December 1st, 2023 | Grant Johnson

Sponsor A Child Before Your Enemies Do

It goes beyond compassion.

Compassion is a Christian-based charity that partners with local churches in third-world countries and offers religious instruction as well as basic healthcare and education. They run events for children to socialize and congregate and provide social services and supplementary developmental programs.

There’s a lot of reasons why people give to this organization, and it usually centers on the name of the organization itself: Compassion. The Christian notion of having empathy for the plight of others and sharing resources with those who have less, is a fundamental trait of the faith. I suspect most people who get involved in sponsoring a child are doing so for no other reason than this.

There are, however, other angles and conservatives should consider sponsoring a child for reasons beyond just compassion.

“U.S. officials now say that key [Saudi government and affiliated] charities became the pipelines of cash that helped transform ragtag bands of insurgents and jihadists into a sophisticated, interlocking movement with global ambitions. Many of those spreading the Wahhabist doctrine abroad, it turned out, were among the most radical believers in holy war, and they poured vast sums into the emerging al Qaeda network.” – David Kaplan

We know that radical Islam is exported from places like Saudi Arabia into countries throughout the Middle East and Africa. Children, especially boys, are enrolled into Islamic schools and in many cases brainwashed into being jihadists and suicide bombers. Money is then dumped onto the families of these victims and the school begets a reputation for providing wealth to those who provide holy warriors trained by the Imams.

The three children I sponsor all live in multi-religious African countries. I view my sponsorships as a bulwark against the rise of radical Islam. By giving opportunities to Christians and potential Christians in these regions, the Christian church can act as a counterforce to the Islamic alternative. By offering this option to children, they will be less likely to convert to Islam and get enrolled in the Islamic programs to begin with.

Furthermore, the spread of Christianity, any religion frankly, requires not only a good message, but good messengers along with it. In the early days, the zealous iron-will of post-resurrection Apostles won hearts and minds amongst the downtrodden. What is usually not mentioned, however, is that Christianity really took off 300 years after it started because it was tolerated, then adopted by Constantine, as the official religion of the Roman Empire. Christian ideology merged with power and status and took the nascent religion out of the catacombs and around the world.

Power and status are necessary for any successful religion. Offering poor people the word of God is wonderful. Offering poor people the word of God and a multitude of resources previously unavailable to them is even better. If a Compassion church has the resources to improve itself and provide more value to the community in the form of prosperity and development, then the impact of whatever ideology exists behind those improvements will have much more impact on the people who receive the benefits. If the power and status of Christians in a community increases, then Christianity will win, and Islam will whither.

Donating to charities like Compassion can help strengthen and develop local communities against the influence of radical Islam. Competition can’t be won without the generous use of resources…and by resources, I mean money. If we don’t donate a few bucks to children in need, then you can be sure that some Saudi Prince will, and we could end up with the future of Africa looking like an Al-Qaeda fever dream.

But why care? Perhaps those dollars could be, or should be, better spent closer to home.

I understand the point, and there’s nothing stopping anyone from also investing in charities or churches closer to home. In this instance, however, the stakes are much higher, and the future is up for grabs. A dollar spent in these circumstances goes a lot further than a dollar spent in your hometown. A functioning church with traditional beliefs operating in a village of a thousand people in Africa, can be a much more powerful resource to a community than trying to bolster a non-functioning church with rainbow flag beliefs operating in a village of a thousand people in Canada.

Africa has about a billion people right now and they are the only continent that is still bearing large numbers of children. By the end of this century more than half the world will be African. African people will likely spread out across the globe as expanding populations throughout history have always done. What they’ll find is an old and empty planet facing decline and ripe for the taking. A conservative and Christian planet is much more appealing than a theocratic and Islamic one.

Today there are 738 million Europeans (500 million of them in the E.U.) and just under 1.2 billion Africans. In 2050, according to the latest U.N. projections, Europe’s population will have dipped to (an aging) 707 million, while Africa’s population will be 2.4 billion. By 2100, there will be 4.4 billion Africans…and Europe’s population will be just 646 million. - Ross Douthat - NY Times 2015

Many conservatives these days consider themselves race-realists and reject the fundamental plank of progressivism known as “Blank Slate Theory”. This is the Enlightenment era notion that all men are created equal, and everyone is capable of anything so long as society doesn’t stand in the way. This fundamental progressive belief started out in a graceful Christian manner, suggesting all humans have intrinsic worth. Over the centuries, however, it has devolved into not knowing how to define what a woman is, or shoe-horning unqualified people into positions they don’t belong, simply on the basis of race or sexual proclivity. Woke madness is the great, great-grandchild of enlightenment notions of equality.

The problem with recognizing natural differences between racial groups is that it can quickly degenerate into simple stereotyping. It’s a fine line between noticing reality and being a racist, a line many on our side cross much too often.

Before being cancelled, Stefan Molyneux suggested that Africa will never develop because the average IQ of Africans is so low. The theory purports that IQ is mostly heritable so it’s not a matter of education or resources or institutions, Africans are not capable of not living in squalor because their capacity doesn’t allow for it. Many other right-wingers like to make these types of claims. They suggest that charitable giving only results in fuller bellies and more breeding, which leads to the next generation of fly-covered dirt dwellers.

This harsh assessment ignores positive solutions that can have fundamental impact, as well as the recent developments of some other current realities in Africa.

Nutrition

One of the biggest negative factors working against IQ development is lack of nutrition, especially in the early years of a person’s life. A growing baby with unlimited nutrients to satiate the brain and body is going to having a huge advantage over a baby constantly starving and deficient. Some studies suggest that a person’s IQ can be increased by 10 points so long as they have access to the basic necessities of civilized life in the early years. (Iodine, medical care, vitamins, calories, vaccines)

20% of Africans struggle with hunger and deprivation. The other 80% could use improvements. IQ can be strengthened through material development and if it comes from the top down and from outside the borders then so be it. Once the IQs go up, it makes for better human resources to improve things from within.

