'Whosoever will'
Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears gave these who attended the Strengthening Faith, Family & Community summit on Thursday a deeply personal look at the faith that defines her.
By Martin Davis
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
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There wasn’t a large crowd at the Kingdom Family Worship Center on Thursday afternoon when Winsome Earle-Sears arrived to deliver the day’s keynote address.
“We’re not concerned about rooms that are full,” she told the 30 or so people in attendance.
“Whosoever will.”
And those who will, Earle-Sears added, can change the world. “The lord took 12 people … half of them scared out of their wits, and caused the gospel to go everywhere.”
Perhaps it was the size of the crowd. Or that Earle-Sears was among people she appears to feel most comfortable — church leaders and those motived by faith. But the sitting Lt. Governor and the Republican candidate for governor set her formal speech to the side and gave those at the Kingdom Family Worship Center a deeply personal look at how she understands what orders life and motivates people to build strong societies.
Referencing the name of the meeting that had brought her and local nonprofit leaders together — the Strengthening Faith, Family & Community Summit — Earle-Sears said: “That’s the right order, because everything starts with faith, doesn’t it? And then we have the family, and then we have the community.”
Over the next 20 minutes, Earle-Sears combined equal parts theology and philosophy to peel back her understanding of faith’s centrality in ordering society.
Not that embracing faith means that the journey is going to be easy. “… from the very beginning,” Earle-Sears said, “families have been in trouble.”
She spoke of the Garden of Eden, “where everything went our way. The soil produced without backbreaking work…. There was no drought. The weather was perfect.” And jokingly, “Fashion was optional….”
The joke didn’t immediately land, so like a preacher calling the flock to their side, Earle-Sears gave the punch line again. And this time, the crowd came along.
“We loved each other …” she continued, “until the snake showed up.”
These are more than Bible stories and parables for Earle-Sears. They define how she sees America — the land her father immigrated to with “seven quarters” in his pocket.
“If you’re going to fail,” she said, “America is where you want to fail. Just because … everybody is dying to get here. So America, I think, is the closest we’re going to get to the Garden of Eden.”
Her tying America to Christian themes is well-trod ground in American politics. Ronald Reagan in his farewell address, for example, reached for the words of 17th-century minister John Winthrop to describe America as a “City on a Hill.” And the expression “God Bless America” has been a near-ubiquitous sign-off for U.S. presidents since Richard Nixon.
For Earle-Sears, however, tying America to Christianity appears to be ground in a personal faith that is not leveraged for electoral gain, but motivates her desire to seek election. And in this near-Garden of Eden, faith is the key she reaches for to unlock the solutions that plague our society.
People think, she said, that “poverty is the problem.” She reached back to the second century and Marcus Aurelius to make the point, quoting his line that “poverty is the mother of crime.”
She then reached for 17th century thinker Jean de La Bruyère, who said: “If poverty is the mother of crime, then the lack of intelligence is their father.”
So delivering a sound education is the key to fixing poverty?
No, Earle-Sears said, citing Theodore Roosevelt, who said: “To educate a man, but without morals, is to educate a menace to society.”
And herewith for Earle-Sears is the reason that faith is the lynchpin of society. Education “gave me a good start,” she said, and it “lifted my dad out of poverty when he came to America. “So, yes, the children need education, but we have some educated fools, don’t we?”
She explained that it is through faith that she learned to move from concern about the problems around her to action. It’s what motivated her to approach a pastor about having families in the church “adopt” families who needed help, and then provide and care for them. Something Earle-Sears and her husband did.
She pointed to research from the University of Virginia that showed the impact of being a part of a faith community has on first marriages surviving for at least 20 years. Fifty-eight percent of first marriages in Virginia reach their 20th anniversary. But couples in a faith community see that number rise into the 70s.
Faith yields these positive results, Earle-Sears suggests, because faith is what motivates people to take on challenges themselves, and not deflect the problems we all encounter to others.
“Do we really need anything more than that?,” Earle-Sears asked rhetorically. “You see a need, and you fill a need.”
Earle-Sears is one who will. The question this November will be, will Virginians follow?
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