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Praying for Your Prodigal
Ephesians 1:18
July 30, 2013 | Ray Pritchard
Listen to this Sermon
I received an email with a heartrending question:
I have a daughter that I don't believe is saved. I pray for her but often times I can't. I suppose that I'm angry she isn't responding and feel incapable of helping her. What can I pray for on a daily basis so that she will come to Christ? At times I feel such sorrow, thinking she might go to hell.
This parent speaks for mothers and fathers everywhere who pray for their prodigal children, often for years, with seemingly no results. I do not doubt that praying parents must at some point feel like giving up, and it must be hard not to get angry when you see your children repeatedly making bad choices or showing no interest in the gospel. What do you do then? How do you keep believing for your own prodigal son or daughter?
How do you keep believing?
When I use the word "prodigal," I'm referring to anyone who has drifted away or run away or totally rejected their Christian heritage. It could refer to a college student who simply stops going to church or to a man who thinks he doesn't need "religion" or to someone who becomes an atheist. It could refer to a son raised in the church who calmly tells his mother, "I'm no longer a Christian." A prodigal could be a husband who one day walks out on his marriage and simply disappears. A prodigal could be someone who gets so busy in their career that they have no time for God. In all those cases, the prodigal was raised in a Christian home or had a Christian background and for some reason no longer lives for the Lord. In thinking about cases like this, we often wonder if the prodigal is saved or lost. The answer is, only God knows because only he can read the heart. We don't need to answer the "Are they saved?" question because for the moment we don't know the answer. It's usually not profitable to spend time wondering, "Were they ever truly converted?" Those questions, while important, go to matters of the heart known only to the Lord. Because we see only the outside, it may be easy to conclude that the person we thought we knew so well was never saved in the first place. But our knowledge is limited. While the prodigal may appear to have totally rejected his background, and he may give all the appearances of being lost, only God knows for certain.
The Problem We Face
In thinking about hard questions, it's crucial that we start in the right place. Nowhere is this more important than when we pray for our loved ones who are away from the Lord. Because we have so much invested in them, we may be tempted to give up because the pain of praying when nothing seems to be happening finally becomes overwhelming. After I wrote about this topic on my weblog, I received the following email from a distraught father:
What about prodigals who have been saved and walk away from everything they know to be true? Our daughter has been drifting and living a sinful lifestyle for the past two years. She has recently chosen to totally walk in the ways of the world. She is involved in an abusive relationship and has turned her back on her parents/brothers. This is a young lady who is musically gifted, loves people, and has served the Lord since she was 3 years old.
We are a Christian family and have always been close knit. She and I have always had a strong relationship emotionally and spiritually until she got involved with the abusive boyfriend. She has given up everything she loves and has lost her identity. She continues to cut off all communication with us. It is breaking our hearts and we try our hardest to trust the Lord and believe He alone can rescue her from herself. I guess I am just looking for some words of wisdom and encouragement on how we can be the "hope givers" in her life.
Stories like this could be multiplied. And not just about our children. A prodigal may be a pastor who ran off with a woman in his church and now has rejected his family and his faith. It might refer to a brother who used to be an Awana leader who now refuses to go to church at all. It could refer to a Bible college graduate who now lives an openly homosexual lifestyle. You may have learned about Jesus from someone who now rejects the very faith they once taught you. Very often prodigals start out as people who, having been deeply hurt by the circumstances of life, feel abandoned or cheated or mistreated by God. These things do in fact happen, and they happen more often than we like to admit. If we could go behind the scenes of the "best" Christian families we know, most of them would have stories of a prodigal son or daughter or of a prodigal husband or wife. As far as I can tell, there is no way to guarantee that it won't happen to someone close to you. For that matter, I know of no way to be certain that you yourself may not become a prodigal someday. That's why we have warnings in the New Testament to pay attention to how we live and to take nothing for granted (1 Corinthians 9:27 is a good example).
Prodigals happenIn stating the matter this way, I don't believe I am a pessimist. I am simply drawing conclusions based on a sober reading of the New Testament and a lifetime of dealing with hurting, confused people.
The story we call the "parable of the prodigal son" (Luke 15:11-32) is universally regarded as one of the greatest short stories ever told because it speaks truth about the human condition. Prodigals happen. This is the problem we face. My sermon is not about how to bring them back. They won't come back until they are ready. We can't argue them back or shame them back. If we force them back too early, they will still be in the "far country" on the inside. So my sermon comes down to this. How should we pray for our prodigals? To answer that, we first need to get our theology right.
The Theology We Need
We need to be reminded that an astounding miracle lies at the heart of our faith. We believe something absolutely incredible–that a man who was dead came back to life on the third day. We believe that God raised him from the dead. Now if God would do that for his Son, indeed if God has the power to raise the dead, who are we to question God's power to change the hardest hearts? After all, if you go to the cemetery and stay there waiting for a resurrection, you'll wait a long time. There are lots of people going in and no one coming out. You will see plenty of funerals and no resurrections. What are the chances that a man who had been tortured and then crucified and then buried in a tomb would be raised from the dead? The odds would seem to be against it. You can't start with what your eyes see or what you can figure out. You can't trust your feelings in something like this because your emotions can play tricks on you. We must therefore start with God who can raise the dead, not with the person who is spiritually dead.
