​america’s mad state of rebellion:
therefore, the world lieth in sin
30 march 2022

What is to be done when not just one person or a few people, but an entire society comes to believe and act as though madness is the norm; that insanity is sanity; that madness and insanity are the normal state of existence?
 
Columnist and reporter, Sharon Zhang, recently wrote, as so many have, of a form of madness that is viewed by many, many 10s of millions of Americans as normal, appropriate, and desirable. Actually, this piece catalogues not “a form of madness,” but multiple forms of madness.
 
“… the average bonus for Wall Street employees rose to $257,500 in 2021 – or roughly five times the average salary for U.S. workers. This is an increase of 20 percent from 2020; meanwhile, the average American only saw wage raises of 2 percent in 2021, which is far less than the inflation rate of 7 percent…”
 
Note, please, we are only talking here about Wall Street bonuses, not salaries. Bonuses, above and beyond salary, were 5 times the salaries of U.S. worders. And, we should not, on one side we are talking about “employees.” On the other, “workers.” I accept this distinction as Wall Street “employees,” for all their talk of the American work ethic, have never done a days work in their lives.
 
“… the average bonus for Wall Street employees has increased by a whopping 1,743 percent since 1985, when the average bonus was $13,970. If minimum wage had kept up with Wall Street bonuses, it would be $61.75 an hour, or 8.5 times higher than the current minimum wage of $7.25.
 
Not only do Wall Street employees not work, but they earn more for not working than ever before.
 
Millions of low-wage essential workers are struggling to make ends meet while taking care of our country’s basic human needs. Meanwhile, Wall Streeters are getting massively rewarded for high-risk behaviors that endanger the entire economy” …
 
Not only do Wall Street employees not work, they engage in practices and behaviors that hurt working American’s and put the entire U.S. and world economy at risk—as was the case a decade ago.
 
“… the minimum wage has remained stagnant since 2009. Not only is $7.25 an hour insufficient to survive nearly anywhere in the U.S., it’s also considered poverty wages in many places. With each year that goes by, that wage is worth less; with inflation, $7.25 in today’s dollars is equivalent to only $5.50 in 2009 dollars.” [1]
 
Not only do American workers actually work, and work harder and smarter than they did a decade ago, they earn less for doing so.
 
In what sane persons mind; in what sane society’s collective consciousness; in what sane legislative body’s policies does any of this sound like a good idea, reasonable, sane?
 
None. No, not one.
 
On its very face, such realities are clear indications of mad insanity. One needn’t be the least bit philosophical or religious to see the clear, abject madness of such conditions. One would think that the drive to survive built into human DNA over millions of years would be enough to cancel the existence of such nihilistic and destructive insanity.
 
That said, those who live in American society claim to be, if not philosophical, religious. Many tens of millions of them claim to be followers of one, Jesus, Son of God. And several millions of these “Christians,” those who once called themselves “Mormons,” also claim to follow Jesus—going so far as to call themselves, “Saints.” But, notwithstanding scripture’s unambiguous opposition, millions of these “Christians,” “Mormons,” and “Saints” have fallen prey to the sort of madness described in Zhang’s piece. In this, at least, there is no hypocrisy. They callously live the false doctrine they espouse—economic inequality is normal, appropriate, and justifiable before God.
 
So, again, to those who normalize madness, we must speak of God’s own word. They have, of course, heard it before, these madmen and women. Having rejected the word of God in the past, they will, likely, reject it once more. Still, we do not wish to be guilty of one of ancient Israel’s greatest sins: the failure to fulfill its calling to the world.
 
“Just look at my servant, whom I grasped,
   the one I chose, in whom I was pleased.
I placed my spirit upon him
   that he should[2] generate justice among the nations.
He won’t call out, or lift
   or make his voice heard in public[3].
He doesn’t so much as trample a crushed blade of grass,
   or an already sputtering wick
      to faithfully produce justice.
He is not to grow feint[4] or discouraged
   until he has established justice on earth;
      for the ends of the earth are in anxious expectation of his instruction.
This is what the God, Yahweh, said--
   the creator and expander of the heavens,
      the one who stretches out the earth and spreads out its life[5],
who grants life[6] to all peoples upon it
   and breath who live[7] on it--
‘I, Yahweh, called you, as is right,
   and would strengthen you and watch over you
and present you as a promise[8] to peoples
   and an example[9] to nations,
to open eyes that are blind,
   to lead captives out of prison
      from imprisonment those who abide in darkness.’”[10]
 
It’s very sad, don’t you think—the world, left without a warning voice because those called to warn wouldn’t lift a finger? Like that ancient nation, Jesus’ disciples today are “sent… out to testify and warn the people, and it becometh every man who hath been warned to warn his neighbor.”[11]
 
 And here is our warning in relation to the madness of the sort of economic inequality so well described in Zhang’s piece.
 
