able to plant it for them, the Africans regularly dug the seed up at night and ate it before it could yield a crop. Such was the case with virtually all the major charitable causes now. Playing on guilty consciences, they served only to impoverish our own children while enriching the middlemen and the worst of the heathen. Such charities never achieved any of their stated goals, but perpetuated those very problems. What he meant by ‘do-gooders’ was those who, through their confusion of priorities and guilt, did evil in the name of good – which is to say, Liberals.