Writer, history major attend poverty summit

Writer, history major attend poverty summit

by Michael Gembola
The Collegian (Bob Jones University's student newspaper)
April 6, 2006

I didn't wake up thinking about the starving children in Somalia today. In fact, ever since I started eating my vegetables of my own volition, I have heard less and less about them. But they didn't go away. And neither did the thousands of people without pure drinking water in Nicaragua, whom I did not know about until last Friday at the Young Global Leaders Summit on Ending Poverty.

Junior history major Paul Matzko and I drove down to Charleston, S.C., Friday for the summit, which was coordinated by Americans for Informed Democracy (AID).

Teaching concerned college students how to raise awareness on the grassroots level of global poverty and the current efforts to end it was the broad focus. And the broad focus drew a broad crowd.

College students from across the state attended, representing schools such as Furman, The Citadel, Clemson, USC, Presbyterian College, Voorhees and Winthrop. The ethnic, political and religious diversity of the 80 students and faculty in attendance reflected the movement against global poverty as a whole.

"I was most impressed at how broad of a coalition it is—everything from free trade economic liberals to social liberals to feminists to evangelicals," Paul said.

Paul and I noted the irony of two afternoon-dress-clad BJU students sitting behind an individual with a "Save Roe Now!" sticker on his notebook at the same conference.

Our differences by no means disappeared during the summit. But Seth Green, chairman of AID, masterfully captained the group's rudder through the weighty discussions, keeping it on course and in peace through issues ranging from gender equality and environmental concern to global interdependence and fighting HIV/AIDS.

The format of the summit included a mix of workshops and small-group discussions. In one workshop called "U.S. in the World: Talking Global Issues with Americans," Seth taught how to communicate in such a way as to avoid offending any one group within a diverse audience as much as possible and to speak in terms with nearly universally positive connotations.

Seth illustrated the propaganda-like concept by describing how Americans oppose a death tax but support an estate tax, though the two mean the same thing. The reason Seth gave was that "death tax" connotes an innocent, average person dying and then being taxed for it, but an "estate tax" connotes the impersonal estate of a rich snobby person whom they would not mind seeing taxed.

Our small group leader happened to be Seth, the leader of the summit and one of the students who started AID after studying abroad at Oxford. Talking with European students there gave him and his friends a vision for what he called "bringing the world home" to Americans so that they have an accurate awareness of global issues. This vision led to the founding of AID and several subsequent sponsorships by high-powered charitable foundations.

Coming to a conference with politically active, diverse yet mostly liberal students led to several instances of what BJU students have come to be familiar with—the widely varying response to the simple statement, "I go to Bob Jones University." It was nearly always met with surprise, interest and of course questions.

"I think sometimes people are surprised to discover that conservatives are real people who actually care about others," Paul said. "You can almost see folks thinking, 'Weird. I thought fundamentalists were all narrow-minded bigots. Why are they even attending a conference on global poverty?"

But more than our identity as generally politically conservative people, our more weighty identity at the summit was rooted in our faith. Because of the justified reaction against the social gospel of modernist and post-modern churches, conservative evangelicals as a whole are often seen as uninterested in the physical needs of people.

But as I told my small group, the foundational reason for my interest in a conference such as this is my belief that Christianity has social implications. Those who believe they have been given much spiritually should naturally want to give to others spiritually and physically.

Though hearing about the starving orphan children in Africa may not have made eating vegetables as a child any easier, and though I may not know exactly how the United States should be involved politically and economically in a third-world nation, the simple teaching of Scripture demands that I not ignore the plight of those in abject poverty.

"Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world."