“It is not given that one man should possess that which is above another, wherefore the world lieth in sin.”[12]
 
You see? Inequality is sin. Economic inequality is sin. No matter how one dresses it up; no matter how normal it is presented to be; no matter how often and vociferously it is defended and justified, economic inequality is a form of madness. In God’s economy it is abnormal. It is not how the cosmos was created to function. It is indicative of a world wallowing in sin and in open rebellion against God. Its only end is disfunction, collapse, and destruction.
 
Unfortunately, a people, a faith, a society engulfed in this form of sinful madness to the extent that America is loses, as we have already said, the very ability to discern truth; to distinguish madness from sanity.
 
“Nevertheless, in your temporal things you shall be equal, and this not grudgingly, otherwise the abundance of the manifestations of the Spirit shall be withheld.”[13]
 
It is, therefore, difficult to see a way out of the present madness or a path that leads to future sanity. Repentance requires enough discernment to recognize and acknowledge sin. But the “manifestations of the Spirit,” so essential in revealing sin, have been and are disrupted; drowned in a flood of lust.
 
In calling for economic equality, we do not call for religious programs or movements. We only call for moral rectitude consistent with cosmic principles of happiness, advancement, and endurance as God, Himself, has outlined them.
 
We will not slacken in our commitment to warn concerning the madness. We will not cease in extending an invitation back from insanity to sanity. If we are unsure and doubtful concerning the possibility of reformation, we will plead before God, as one anxious, yet determined father once did,
 
“Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.”[14]
 
Even so, come, Lord Jesus!


[1]“If Minimum Wage Kept Up With Wall Street Bonuses, It Would Be $61.75 an Hour,” Truthout).
[2] I understand this imperfect verb to be modal.
[3] Literally, “outside, in the street.”
[4] Again, the imperfect verb is read in a modal sense.
[5] Literally, “offspring, seed.”
[6] Literally, “breath.”
[7] Literally, “walk.”
[8] Traditionally, “covenant.”
[9] Literally, “light.”
[10] Isaiah 42.1-7
[11] DC 88.81
[12] DC 49.20
[13] DC 70.14
[14] Mark. 9.24

For those who regularly visit this site, my love for the Book of Psalms is by now well known. Also well know is one of the reasons for my appreciation: faithful boldness in prayer. The Psalmists’ faith in God is such that they know His appreciation for honesty in prayer and so fearlessly offer it, even when their thoughts and feelings might challenge traditional views of what God will and will not accept by way of challenging complaint and questioning. Today’s blog post is a prayer.
 
 
Oh Lord, I will be as bold as Israel’s beloved Psalmist. I will speak of my wonderment. I will confess my doubt. I will give voice to my frustration and complaint. 
 
Where, I ask, are you? Are you really there? Do you really care?
 
How long will you remain silent, absent, neglectful, inert?
 
Why silent, absent, neglectful, and inert about and toward the devil named Putin?
 
Why silent, absent, neglectful, and inert toward and about religious leaders who give this devil a pass—is it because his views toward gays is perfectly aligned with theirs?—while they engage in inanities that waste the spiritual energy of adherents, divert attention from Jesus’ most cherished aims, and trivialize the Gospel of Jesus Christ?
 
Is it wrong to ask that you act today as it is reported you have acted in the past?
 
I remember, Lord, the words with which Sennacherib’s envoy, Rabshakeh, blasphemously reproached you to your face. “Hear ye the words of the great king, the king of Assyria,” spat Rabshakeh at the walls of your holy place. 
 
