And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to the suffering outside our borders; nor can we consume the world’s resources without regard to effect. For the world has changed, and we must change with it.
(From President Barack Obama’s inaugural address.)
President Obama’s implication that the Bush Administration stinted on foreign aid was the most disingenuous part of his inaugural speech. It may also have been the most depressing. It signals that he is likely to replace one kind of faith-based policy with another, equally blind variety.
President Bush more than quadrupled aid to sub-Saharan Africa. Driven largely by Michael Gerson, Bush’s self-promoting evangelical speech-writer, the Bush Administration undertook the largest government public health effort targeting a single disease in history, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). The scale of the commitment is especially surprising, since PEPFAR exclusively targets AIDS abroad, almost all in Africa. The program has already doled out nearly $19 billion in taxpayer dollars since 2003; it will spend $48 billion over the next five years (a sum that includes some side efforts on TB and malaria as well).
PEPFAR was a classic example of Michael Gerson’s religious politics. Gerson specialized in appropriating other people’s money to pursue his own vision of Christian social justice. Anyone who dared to question the propriety of spending scarce taxpayers dollars abroad on a disease that is 100% preventable by behavioral change would be accused of lack of compassion. Only a “collection of shriveled souls,” Gerson wrote of PEPFAR’s few but doughty Congressional opponents, “would be excited by an attack on AIDS treatment.” PEPFAR critics failed to grasp the “nearly universal Christian conviction that government has obligations to help the weak and pursue social justice.”