Our focus must be on God alone
If it is God alone who can raise the dead, then our focus must be on God alone. Here are three verses that will help us as we think about praying for our prodigals: "Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life" (Proverbs 4:23 NIV). "The king's heart is in the hand of the LORD, Like the rivers of water; He turns it wherever He wishes" (Proverbs 21:1 NKJV). "I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened" (Ephesians 1:18 NASB). The heart has eyes. Did you know that? When Paul speaks of "your heart," he's not referring to the organ in your chest that pumps blood throughout your body. The term "heart" refers to what we might call "the real you," the place inside where the decisions of life are made. The heart is the place where you decide what values you will live by and what direction you will go and how you will live your life each day. Every important decision you make starts in your heart. And your heart has eyes that can be open or closed. When the eyes of your heart are closed to the light of God, you stumble blindly through life, making one dumb choice after another. You fall into sinful patterns, you break God's laws, you end up driving into the ditch, you make the same mistakes over and over again, and you enter one dead-end relationship after another. Why? Because the eyes of your heart are shut and you lack moral vision. The light of God is shut out of your life. That means you can see and be blind at the same time. That is, you can have 20/20 vision with your physical eyes, but the eyes of your heart can be blind to the light of God. There are lots of people like that in the world. Physically they can see but spiritually they are totally blind.
The heart has eyes
That describes many young people raised in the church. They know God, but their eyes are so filled with the things of the world that they are blind to the truth. Let me illustrate. Here we have a young man who has been raised in a Christian home. He's been going to church for years—Sunday School, Vacation Bible School, children's ministry, and the youth group. Now he goes off to college and at last he's on his own. He meets a girl and they start dating. Soon they are sleeping together. When his parents hear about it, they are furious and worried and upset and they wonder what to do. They argue and plead and cajole and threaten and quote Scripture, all to no avail. What is the problem? It is precisely this: The eyes of his heart are closed to the truth of God. And until those eyes are opened, all the yelling in the world won't make much difference.
It's time to get in the game!
If our young people sleep around, or if they get drunk on the weekends, if they cheat and cut corners, if they are rebellious and unmotivated, those things are only symptoms of a deeper, more fundamental issue. They've never made a personal commitment to get serious about Jesus Christ. They're sitting on the bench when they ought to be in the game. I tell you this with total certainty, once you get into the game, once Christ becomes the center of your life, no one will have to tell you not to sleep around, and no one will have to tell you, "Don't get drunk on the weekends." You just won't do it. Once the eyes of your heart are opened, the light of God's truth will come flooding in and you'll never look at anything the same away again.
The Prayer We Must Pray
The heart of the problem is the problem of the heart. Sometimes we worry too much about the symptoms without dealing with the root issues of life. We should pray, "Open the eyes of their heart, Lord," because when that happens, life will radically change. They will grab their helmet and get in the ballgame for the Lord. They'll go to the huddle and say, "You call the play, Lord. I'm ready to do whatever you say." One translation of Ephesians 1:18 (The Voice) says it this way: "Open the eyes of their hearts, and let the light of Your truth flood in." That's what prodigals need. When the eyes of the heart are opened, light from heaven comes flooding in.
Light from heaven comes flooding inSuddenly everything looks different. What seemed right, they now see as wrong. The truth they once mocked, they now gladly obey. The Jesus they spurned, they now worship. The path they followed into sin, they follow no more.
All things have become new to them. What a thousand sermons could not do, they light of God does for them. Once they enjoyed the far country. Now they long to dwell in the Father's house. Once they lived for worldly pleasure. Now they seek to please the Lord.
With God all things are possibleOnce sin held them captive. Now their heart is captive to Jesus alone.
As I type these words, I realize some people wonder, "Is this really possible?" Could a life so far gone in sin ever been deeply changed? My answer is quite simple. We do not need to understand how it could happen. We only need to know that with God all things are possible (Matthew 19:26). Opening blind eyes is the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit. He and he alone can do it. But he can do it, and this is the source of our hope.
We all have the same problem This is why we pray for our children and grandchildren and for our family members and for friends and loved ones who today are far from God. As our children grow older, we discover over and over again how little control we have over them. We cannot compel their obedience because we cannot compel their hearts. But we can pray and cry out to God and say, "O Lord, open the eyes of their heart. Help them to see the light of truth." If you have a prodigal daughter, pray like this: "Lord, open the eyes of her heart so that she can see Jesus." That prayer is so simple and yet so profound. Apart from God's grace, we all have the same problem. Our hearts are closed and we cannot see the truth. Only God can open the eyes of the heart. When God opens those eyes, she will see the truth and light from heaven will come flooding in. Do not focus on her going to hell. Focus your prayers on God and his power to change her heart. Ask our Father to do what only he can do—open the eyes of her heart so that she will come to know him.
A Mother's Tears
My favorite story about the power of prayer to reclaim a prodigal is over 1600 years old. It begins with a woman named Monica who was raised by Christian parents in North Africa. When she was old enough, her parents arranged a marriage to a pagan man. Evidently the marriage was very difficult because of divided spiritual loyalties. Monica and her husband had three children who survived. Two of them followed Christ but one son left the faith of his childhood. By his own admission, he chose the path of worldly pleasure. For many years he lived with a mistress and together they gave birth to a son out of wedlock. He broke his mother's heart by joining a religious cult. Monica prayed for 17 years that her son would return to Christ and to the church.
