Soft Power

Many years ago on one of my trips to Nigeria, I visited a hospital outside of Jos that was doing work with the AIDS epidemic.

 

Some of the offices were simply shipping containers, those huge steel makeshift rooms that felt like 120 degrees inside. In the hospital where they did lab testing hung a single light bulb from a porcelain socket with loose wires knitted together.  

In regular fashion, the electricity would go out citywide, the gas-powered generators would belch on, and the hospital would go on operating as if nothing happened, saving lives. If anything, these doctors and nurses were resilient and resourceful, doing what they could in marginal situations.

A worker there, when he found out I was American, told me how much he loved then-president George W. Bush. Bush and his creation of PEPFAR is credited for saving over twenty-five million lives with antiretroviral medication supplies. Bono, of U2 fame, had earlier built a relationship with Bush and encouraged him to do something big—a massive foreign aid package for a massive problem. Bono’s ONE Campaign helped rally bipartisan support in Congress.

Last year, the richest man on the planet was given carte blanche to cut waste and fraud in government spending, declaring he could cut over a whopping trillion dollars. A quick hit was USAID—DOGE cancelled more than eighty percent of its programs, wiping out basic health care access for more than ninety-five million people around the world. Atul Gawande, former Assistant Administrator at USAID who recently stepped down, estimates seven hundred thousand people have already died.

Was there fraud and waste in the USAID program? Undoubtedly, yes—in the same way Americans—including corporations—took advantage of COVID-19 pandemic relief funds, as critically helpful as they were. That’s why we have independent Inspectors General who do the challenging and unsexy work of tracking down fraudsters and clawing back funds.

Unfortunately, those were cut as well by DOGE.

For perspective, in 2024 USAID was less than 0.3% of our total budget. DOGE never touched the massive U.S. military budget of the Department of Defense—er, Department of War—even though our own GAO reports that it has never passed a clean financial audit, the only government department to fail to do so. The proposed 2027 budget includes a 40% increase, making it more than the combined military spending of the next ten countries. With a discretionary spending budget proposed at about $1.83 trillion, DOD will consume $1.15 trillion of that.

When I was pastoring, people would sometimes ask us during the gazillion servant evangelism outreaches we did if we were ever concerned that some people might rip us off. Our standard answer was: “Nope. We know they will.” That’s simply a built-in risk when you extravagantly love and serve people. But the goodwill and paradigm-changing response of how people viewed Christians—and the Church at large—well made up for any loss.

Or as C.S. Lewis once famously wrote, “To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal . . . To love is to be vulnerable.”

Of course we have to be diligent and do our best with our hard-earned money. But the “soft power” of global goodwill was a beacon of light and earned the respect of suffering people everywhere, just as I personally experienced in Nigeria.

When evangelicals claim that the U.S. is a “Christian nation” and a “city on a hill”, does it not seem antithetical then that “America First” becomes the driving motto? When Jesus—as God in the flesh with all authority and power—declared that “Even I…did not come to be served, but to serve and give his life as ransom for many”, it seems that we have reversed a divine modus operandi, if we are to be who some claim we are.

Soft power—think of the cross—is always more powerful than sheer might.

Pass that on to the richest man in the known universe. 

Dave Workman | The Elemental Group

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