Parenting & Family Quote by Tony Campolo

Campolo’s line is a moral judo move: he uses the language of patriotic duty to flip the audience’s attention from a distant battlefield to the home front. By invoking “every man, woman, and child” twice, he borrows the cadence of political promises and biblical inclusiveness, making the comparison feel less like policy wonkery and more like a test of national character. The question isn’t informational; it’s prosecutorial. It corners listeners into admitting that the U.S. can marshal enormous resources for war-zone logistics while treating universal health care as an impossible dream.

The subtext is sharper than the genteel clergy tone suggests. If America can guarantee comprehensive coverage to people in Iraq because it controls the system there (occupying power, military infrastructure, centralized authority), then the barrier at home is not capability but will. Campolo is quietly accusing his audience of accepting a hierarchy of human worth: that American lives, paradoxically, become less “deserving” of collective care precisely because they’re inside a market and a political system that normalizes scarcity.

Context matters. This is post-9/11 America, when the Iraq War was sold as both security policy and humanitarian mission. Campolo, a prominent evangelical voice with progressive instincts, is speaking into a culture where “support the troops” often functioned as a conversation-stopper. He refuses that script. By tethering war spending to domestic neglect, he reframes patriotism as caregiving, not conquest, and forces a faith-rooted question onto a policy battlefield: What does a nation owe its own people when it can so readily promise wholeness to others?