"Your son will be saved"
Looking back, her son said that she watered the earth with her tears for him, praying more for his spiritual death than most mothers pray over the physical death of a child. She fasted and prayed and asked God to save her son. One day she went to see the bishop and with tears asked why her son was still living in sin. The bishop replied with words that have become famous across the centuries: "It is not possible that the son of so many tears should perish. Your son will be saved." He was right. It took several more years of fervent praying but eventually Monica's son came to Christ. His name is Augustine. We know him today as St. Augustine. He is universally regarded as one of the greatest thinkers in Christian history. Sixteen centuries later his books and writings are still in print. He makes it clear in his Confessions that his mother prayed him to Jesus. She would not give up and eventually God answered her prayers. I think the bishop was right when he said, "It is not possible that the son of so many tears should perish." How precious are a mother's tears! There is no substance on earth more valuable than the tears of a godly mother. There are mothers and grandmothers who have prayed their children and their grandchildren to Christ. There are mothers and grandmothers who have seen their children in the "far country" of sin and have prayed them step by step back to the Father's House. When everyone else gave up, godly women laid hold of heaven and claimed their offspring in Jesus' name. And God heard those prayers and answered them.
We pray because everything depends on GodPlease do not misunderstand. I do not believe that our prayers contain merit in and of themselves. But God has ordained both the means and the ends of salvation. And the two chief means of salvation are fervent prayer and the proclamation of his Word. We pray because everything depends on God, and we preach because the gospel is the power of God for salvation. Your prayers are part of heaven's plan to reach out to the prodigals in your life and bring them back to God. If you are heavily burdened for a loved one, you may be sure that that burden does not come simply from yourself. The burden is a gift from God, a token of his mercy toward the prodigal who at this moment cares nothing for the Lord. Your prayers are an indispensable link in the chain of God's purposes.
First, We Must Change
Finally here is one more email that arrived from a mother whose prayers have not yet been answered:
Our third son is a prodigal, (although I suppose we are ALL prodigals in some fashion!). I have experienced a depth of relationship with God that I didn't know before mothering a prodigal. God has continued to walk this road of parenting with us, revealing his character to us, and growing us through the trials.
I thank God for our son actually. He has been and is the iron that sharpens me. I trust that God is working deep in his heart, even though the outside doesn't often look that way. I believe that someday his eyes will be opened, and God will remove his heart of stone will give him a heart of flesh! And the renewing of his heart and his mind will be a great testimony to God and who he is.
Everything I have been trying to say is in that email. Here is a mother who has grown spiritually as she has prayed for her son who at this moment is still far from the Lord. Instead of becoming bitter, she has been changed on the inside and brought closer to the Lord. God often uses the prodigals in our lives to bring us closer to him. As long as we try to control our loved ones, either through anger or through our tears or by arguing with them or complaining about them to others, as long as we focus on them, they will not change, and neither will we. Sometimes in our despair, we become prodigals ourselves because our anger at them has ruined our own walk with the Lord.
Our anger may make us prodigals
As we pray for our prodigals, we must remember that the first change needs to happen in us. Until we are changed, and our anger is turned to love, we will become bitter and hardened ourselves. That can happen even though we go to church every Sunday, pray the prayers, sing the songs, serve the Lord, and do all the outward things the church asks us to do. At that point we ourselves have become prodigals just as surely as the loved one for whom we are praying. We must relinquish our loved ones into his hands and say, "Lord, they belong to you. Always have, always will." They never were ours to start with. It is so hard to yield them to the Lord, but it is made easier when we remember that his love never fails, that he knows what he is doing, and that he is a better parent than we are. We sometimes look at the prodigals around us and wonder where God is in the midst of our pain. He is not unknowing or uncaring. He is not surprised or stumped.
God is not stumped
Though our prodigals may have left the Lord, he has not left them, not even for a second. They may be "lost" to you, but they are not "lost" to him. He knows exactly where they are and what they are doing at this very moment. He loves them more than you do. And he leads them even when they don't know they are being led. Do you have a loved one who is far from the Lord? Does it seem totally impossible that he or she will ever change? Do you get angry thinking about their foolish choices? Do your prayers seem useless to you? Pay no attention to your feelings. There is more going on in the heart of your loved one than you can know.
Pay no attention to your feelings
Don't give up. Keep on praying. Keep believing. You never know what God will do. When you pray for a loved one who seems hardened against the Lord, pray that the eyes of their heart might be opened so that the light of God can come flooding in. If that seems hopeless, at least it puts the hopeless case at God's doorstep, which is where it belongs. On Saturday night there was a "hopeless case" in the Garden Tomb. On Sunday morning the whole world changed. You never know what God will do, so keep on believing and keep on praying. God specializes in impossible situations, and he loves to prove that hopeless cases aren't hopeless after all. So never give up. Pray, pray, and keep on praying. Your prayers accomplish more than you have ever dreamed.


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Where Is Henry George Now That We Need Him?
April/May 1978
He had the answer—he believed it, and he persuaded millions of others to believe it, too. Even today there are those willing to maintain that if the American people had just listened to him, we would not now be afflicted by a multitude of taxes like barbs in the skin—including the annual stab of the 1040 form.