“Let not Hezekiah deceive you… neither let Hezekiah make you trust in the LORD, saying, ‘The LORD will surely deliver us: this city shall not be delivered into the hand of the king of Assyria’ … Beware lest Hezekiah persuade you, saying, ‘The LORD will deliver us.’  Hath any of the gods of the nations delivered his land out of the hand of the king of Assyria? Where are the gods of Hamath and Arphad? Where are the gods of Sepharvaim? And have they delivered Samaria out of my hand? Who are they among all the gods of these lands, that have delivered their land out of my hand, that the LORD should deliver Jerusalem out of my hand?”[1]
 
I remember, still, what you said and how you responded when Hezekiah laid all this blasphemy before your face. I remember how you said to the mighty king of Assyria,
 
“Whom hast thou reproached and blasphemed?    
   and against whom hast thou exalted thy voice,  
      and lifted up thine eyes on high?   
even against the Holy One of Israel…”[2]
 
I remember how you warned the oppressor, and promised the oppressed
 
“He shall not come into this city,   
   nor shoot an arrow there,  
nor come before it with shields,   
   nor cast a bank against it. 
By the way that he came,   
   by the same shall he return,  
and shall not come into this city,   
   saith the LORD.”[3]
 
I remember, too, how you then acted.
 
“Then the angel of the LORD went forth, and smote in the camp of the Assyrians a hundred and fourscore and five thousand: and when they arose early in the morning, behold, they were all dead corpses. So Sennacherib king of Assyria departed, and went and returned, and dwelt at Nineveh. And* as he was worshipping in the house of Nisroch his god, that Adrammelech and Sharezer his sons smote him with the sword.”[4]
 
Did this, O Lord, really happen? Is scripture to be trusted? Is it to be used as precedent, as an example to be followed? Did you really heed Hezekiah, a good, but flaw man such as I, as so many of us? Did you deliver Jerusalem, flawed city that it was, from the spoiler’s lust?
 
So, look down now, Lord, at what is happening on the planet called earth. A spoiler has entered the sovereign nation of Ukraine. The besieged nation is not a perfect nation. But it is no better or worse than ancient Judah was, surely. Its inhabitants have no less claim upon you for life and peace than that ancient nation that Isaiah, Jeremiah and many others castigated so mercilessly for its unfaithfulness to you. And I, with many others who pray to you, are we so different from Hezekiah. And surely, the spoiler’s head, Putin, is but a reincarnation of and is driven by the same vile lusts as that infamous Sennacherib.
 
Why, then, oh Lord, do you turn a blind eye to Putin’s present blasphemy and reproaches to your honor? For surely, the man’s violent outburst is a blasphemy and reproach against you and all that you stand for. Why do you sit idle while the puny man does Satan’s bidding? Wreaks havoc on the world? Lays waste to cities? Chases millions into the life of powerless refugee status? Causes psychological damage to children that may very well spill over to several generations? Takes the life of thousands upon thousands of innocents?
 
You, it is claimed, sent a sword-wielding angel to threaten death upon one, Joseph, who hesitated to take a second wife in polygamy. Why do you withhold your warning sword now? Why do you not visit and threaten Putin, whose sin is viler than Joseph’s by the order of many magnitudes? This would be a mercy to Putin and to the whole world. Can I, can we not ask this of you? If not, why not? What’s changed? What’s different?
 
Can I, can we not ask this of you? If Putin will not yield to your merciful warning that he stop and desist from his demonic works, then may you do as you did to Sennacherib and his army. Stretch forth your mighty arm and turn his army backward. Send them back to their homeland, defeated, without the shedding of the defenders’ blood. And, if necessary, may you send forth upon Putin an assassin, as you did against Sennacherib and as you did when you sent the left-handed Benjamite, Ehud, to pierce with his two-edged dagger the corpulent Moabite king as he sat upon his royal toilet.[5]
 
I ask that you try mercy first. Then, the bloodless defeat and failure of an army. Only then, death to Putin.
 
Can I really ask God to kill? Do I want to? How do I feel about a God who kills? I am, I confess, torn. But, what else is there to it? It is good and righteous and proper that Putin’s evil be stopped.
 
Now, Lord, forgive me, but I am troubled by another evil. We have leaders, it seems to me, religious leaders who, claiming to know you best and to be your mouthpiece, trivialize the Gospel of Jesus Christ. They give a pass to an obvious aggressor, murderer, war criminal, and faithful, apocalyptic-scale disciple of Lucifer by offering generic, half-hearted, milk toast statements of regret in regard to Putin and his international lawbreaking aggression against another nation. This weak-kneed and inadequate response is, in itself, troubling enough. But, at the same time that Satan unleashes his bought and paid for armies and navies and air forces upon a weaker nation, these same leaders travel the world over to claim that your greatest concern revolves around a matter as trivial as the name of the church and how its name is to be typeset. Putin may not be named as a danger to righteousness, but by God, those who won’t abide by their stylistic preferences sure as hell are!
 
