Are religious conservatives “too pro-life” at the expense of other issues like poverty?

This transcript has been adapted from the attached audio. It may not be in its final form and may be updated.

I believe that conservative Christians can walk and chew gum at the same time. Our major focus is going to be on the abortion issue as long as 4,000 babies a day are being killed through abortion. My question to Jim Wallis and Tony Campolo is, “Why aren’t you—as long as 4,000 babies a day are being killed? That is unacceptable and it is going to continue to be unacceptable.”

To criticize pro-lifers for saying we are too focused on the pro-life issue would be like criticizing Dr. King for being too focused on the issue of racial justice and racial reconciliation. Dr. King dealt with other issues but he kept the main thing the main thing as long as his people were being denied their basic constitutional rights. There is no more basic constitutional right than the right to life. As long as unborn Americans are being denied the right to life—and a third of them are being killed before they are ever born—that is going to be the major focus, and we are going to continue to make it the major focus. We are not going to apologize for making it the major focus.

When it comes to other issues, I do not know anybody who is the “pro-poverty” party. But there is a difference of opinion about the best way to address these issues. Jim Wallis and Tony Campolo both adamantly opposed the welfare reform legislation. When it passed, Jim Wallis predicted there would be tens of thousands of Americans dropping dead on the streets of America from starvation.

The welfare reform has been a tremendous success—not a complete success—but a tremendous success and has reduced welfares roles and brought people from welfare to work and has done a great deal to eliminate poverty.

When you start looking at the proposals that Jim Wallis, Tony Campolo and others want to put forward, they involve confiscatory taxes. It’s sort of a “neo-socialist” model that has failed in Western Europe and has failed everywhere it has been tried in alleviating poverty. All it does is try to evermore equally distribute a never growing pie. ¹

Whereas, there are other economic models, the free market models that have made Korea (South Korea) a tremendous economic success. Taiwan, China, and India—now that they have adopted free market models—have eliminated far more poverty in the last twenty years than they did under a much longer time period of socialism in India and communism in China.

So we at some point have to ask the question, what works? And what works is a free market system that produces more wealth that can then be used to help those who are less fortunate.