His name was Henry George, and he was perhaps the most original economic theorist this nation has produced. In his own day he was as well known as, say, Ralph Nader is today, but among the orthodox economic thinkers of modern times, he has long since been dismissed as a curious footnote to nineteenth-century history, one more crackpot among all the anarchists, Populists, and socialists spewed forth by the industrial revolution. He was far more than that; he had something to say still worth listening to, and he put it all down in a book called Progress and Poverty , published in 1879 as the pinnacle of what might be called an intellectual success story by Horatio Alger. As he himself once observed, "… if I have been enabled to emancipate myself from ideas which have fettered far abler men, it is, doubtless, due to the fact that my study of social problems was in a country like this, where they have been presented with peculiar directness, and perhaps also to the fact that I was led to think a good deal before I had a chance to do much reading."
Henry George was horn in 1839 to a middle-class Philadelphia family. His father, a clerk in the customs house who had published religious hooks for some years, was a strict Low-Church Episcopalian. Young George was rebellious from the start. Just before he turned fourteen, he dropped out of school, where he later said he had only "wasted time," and never went back. A passing interest in phrenology led him to analyze his character by the shape of his skull. (Fifty years after his death, his granddaughter, Agnes De Mille, the choreographer, wrote that elderly people who had known George would ask her to remove her hat so they could observe the formation of her head. ) Some of George's self-observation through skull-bump analysis accurately forecast his adult life: "… generally takes sides on every contested question. … Is inclined … to push his projects with so much energy and zeal as to appear rash and nearly destitute of caution … has an insatiable desire to roam about and see the world. …"
At sixteen he shipped out as a foremast boy on the Hindoo , an East Indiaman carrying lumber around Cape Horn to Australia. The round trip, which took the Hindoo to Calcutta to pick up a cargo of rice and seeds, lasted fourteen months, and George came home with a net of fifteen dollars and a pet monkey. For the next couple of years he worked in Philadelphia as a printer's apprentice, but the pay was low and the work unsteady. He had heard from a friend in Oregon of the high printers' wages in the new lands of the West, and he was finding family discipline increasingly irksome. In 1858, when he was nineteen, George went to sea again, this time on a ship bound for California, with no intention of making the return journey. He jumped ship in San Francisco.
Henry George landed in California just ten years after the great Gold Rush had begun. It was an incredible new country whose wealth in rich farm land, it was already evident, exceeded even the value of its precious minerals. There should have been enough for everybody, and for a brief lime in the 1840's and early 1850's there had been; because good land was cheap, employers had to pay higher wages than in the now-old East to attract labor away from farming. But soon power and land and wealth were concentrated in a few hands, wages fell, and the gulf between those who had and those who had not opened up in faithful duplication of humanity's experience elsewhere.
Land was the key to wealth—and poverty. Ry the end of the 1860's, through massive federal and state grants, railroads, largescale farmers, and speculators had acquired much of the new state's most valuable property: almost half the land available for agriculture was owned by one five-hundredth of the population. The owners held their land off the market, knowing its price could go nowhere but up, and new settlers, unable to buy land, had to work for lower wages. The drama was in the deposits of California gold and Nevada silver, but in the words of a contemporary account, "chiefly it was the holders of real estate that made the greatest fortunes." The ups and downs were extraordinary, for history in the California of those days unreeled at the demented speed of an early silent movie: what took generations in the Kast, and centuries in the Old World, happened in California within the span of Henry George's life. George Bernard Shaw later said about George that "Only an American could have seen in a single lifetime the growth of the whole tragedy of civilization from the primitive forest clearing."
This California was to be George's home for the next twenty years. Gold was still being discovered around the West, and soon after his arrival George set out for the latest reported strike, on the Fraser River in British Columbia, in the first of three unsuccessful mining ventures. Back in San Francisco, he found work as a printer at sixteen dollars a week, but nine dollars went for room and board at the respectably all-male What Cheer House, which, he wrote home, had a good library. The job was the first of many: the times were restless, and George was a particularly restless man.
In 1860, at twenty-one, he cast his first vote—for Lincoln (but, like Californians in general, he did not take part in the ensuing Civil War). A year later he married Annie Fox, an Australian-born orphan. The marriage was close and lifelong, and they had four children. George evidently enjoyed their respect, since two of them wrote biographies of their father and a third sculpted his bust. In their accounts, Henry George as parent comes through as impatient but affectionate, interested but absent-minded.
The first years of married life were hard. George kept losing or leaving jobs, his ventures in the printing business were all wrecked in the recurring storms that afflicted California's economy, and the family moved so often that, he observed, they seldom had to clean house. One of George's failures, a job-printing firm he started on a shoestring with two partners, left the couple—with one child, and a second on the way—in particularly difficult circumstances. On Christmas Day, 1S04, George wrote in the diary he intermittently kept: "Feel that I am in a bad situation, and must use my utmost effort to keep alloat and go ahead. … Saw landlady and told her I was not able to pay rent." Mrs. George sold all her jewelry except her wedding ring, and persuaded the milkman to provide milk in exchange for printed cards. George recalled that "I came near starving to death, and at one time I was so close to it that I think I should have done so but for the job of printing a few cards which enabled us to buy a little corn meal. In this darkest time in my life my second child was born." There was no food in the home, and George went out on a desperate search for money. As he described it, "I walked along the street and made up my mind to get money from the first man whose appearance might indicate that he had it to give. I stopped a man—a stranger—and told him I wanted five dollars. He asked what I wanted it for. I told him that my wife was confined and that I had nothing to give her to eat. He gave me the money. If he had not. I think I was desperate enough to have killed him."