Then again, they use their globetrotting ways as an opportunity to unambiguously and consistently and emphatically chide those who speak too often and/or too intimately of/to a wholly speculative, non-scriptural divine matriarch. But, on those occasions when this unknown matriarch is referred to, these leaders once more demand that their stylistic preferences be maintained and capital letters avoided in vocal intonation and typesetting.
 
How, oh Lord, are we to take such leadership or its claims of insight seriously? Forgive me, O Lord, but Jesus’ famous criticism of the religious leaders of his day comes unbidden to my mind: they “strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel.”[6]
 
Lord, should not Putin be stopped? Will you let him offend and defile his nation and the nations of this world as America’s previous president did? You know how I prayed to you about him. I won’t return to that complaint. Will you not demand of all, especially religious leaders, that they take a stand and proclaim boldly and unequivocally against the evil that is Putin? Will you not put an end to the blasphemy and reproach that Putin’s violence casts at you? Will you not put an end to the trivialization of the Gospel of Jesus Christ? Will you not put an end to the misery and suffering and death of the Ukrainian people?
 
Please act, Lord. I refuse to be comforted until you do. A gospel that does not comfort the vulnerable, the oppressed, the suffering, the powerless, the dying can bring comfort to no one.
 
Even so, come, Lord Jesus!

[1] Isaiah 36.13-15, 18-20
[2] Isaiah 36.23
[3] Isaiah 36.33-34
[4] Isaiah 36.36-38
[5] See, Judges 3.15-26
[6] Matthew 23.24

​​In the twenty first chapter of his book, Isaiah reports hearing a voice, saying,
 
“Go, set a watchman,
   let him declare what he seeth” (vs. 6).
 
Later in the same chapter, Isaiah hears a voice from afar.
 
“Watchman, what of the night?
   Watchman, what of the night?” (vs. 11)
 
In today’s blog post, I will play the role of a watchman and report a just a few of the many things I have watched and seen from my perch on scripture.
 
I have watched the planet continue to heat dangerously from its inhabitants’ insatiable and rapacious appetite and from the impotent response of leaders caught in the web of lust and covetousness.
 
I have watched American citizens, guided by their own insatiable narcissism and led by inept leaders and a freely elected immoral sociopath, insanely refuse to act rationally and morally in the face of the worst pandemic in a hundred years, thus bringing needless sorrow and death to hundreds of thousands of their neighbors.
 
I have watched fathers, mothers, and children worry about having shelter from nature’s hostile elements—necessary shelter inhumanely thought and spoken of by those in power only in sanitized terms such as “rental property” or “house and home”—while rich vulture (no, that is not a typo) capitalists, with legislators' approval, buy and sell needed shelter to line investors’ pockets with the skin they strip off the bodies of the poor.
 
I have watched American lawmakers place anti-democratic obstacles in voter’s paths to the ballot box. Then, if voters possess the chutzpa and demonstrate the ability to negotiate the damnable obstacle course placed before them, those same unlawful law makers threaten to not count and/or certify those audacious voters’ ballots.
 
I have watched tens of millions of innocent American children live in poverty and go to bed hungry while, even in a pandemic, business tycoons count their growing wealth by the billions and unfeeling businesses rake in their misbegotten profits by preying on the vulnerable and powerless.
 
On this very day, I watch another man work himself to the bone laboring at two jobs so he can keep his life-prolonging medical insurance while he weakens daily as another pound of the twenty pounds of flesh that his cancer has already taken falls from his enfeebled frame.
 
In this very hour, I watch with the rest of a perverted and impotent planet as innocent citizens, non-combatants of Ukraine violently die in burning and crumbling cities barbarically targeted by a nation’s army that accepted a psychopath as national leader.
 
As I watch these and countless other crimes against God, angels, and humanity, I also watch secular and religious leaders’ pathetic and impotent—too often near non-existent—response to them. Watching their callous indifference, I imagine that I see Nero, backlit by towering orange flames, playing his fiddle while Rome burns. Or, like Jeremiah of Old Testament fame, I see watchmen who refuse to fulfill their saving call—likely more concerned with the money they have given to their “exchangers” than with the vulnerable and endangered (See DC 101.49).
 
“Also I set watchmen over you, saying,
   ‘Hearken to the sound of the trumpet.’
      But they said, ‘We will not hearken’” (Jer. 6.17).
 
