Posted by Otter at 12:04pm Jun 11 '14I think this article is pretty unfair.
I have nothing but distaste for World Vision at this point, but not for the reasons you think.
I don't think it's fair for the author to hint that the World Vision PR meltdown is indicative of an entire generation of 'evangelical' Christians nationwide and the numbers that the author used to illustrate her point about people who quit their sponsorship are totally without context or explanation. In short - it's a very poorly written piece with a clear bias trying to illicit a specific response of disgust from the reader. It contains very few facts that pertain to what actually happened and even fewer real statistics about the impact of World Vision, it's supporters, or Christian giving on the whole.
World Vision committed a huge PR blunder and contradicted their own written value statements in a multitude of ways on "both sides" of the event (both in announcement and retraction). The entire event should result in several people getting canned.
It wasn't anything more than that though, and the author trying to turn this into something bigger or some "sign" of horrible conservative homophobic Christians is just really poor and misinformed writing.
I've written several times before about how I AGREE with the author's stance on homosexuality and Christianity and loving "the least of these".
I think she could have done a much better job of simply saying... look, these horrible people who hate in the name of our God are still out there influencing decisions. We - as Christians - should continue to do something about that.
or alternately - a better job of simply covering the story for what it actually was - a huge PR blunder by a para-ministry non-profit organization that's already under a lot of fire for it's hypocrisy and practices.
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I quit sponsoring World Vision myself about 3 years ago and picked up Compassion International. I had a lot of good reasons for this, not limited to stunts like this one. Compassion has it's own issues as well. None are perfect.
As a realistic Christian, I don't expect that my money will always be used to do the greatest good that it can do. I do hope that I'm making the most informed choice that I can at any given moment in time to do the greatest good that I can do within the limitations of my understanding and ability to know.
Certainly some of the people who withdrew their sponsorship were doing it out of hate and vile. The number was around 2,000 apparently. Do we know what the reason was for that 2,000?
According to World Vision's website "we serve close to 100 million people in nearly 100 countries around the world". So 2,000 would be 0.002%.
Let's stretch this a little more conservatively. World Vision claims to support a whole family with a single sponsorship... I'll buy that... so let's say 100,000,000/5 for a average third world family size of 5 (yes, I pulled that out of my butt). So now we're talking about 20 million. That's still only 0.01%.
I wonder what their daily in/out-flow rate is of sponsorship?
It sounds to me more like a non-event. It sounds to me more like World Vision was trying to stir-up attention (any press is good press, right?). In their own announcement World Vision claimed that they didn't want this GLBT thing to be a big deal... which immediately begs the question... why did you write a press release about it?
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Conclusion:
Is World Vision a crappy organization and have they proven that once again very recently? Yes.
Are all evangelicals conservative homophobic pricks and does this event just ruin it for a whole generation of Americans? Well, it does if enough authors like this one get the influence they wanted with their horrible writing.
Agnostic, Atheist, Christian, Muslim or 'whatever' you are... you should hate bad writing (even when it's opinion writing like this article) that tries to influence you with intentionally false conclusions and emotionally appealing big headlines.
I think - Otter