George never had to kill anyone, for he soon began picking up enough work as a substitute printer to support the family, though he was in and out of debt for many years. The privation that he had undergone when unable to find work in wealthy California had a profound effect on his thinking, as soon became evident, because around this time George began to write. His first published effort was a letter to the editor of Journal of the Trades and Workingmen in which he asked if it were possible to "check the tendency of society to resolve itself into classes who have too much or too little," a question that was to be his lifelong concern. Another piece, a rather feverish editorial on Lincoln's assassination, got George his first reporting assignments. He began attending political meetings, at one of which he spoke out in favor of free trade, the subject of one of his later books. Soon he was a typesetter, then a reporter, and finally a managing editor of the San Francisco Times , a job that lasted until August, 1868.
Later that year the San Francisco Herald sent George to New York to try to arrange for wire news service. The experience left a deep impression. George got a firsthand lesson in how the game of monopoly was played. The Associated Press, then the only wire service, refused the Herald 's application, and when George enterprisingly started an independent news service, the AP arranged for Western Union, also a monopoly, to raise its rates for news transmission high enough to put the interloper out of business. The city taught him other lessons, too: "The contrast of luxury and want that I saw in New York appalled me, and I left for the West feeling that there must be a cause for this, and that if possible I would find out what it was."
Back in California, George found his answer. Out riding in the hills near San Francisco, he "asked a passing teamster … what land was worth there. He pointed to some cows grazing off so far that they looked like mice and said: 'I don't know exactly, but there is a man over there who will sell some land for a thousand dollars an acre [then an outlandish price for farm land].' Like a Hash it came upon me that there was the reason of advancing poverty with advancing wealth. With the growth of population, land grows in value, and the men who work it must pay more for the privilege. I turned back, amidst quiet thought, to the perception that then came to me and has been with me ever since."
In 1871 George put his "perception" into a forty-eight-page pamphlet, Our Land and Land Policy, State and National , which sold a thousand copies locally and added to his modest reputation in California. Shortly thereafter he had his first unhappy brush with the academic world, a harbinger of the low esteem in which each would hold the other in later years. The new University of California at Berkeley had decided to set up a chair in political economy, and George was asked to deliver a lecture with the thought that, despite his lack of proper credentials, he might be chosen for it.
With his usual willingness to do battle against both odds and his own self-interest, George uncorked a lecture that guaranteed he would not get the job. After castigating the professors for having "given to a simple and attractive science an air of repellent abstruscness and uncertainty," he went on to tell the students: "You do not even need textbooks nor teachers, if you will but think for yourselves. … Here you may obtain the tools; but they will be useful only to him who can use them. A monkey with a microscope, a mule packing a library, are (it emblems of the men—and unfortunately they are plenty—who pass through the whole educational machinery, and come out but learned fools. …" Within the family, George disapproved of homework for his children, and years later, when his eldest son had to choose between a Harvard scholarship and a newspaper job, his father advised the latter, on the grounds that Harvard would leave "much that will have to be unlearned."
George now devoted most of two years to writing Progress and Poverty , the book that was to make him a world figure. These were the "Terrible Seventies," a time of hank failures and bankruptcies; the family lived hand to mouth on his occasional earnings from fees as a gas-meter inspector and from a few lecture engagements. (Most of his lectures were on land or free trade or polities, hut one, which he often repeated in later years, was on Moses.) George went deeply into debt, and at one point he had to pawn his watch, but he was determined to complete the book. Later he recalled that "when I had finished the last page, in the dead of night, when I was entirely alone, I Hung myself on my knees and wept like a child." George sent the manuscript to New York in early 1879 and got two rejections: D. Appleton & Co. found it "very aggressive" and to Harper's it was "revolutionary." George decided to publish it first himself; a friendly printer in San Francisco offered to make the plates, and George himself set some of the type.
Progress and Poverty is long and rambling, but often soaring in its eloquence. George's style is more biblical than economical; this was before economics had to be written in numbers rather than words. Along the way, George offers his critique of classical economic doctrine, delves into world history, and concludes—eccentrically, by current standards of economic writing—with a theological chapter on "the problem of individual life." The subject of the book is summarized in the subtitle: "An inquiry into the cause of industrial depressions and of increase of want with increase of wealth … the remedy."
The "cause" lies with the landowner. Man is entitled only to the fruits of his own labor, but the holder of land, unlike the worker and the capitalist, makes no contribution to wealth: he simply charges others for the use of what was made by nature and which he happens to possess, usually by theft or conquest. Land has value only when it is scarce. When land is abundant, as in early America and early California, no one has to pay for it, there are no landlords, and each person is rewarded according to his effort and his ability. The value of land rises, not through any contribution by its owner, but because more people need more space; because the growth of a community enhances the value of strategically located property; and because of speculation.