What else am I to think and feel when I compare the desperate needs evident in such dire times with the woefully inadequate and impotent response of America’s secular and religious leaders to those needs? What am I to think and feel, for example, about legislators who, in the face of such need, are so useless as to waste serious discussion and precious time in a matter as trivial as whether we turn clocks forward or backward twice a year? And what am I to think and feel about these “leaders” when this is the only sort of issue—other than weaponizing the planet—around which they can gather and agree? Am I really supposed to take them seriously as “leaders”? Hardly. They are worthless as leaders.
 
And what am I to make of religious leaders who waste time speculating on things such as the possible existence of divine matriarchs, worrying and lecturing about a possible obsession with them, and then attempting to legislate how one utilizes capital letters when referring to this unknown being? What am I to think when those same leaders in “Zion” so seldomly and timidly address in word or deed the very purposes for which God created Zion in the first place—alleviating the suffering of the poor and replacing their poverty with abundance?
 
“That you might be honored in laying the foundation, and in bearing record of the land upon which the Zion of God shall stand; and also that a feast of fat things might be prepared for the poor; yea, a feast of fat things, of wine on the lees well refined, that the earth may know that the mouths of the prophets shall not fail; yea, a supper of the house of the Lord, well prepared, unto which all nations shall be invited. First, the rich and the learned, the wise and the noble; and after that cometh the day of my power; then shall the poor, the lame, and the blind, and the deaf, come in unto the marriage of the Lamb, and partake of the supper of the Lord, prepared for the great day to come” (DC 58.7-11).
 
Twenty-five hundred years ago, Jeremiah complained of the uselessness of Judah’s secular and religious leaders “from the least of them even unto the greatest of them.” “They,” he charged,
 
“Have healed also the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly,
   saying, ‘Peace, peace;’ when there is no peace.”
 
Jeremiah was amazed so see that “they were not at all ashamed, neither could they blush” at their uselessness (See Jer. 6.13-15). America’s secular and religious leaders, too, find no reason to blush at the obscenity of their leadership. If only they made an even half-hearted attempt to “heal… the hurt,” rather than perpetrate greater suffering and more death upon the very people they were elected and called to serve, heal, and protect.
 
We do not go too far or exaggerate when we conclude that far too many American secular and religious leaders are worthy of the same prophetic condemnation as that spoken by the ancient Jewish prophet, Ezekiel.
 
“Woe be to the shepherds of Israel that do feed themselves! Should not the shepherds feed the flocks? Ye eat the fat, and ye clothe you with the wool, ye kill them that are fed: but ye feed not the flock. The diseased have ye not strengthened, neither have ye healed that which was sick, neither have ye bound up that which was broken, neither have ye brought again that which was driven away, neither have ye sought that which was lost; but with force and with cruelty have ye ruled them. And they were scattered, because there is no shepherd: and they became meat to all the beasts of the field, when they were scattered. My sheep wandered through all the mountains, and upon every high hill: yea, my flock was scattered upon all the face of the earth, and none did search or seek after them” (Ezek. 34.2-6).
 
Nor do we do too far in hoping that God will put an end to this, at best, useless rule, and, at worst, self-servingly deadly rule.
 
“Thus saith the Lord God; Behold, I am against the shepherds; and I will require my flock at their hand, and cause them to cease from feeding the flock; neither shall the shepherds feed themselves any more; for I will deliver my flock from their mouth, that they may not be meat for them… As a shepherd seeketh out his flock in the day that he is among his sheep that are scattered; so will I seek out my sheep, and will deliver them out of all places where they have been scattered in the cloudy and dark day… I will seek that which was lost, and bring again that which was driven away, and will bind up that which was broken, and will strengthen that which was sick: but I will destroy the fat and the strong; I will feed them with judgment” (Ezek. 34.10, 12, 16).
 
Even so, come, Lord Jesus!

The Old Testament is the longest of the standard works. In fact, it is longer than all the other standard words combined. Except for a few dozen proof-texts, we Latter-day Saints ignore about 95% of the Book. One of our favorite proof-texts comes from the Book of Malachi. We hear it quoted in Sunday School. In priesthood. In Relief Society. In sacrament services. It would be interesting to know how many general conferences have concluded without having this passage quoted. My guess is, not many.
 
In wonderment at Judah’s failure to “bring… tithes into the storehouse” (Mal. 3.10), Malachi asks his famous question: “Will a man rob God?”
 