IQ isn’t evenly distributed

There are millions of extremely smart Africans. The bell curve may be shifted to the left, but that still leaves a lot of smart people within the borders of every country. Take someone like Ayaan Hirsi Ali for example. She’s Somalian; a country in which the average IQ is about 68. For comparison, anyone with an IQ of 70 is clinically considered to have borderline mental retardation. Obviously, Ayaan is an author, scholar, and former politician. Two of those three things require an IQ above mental retardation.

The temptation for Africa’s high IQ citizens will be to leave for countries where their intelligence can be more handsomely rewarded. Nevertheless, should enough stay behind they will carve out an elite space for themselves and put their gifts to work right at home for the benefit not just of themselves, but everyone around them.

Take the president of Rwanda, Paul Kagame for example, he is obviously a very intelligent Rwandan elite. When he became president in 2000, he was able to double the size of the economy in 7 years. By 2014, he doubled it again. The poverty rate is down. The literacy rate is up. Access to electricity is up. Maternal fatality rates are down. Access to clean water is up. Fertility rates are way down (5.8 to 3.8 in 20 years).

These are painstakingly slow processes and obviously Rwanda is still one of the poorest places on Earth, but 30 years ago it was an ungovernable hellhole filled with machete genocide. Today it looks like this.

With a smart leadership class in business, government and military, all of Africa can develop in much the same way. The talented ten percent can rise to the top, just as we see in every endeavour. It’s the Pareto principle played out in the racial IQ arena. So long as you’ve got a decent ruling class (no easy task), the people less endowed with smarts can simply let them lead and ride the wave of prosperity that follows behind.

No democracy

According to the Democracy Index, almost every African country lacks a functional, legitimate democracy. Progressives will lament this fact and claim, “Much work to be done!” However, the lack of democracy in Africa can function as a benefit rather than a cost.

When the majority of your population is dumb, the last thing you want is democracy. African leaders able to climb to the top, should rule with a free and firm hand, unencumbered by the notions of competitive politics. The danger is that you get tyrants and people prone to violence winning through force, but the reward can be sustained long-term success should a leader with intelligence, ambition and competence arrive. The process is messier than in a democracy, but as the Arab Spring and George W. Bush’s experiments in Iraq and Afghanistan showed us, democracy can be messy too…and riddled with horrific failure.

Before 1880, Africa was mostly tribal and had empires and caliphates and kingdoms. Colonialism imposed Western Civilization from abroad and by 1960 the Europeans had run out of steam. There has really only been about 50 years or so of independent self-rule in a modern state context. It took Englishmen about 500 years to go from the Magna Carter to the U.S. Constitution, so if democracy is an ideal to aim for, the Africans have only just begun. In the meantime, let them govern in whichever way produces good results.

Natural Resources

It’s hard to imagine the quantity and quality of natural resources in Africa. The sheer size of the continent isn’t accurately represented in our popular media. You could fit China, India and the United States into Africa and still have room left over.

What Africa lacks in human capital it more than makes up for with bountiful natural resources. The more they can take advantage of their assets the more their standard of living will improve. Everyone doesn’t need to be a genius if a large part of your wealth can be derived from the riches of the land.

Declining Fertility

Despite handwringing by Elon Musk and many of the others in the birth dearth crowd, one of the easiest ways to alleviate poverty is to not breed more people into it. When Japan’s fertility rate dropped below the replacement rate in 1974, it led to an economic boom shortly thereafter. The same thing for the United States which saw the fertility rate drop below the replacement rate in 1973.

China artificially and barbarically dropped their fertility rate on purpose in 1980 with the “one-child policy”. This policy was aspirational and China’s fertility rate actually just went from 2.8 in 1980, to 1.8 by 1993. At that point in the early 90s, China was finally at a below-replacement fertility rate and guess what happened?

Chinese standards of living skyrocketed. The economy boomed year after year after year. Sure, there were reforms and liberalizations and trade deals and technological advances and this and that…but the fertility rate dropping below replacement corresponds to these developments, if not causing them outright and it is a pattern that is repeated in every country that sees fertility rates drop below replacement levels.

India is the most recent country to drop below replacement rates. Watch for India’s economy to dominate the world in the 2030s and 40s.

Africa is the caboose on the train of worldwide fertility rates. In 1990, Africa had an average of 6 children per woman. In 2004, it was down to 5 children per woman. Today, it is down to 4 children per woman. If current rates of decline continue, then by 2045 Africa will hit 3 children per woman. By 2075 Africa too will fall below the replacement rate.

When people aren’t spending all their time, money and energy trying to provide the basics for their children, they are left with surplus and that surplus can then be spent on improvements. Instead of six kids eating rice, you can have two kids eating rice and chicken and carrots. Instead of two out of six kids going to school, leaving the leftovers for violence or exploitation, you can send your two kids to school and not worry about the ones leftover because they won’t be there to worry about. Instead of needing six shirts and shorts and shoes, now you only have to buy two shirts and shorts and shoes, or maybe four so they each have more than one set.

Anyway, you see what I’m illustrating here, and this is the path out of poverty both on an individual and mass scale.

(Sure, problems of an aging population show up fifty years later, but let’s solve one thing at a time.)

What does love look like? It has the hands to help others. It has the feet to hasten to the poor and needy. It has eyes to see misery and want. It has the ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of men. That is what love looks like. – Augustine