The parasitic landowner's share, his "economic" rent—not for any buildings he may put up, but for the bare, natural land itself—can only increase at the expense of the true producers, labor and capital (itself the product of past labor), which George saw as common victims rather than natural antagonists: "When non-producers can claim as rent a portion of the wealth created by producers, the right of the producers to the fruits of their labor is to that extent denied." And when the owner holds his land out of production, waiting for a better pri'ce, land use is distorted because people have to move farther out to find space to work and trade and live—sprawl is what we call it today. Poverty comes with progress. Ultimately, the rough equality of prelandlord times gives way to the extremes of rich and poor, and, in a passage that suddenly jerks us back to today's newspaper: "Upon streets lighted with gas and patrolled by uniformed policemen, beggars wait for the passer-by, and in the shadow of college, and library, and museum, are gathering the more hideous Huns and fiercer Vandals of whom Macaulay prophesied."
In George's view, a landholder had no more right to charge rent for land he did not create than he would to monopolize the air and charge others for the right to breathe. This is how George put it: "If we are all here by equal permission of the Creator, we are all here with an equal title to the enjoyment of his bounty—with an equal right to the use of all that nature so impartially offers. This is a right which is natural and unalienable; it is a right which vests in every human being as he enters the world, and which during his continuance in the world can be limited only by the equal rights of others.… There is on earth no power which can rightfully make a grant of exclusive ownership in land. … For what are we but tenants for a day? Have we made the earth, that we should determine the rights of those who after us shall tenant it in their turn? … Though the sovereign people of the state of New York consent to the landed possessions of the Astors, the puniest infant that comes wailing into the world in the squalidest room of the most miserable tenement house, becomes at that moment seized of an equal right with the millionaire's. And it is robbed if the right is denied."
The absolute ownership of land and other resources of nature is the equivalent of chattel slavery, and a more common evil. Slavery grows up where, as in the early American South, the land is so abundant that free laborers can have it for themselves instead of working it for others. Whenever land is scarce enough to be monopolized, however, laborers will be forced to "a condition which, though they be mocked with the titles and insignia of freedom, will be virtually that of slavery." In the extreme case (here one thinks of Hawaii after the American missionaries and traders had appropriated all the land): "Place one hundred men on an island from which there is no escape, and whether you make one of these men the absolute owner of the other ninety-nine, or the absolute owner of the soil of the island, will make no difference either to him or to them. In the one case, as in the other, the one will be the absolute master of the ninety-nine. …"
Henry George's greatest originality lay in his "remedy." He rejected the usual alternatives of dividing up or nationalizing the land. The first was unworkable and superficial. The second violated both George's profound belief in free enterprise (as long as its fruits were earned) and his equally profound distrust of government. The remedy was to allow private ownership of land, but for society to collect the unearned rent on that land through taxation: "It is not necessary to confiscate land; it is only necessary to confiscate rent." The rent to be "confiscated" was the amount the owner could collect by renting out unimproved land, or if he had improved or built on it, the portion of the rent attributable to the land alone; he would not be taxed on the improvements, because those were products of his own effort. Thus society would recapture the land values society itself had created, and the owner would be forced to put his land to its best use or give it up; hoarding land would no longer pay. Furthermore, the rent, or tax, would be enough to pay all the expenses of government so that neither labor nor capital need be taxed on their just earnings. This was the "single tax" that became glued to Henry George's name. George believed it "would enormously increase production; would secure justice in distribution; would benefit all classes; and would make possible an advance to a higher and nobler civilization."
Such was the message Henry George wanted to preach. When the commercial publication of Progress and Poverty was finally assured, George boldly moved to New York, without money or job, to launch his book and himself. As a later chronicler of the single-tax movement, the historian Arthur N. Young, observed: "Scarcely anything in the history of social reform movements is more remarkable than the spectacle of this unknown California printer setting foot in New York City in 1880, poor in pocket, equipped solely with a book and the consciousness of a message, to become the founder of a new world-wide crusade against world-old evils." The author himself professed the utmost confidence, writing to his eighty-one-year-old father in Philadelphia that "it will ultimately be considered a great book, will be published in both hemispheres, and be translated into different languages."
Against all odds, George was right. Within a year Progress and Poverty was widely noticed and began to sell as no book on political economy had ever sold before. It was published in England,and eventually it was translated into more than a dozen languages, including Chinese, unknown on his fortieth birthday, at forty-two the California printer was on his way to world fame. His short, stocky Rgure, with reddish beard and high balding forehead, became familiar on the lecture platform. In 1881 George went to England and Ireland on the first of many lecture tours; he was also the correspondent of the New York Irish World . The Irish, and English radicals opposed to the exploitation of the Irish by English landowners, were particularly receptive to his views on land. Shaw, who dropped in on one of George's lectures by accident, credited the event with making him a socialist, and most of the members of the reform-socialist Fabian Society came there by way of an earlier exposure to Henry George.