So, over and over again we are admonished to pay our tithing. We are assured that we will be personally blessed, the windows of heaven opening wide to flood our narcissistic little worlds with benefits—for this appeal to our self-centeredness is the only way, it seems, to move us to action.
 
Just verses earlier, however, Malachi complains of another theft. This one gets no press. It would be interesting to know whether it has ever been quoted in a single one of the 191 general conferences. My guess is not.
 
“And I will come near to you to judgment; and I will be a swift witness against the sorcerers, and against the adulterers, and against false swearers, and against those that oppress the hireling in his wages, the widow, and the fatherless, and that turn aside the stranger from his right, and fear not me, saith the LORD of hosts” (Mal. 3.5).
 
Wage theft is as much robbery as shorting the Lord in tithes. Both are a violation of God’s law. Indeed, wage theft is lumped together with sorcery and adultery. Why, then, has this warning against wage theft been so often, almost vigorously ignored while other sins, no more perverted, are incessantly harped on? Is it because many of us do not see wage theft as a threat to our narcissistic lives—as a problem impacting others and so of little consequence to us? And yet, this theft is far, far more pervasive and destructive to individuals and society than a few measly million “saints” giving something less than 10% of their income to fund an already hugely wealthy church. Wage theft harms millions, perhaps billions. It has, in fact, become part of our global cottage industry. It is how business is conducted in 2022. Take, for example, the following example from the United States—by no means one of the most obscene examples of wage theft.
 
“Thousands of part-time workers at the United Parcel Service (UPS) around the US were recently informed that their hourly wages would be cut, eliminating raises implemented in 2021 at some hubs as a means to attract and retain workers in the tighter labor market.
 
“Alex Sanchez, a part-time UPS worker in Ontario, California, for one year, said part-time workers at his hub had their base rate increased in 2021 from $15.33 an hour to $18 an hour.
 
“‘We were told that the raise was permanent,’ said Sanchez.
 
“At the end of January, Sanchez said he was informed that his hourly wage and those of every other part-time employee at UPS would revert back to $15.33 an hour.
 
“UPS reported record profits in 2021 as it increased shipping prices; its profits grew nearly tenfold in 2021 to $12.89bn from $1.34bn in 2020. Its stock price hit a record high in February 2022. UPS is projecting more growth in 2022, with the expectation to hit 2023 financial goals a year early. The company approved a $5bn stock buyback program in August 2021” (“‘This $3 cut takes a toll’: UPS slashes pay for part-time workers as profits grow,” Michael Sainato, Guardian).
 
When we consider the degree to which wage theft takes place in America, and the number of individuals who are victimized by corporate robber barens, our willful indifference toward and ignoring of wage theft is all the more perplexing and, frankly, offensive. It not only makes us complicit in the crime, it leaves the victims of wage theft without advocates and subject to continued and additional violation.
 
Perhaps, one might argue that because God is the greatest of all robbing God is worse than robbing one’s fellow man or woman. But, if Jesus is to be trusted, this is patently false; for he makes clear that whatever we do to even the least of those among us, we do to God (See Mat. 25.31-46). A Book of Mormon king, inspired by the same spirit that inspired Jesus, asserted that “when ye are in the service of your fellow beings ye are only in the service of your God (Mos. 2.17). So, robbery of our fellow men and women is the same as robbing God.
 
I don’t know who or how many of those who are reading this right now are guilty of robbing their fellow man and God through wage theft. If there are those who are guilty of such blatant rebellion against God, repent. But, that is not the end of the matter. Those of us who may not be guilty of this crime, may be implicated in the crime through our disinterested silence and our cowardly, selfish refusal to advocate for the millions and billions of workers being harmed by wage theft. We remain complicit in the crime so long as we join in electing and supporting immoral leaders who “decree unrighteous decrees” and “write grievousness” in a vain attempt to turn that which is immoral into something that is moral and to call good what is evil. They, with their business partners, are bandits. They are robbers, who
 
turn aside the needy from [justice],   
   and… take away the right from the poor of my people,  
that widows may be their prey,   
   and that they may rob the fatherless!”
 
And what, what,
 
“what will ye do in the day of visitation,   
   and in the desolation which shall come from far?   
to whom will ye flee for help?  
   and where will ye leave your glory?” (Isaiah 10.1-3)
 
Yes, wage theft is sin. It carries serious consequences. Those who engage in it and those who do and say nothing to challenge its evil will, “with the wicked, lift up [their] eyes in hell, being in torment” (DC 104.18).
 
Even so, come, Lord Jesus!