Our Government Needs God

Guest Opinion by Tonia Stulting

I co-wrote an article recently on why we need to put God back in our institutions. I think we did a decent job of outlining the logic behind that position, but this piece is a little different.  It doesn’t rely solely on logic, but on the personal experience of someone I love.

My brother is 16 months younger than me. In the way of close siblings, he was my best childhood friend when we weren’t trying to kill each other.  My parents got divorced and our dad moved out when we were preteens.  My brother fell in with some bad actors and spent a good part of his youth in and out of prison.  He doesn’t like to talk about that lost decade of his life, so I’m not even sure what he was imprisoned for. If I had to guess it was probably things like possession of illegal substances, theft, and vandalism.  He just recently told me the following story, and I got his permission to talk about it here.

He was headed to yet another prison stint, and he was standing in handcuffs and leg irons in front of the desk of a bored bureaucrat at the Kilby Correctional Facility in Mt. Meigs, Alabama.  Kilby is a maximum-security classification center, a processing hub for male inmates, so it was this man’s job to determine which facility to place my brother in this time.  

The man, probably desensitized by the endless parade of repeat offenders passing by his desk, looked over my brother’s paperwork, never once glancing up at the man standing in front of him. He muttered to himself as he read, and my brother caught the word “selfish”.

He responded with anger and defensiveness, his knee-jerk reaction to most things during those years.  “Selfish?!  What do you mean?”

Still without looking him in the face, the man asked, “You got a woman?  Kids?”

“Yeah, so?”

The man, looking down at his paperwork all the while, handed one of the pages up to him.  “Well, read all this mess you’ve done. Doesn’t it sound selfish to you?”

As my brother read all the stupid, careless things he’d done, all while his wife and children waited for him, he realized that he had been selfish, and he asked the man behind the desk, “Well, is this place you’re sending me gonna fix me?”

That’s when the man looked him in the face for the first time.  “You really want to get better?  You really want to get right?” Then he pointed at the picture of Jesus hanging behind his desk, signed my brother’s paperwork, and sent him on his way.

My brother took that man’s advice.  He sought out the people around him, fellow inmates and employees both, who could introduce him to the Father he’d really been missing. That was his last stint in prison.  He now owns a construction company with his wife of many years, and he makes it a priority to hire and mentor troubled young men.

Jesus saves?  Truer words were never spoken.

 I don’t even know the name of the man who probably saved my brother’s life, but how would things be different now if that man had believed the lies America has been fed about “the separation of church and state”?  I bet I would still be visiting my brother in prison, and his children would never have gotten the chance to know him.  No organization, government or otherwise, will be successful if God is not involved.  I don’t say this because of one man’s story.  I’ve seen it over and over again.

The last time I applied for food stamps I was told what amounted to, “Here, fill these out in triplicate, and we MIGHT be able to help you in three to six months.  If you’d rather not starve to death in the meantime, here’s a list of some churches who keep food pantries.”  The faith-based Downtown Rescue Mission in Huntsville, where my daughter and I have both volunteered, boasts a 70% success rate of its graduates staying clean and reentering society while studies show a rate of 17% in secular programs.

We should do more of what actually works. This isn’t the declaration of a religious fanatic.  It’s just logical.

Tonia Stulting is a Member, of the North Central Alabama Republican Assembly.

For more information on the Alabama Republican Assembly, “the Conscience of the Republican Party,” visit them on the web at https://alabamarepublicanassembly.org or follow them on social media.

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