By 1884 George was churning out articles, writing his next book, Protection or Free Trade? , and lecturing to working-class audiences, many of whom had read the cheap edition of Progress and Poverty . His working-class support led to his race for mayor of New York in 1886. Although Samuel Gompers, head of the newly founded American Federation of Lahor, was one of his converts, labor was less interested in the single tax than in the idea that George was the only person who had a chance of defeating the dreary offerings of the two-party system. George didn't particularly want to be mayor, but he saw an opportunity to "raise hell." When the union leaders approached him, he said that, as a guarantee against "ignominious failure," he would only run if they could produce thirty thousand signatures on a petition, a huge number at the time. The unions collected thirty-four thousand signatures, and Henry George formally accepted the nomination at the Great Hall of Cooper Union. The Democrats coughed up a relatively respectable figure, Abram S. Hewitt, and the Republicans nominated a rising young patrician politician named Theodore Roosevelt.
Now, Henry George in public office, mayor of the nation's leading city, was quite a different matter from Henry George in the bookstores and on the lecture platform. Wealthy and landed interests joined against such a clear and present danger. All the press was against George, except the Irish World and the German-language Volkeszeitung , a socialist paper, though some reporters on the major papers moonlighted without pay on a pro-George campaign paper called The Leader . The Republicans were advised to withdraw Roosevelt in order to prevent George from winning, for if he did, in Hewitt's words, they might as well "go out onto Henry George's unoccupied lands and hang themselves."
George ran vigorously, speaking to enthusiastic street crowds from the tailboards of carts. But in those days when each candidate had to supply his own watch over the vote counting, he suffered from a fatal handicap that had been diagnosed earlier by a Democratic party worker: "How can George win? He has no inspectors of election." On Election Day, the returns showed George second, with 68,110 votes, only twice his number of petition signatures. Hewitt, the Democrat, came in first with 90,552 votes, and Roosevelt was third with 60,435. The consensus was that the election had been stolen, like others in the city's history, and an expert in the RcId, Tammany boss Richard Croker, later commented: "Of course they could not allow George to win. It would upset all their arrangements."
George's defeat foreshadowed his consistent failure to translate mass support into either political victory or change in the tax system. A year later the nascent Georgist political movement fell apart, with the socialist faction proclaiming that "the burning social question is not a land tax, but the abolition of all private property in instruments of production." The split was inevitable. Both shared a commitment to the ideal of equity, but George the individualist and believer in Adam Smith's free market could never agree with Karl Marx, another contemporary prophet, that state ownership was the way to get from here to there. Certainly the two had little use for each other. Marx dismissed George as "the capitalists' last ditch," while conceding, rather surprisingly, that "he is otherwise a writer of talent (but to have talent is a Yankee characteristic). …" George considered Marx "a most superficial thinker, entangled in an inexact and vicious terminology" and "the prince of muddleheads."
George remained active for the eleven years of life left to him after the 1886 election. His lecture tours took him as far as Australia, which, then and now, practices a diluted form of his land-value tax. (The full "confiscation of rent" exists nowhere.) On the way to Australia he stopped off in California, where local observers commented wonderingly on the world renown achieved by their own "little Harry George." His writing was prolific. From 1887 to 1892 he edited the Standard . a weekly platform for his opinions. Having become enbroilcd in dispute with the Catholic Church over its disciplining of Edward McGIy nn, a priest who supported him for mayor, George wrote, in 1891, An Open Letter to the Pope , a reply to the papal encyclical Rerum Novarum , in which he took Pope Leo XIII to task for his support of property rights in land. Whenever George could find a free-trade candidate, he campaigned for him.
George's life and personality do not seem to have been transformed by his sudden rise from obscurity to fame. Since he never held on to money, his family's life-style remained modest, though not impoverished as in the earlier years. Although single-mindedly devoted to his beliefs, George was free of the hatred that disfigures so many true believers; he showed no vindictiveness toward his opponents, and he did not go around preaching "hang the landowners." Always physically active, he learned to ride a bicycle at fifty-two, and thereafter would drag his family and friends out biking in Central Park.
In 1897 George was persuaded to run again for mayor of New York. On October 29—in the middle of the campaign—he died suddenly of apoplexy. He was fifty-eight. His massive funeral called forth tributes from friend and foe: as with most radicals, Henry George became praiseworthy once he was safely buried.
The single-tax movement survived George as a significant political force for about twenty years. In the first two decades of this century, single-taxers fought—and lost—referendum battles in several states and cities. The issue was fought four times in Oregon alone, the single-taxcrs being financed by Joseph FeIs, a soap manufacturer who gave a total of $173,000 to "put the single tax into effect somewhere in the United States within five years."
The massive influence of Henry George and Progress and Poverty in awakening interest in social reform was diverted toward targets other than his land tax, for, as George himself noted, most people had other, more pressing goals. George was fated to he a kind of John the Baptist for other prophets preaching different and often contrary messages. Many of the Americans George had inspired backslid into the Progressive and Populist movements, and the goal of removing unearned profit from landholding was lost. The Georgist movement faded away to the margins of history, where it remains today—a sect apart rather than a serious force, dedicated more to preserving his memory than to implementing his beliefs.
Yet interest in the ideas Henry George expounded has been rising in recent years. That interest spans the range from his method of taxing land to his philosophical view of humanity's relation to nature. Many economists and urban experts, though they do not often invoke his name, now believe he was right about taxing land rather than the improvements on the land. Shifting the property tax (which now taxes both equally) all or mostly onto the land itself would benefit both the decaying city and the vanishing countryside. The tax would act on the landowner as both stick and carrot. In and around the cities, where vast amounts of potentially valuable land are vacant or underused, a high tax on land value would force the landowner to put it to its most economic use, while less or no tax on buildings would reduce or remove the present penalty he pays for improving the property. This is land that, being strategically located in terms of transportation, should be used intensively: that's why a city grew up there in the first place. Since there is only so much demand for factories and stores and homes, the more intensive use of the best-located land would reduce the pressure on outlying areas. Thus, in the country, the land tax would discourage the phenomenon of sprawl, so costly in land and energy and money, and save some of the acres now disappearing under the suburban bulldozer. Some, not all: people have to live and work somewhere, so the most desirable land now farmed (and often in fact held for speculation) would go to other, more intensive uses. Rut because the high tax on the most valuable land would encourage thrifty use of it, much larger amounts of land would be saved for open space or agriculture.
The patterns of land use, which in large measure shape our lives, would become more varied—more intensive use here, more open space there—in place of the even spread of the usual suburb. Less land would be used, and other great savings would result: fewer highways, fewer utility lines, less fuel spent on auto travel, less air pollution. This sort of human settlement lends itself to mass transit—an obvious goal of any rational energy-saving policy—and a variant of George's land tax would provide the means to pay for it. Any new transportation line causes an increase in land value along its routes that often exceeds the cost of its construction. This windfall is completely unearned by the property owners who receive it; this is, in fact, a dramatic case of community-created land value. A Georgist would look to that windfall, not to taxes imposed on the general public, as the best and fairest source of money to pay for new transportation lines.
In less strictly economic terms, George's vision of assuring both freedom and fairness in access to natural resources is particularly appealingtoday. Any reader of Progress and Poverty can figure out how George would answer the pressing questions ofourtimcs. Instead of trying to prevent pollution by regulation, he would tax polluters heavily enough to motivate them to clean up their messes. He would allow private enterprise to mine minerals and oil and other fossil fuels, but he would tax away that part of the profit due to exclusive access to the gifts of nature. Doubtless he would apply the same principle in the developing debate over mining the ocean floor, taxing in this case for the benefit of all humanity—an attractive alternative to mining for the benefit only of multinational monopolies or authoritarian governments or incompetent international agencies. Ucyond that, George's view of the world around us as a trust to be preserved rather than a conquest to be looted is in harmony with our growing awareness of the limits of nature. In this most profound sense—that we are all tenants on this earth, and owe rent for how we use and misuse it—Henry George speaks to the present and the future quite as eloquently as he did to the past.

subset: commoncrawl


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In the News: The Governor and Being Human
Today, we have The Walking Dead, Being Human, Warm Bodies, and World War Z for you, as well as natural disasters, databases to keep yourself updated and out of harm's way, and a nationwide earthquake drill. Will you participate?
Top Stories
It's the rise of The Governor in the land of the undead (via ToNight)
The third installment of the Emmy award-winning zombie fest series, The Walking Dead, features an |array of exciting and intriguing new characters. Among them is seasoned British actor David Morrissey as The Governor. Debashine Thangevelo found out how he feels about depicting the villainous comic book character…
I DON'T think David Morrissey imagined he would bag the role of The Governor – an immensely popular character with fans of The Walking Dead comic books – when he visited his friend in Los Angeles.
But that is exactly what came to pass.
Thespian Rob Corddry Shares Acting Tips With the Undead in Warm Bodies (via Dread Central)
Having been a zombie for Romero, I can tell you first-hand that a lot goes into playing one of the undead. Oh, how I wish I would have had someone of the caliber of Warm Bodies' Rob Corddry to guide me through it all.
Starring Nicholas Hoult, Rob Corddry, Teresa Palmer, and John Malkovich, Warm Bodies follows an existentially tormented zombie named "R" (Hoult) who begins an unlikely friendship with the girlfriend of one of his victims (Palmer). It's based on the book by Isaac Marion.
Disaster Central
Part 2: "Tornado Chaser" Reed Timmer's Terrifying Hotel Tales (via Hotel
Earthquake drill planned Feb. 7 across Central United States (via Courier-Journal.com)Chatter)
Volcano Database (via Emergency Management)
Unrestricted access to the details of deadly eruptions (via Terra Daily)
The Dead, the Undead, and WWZ
Being Human: Meaghan Rath Talks Being Undead, Roommate Romance, Craving Brains, and More! (via Dread Central)
"Nobody is safe" on Walking Dead (via RTE)
World War Z Fan-Made Posters Will Put You In An Undead Mood (via Cinema Blend)


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Presented by Moonbox Productions
Music and Lyrics by Michael John LaChiusa
Book by Michael John LaChiusa and George C. Wolfe
Based on the poem by Joseph Moncure March
Directed and choreographed by Rachel Bertone
Music direction by Dan Rodriguez
Orchestration by Bruce Coughlin
Now – May 1, 2016
Calderwood Pavilion at the BCA
Boston, MA
Moonbox on Facebook
Review by Kitty Drexel
Trigger warning: underage rape, blackface, drinking, drugs, violence
(Boston, MA) Moonbox Production's The Wild Party is a tight, gin-moist package of cruelty, casual racism and light kink. It's a domestic violence fairy tale of grotesque proportions, and sexy as fuck. Everyone over the age of 18 should see it. The subject might be naughty but its methods are mesmerizing. Continue reading