Whenever you see a left-leaning Christian talking to a conservative about poverty, it turns into a question of who should be taking care of the poor. I found myself in a debate about this the other day, and the gentleman I was talking to fell back on the argument that it was the church’s job to take care of the poor, and not the government. But is that really true?
Whose “job” is it to take care of the poor?
My first thought whenever I hear this argument is, “who gave the church this job?” Obviously the implied answer is God. After all, Jesus does talk a lot about his followers’ responsibility for taking care of the downtrodden, poor, and oppressed. If you read his parable about the sheep and the goats, it’s easy to walk away with the impression that eternal life rests entirely upon whether or not a person cares for the poor. It’s pretty obvious that Jesus intends for the church to be in the business of serving “the least of these.”
But does that mean that he’s delegated that responsibility away from non-faith communities and governments? That seems a little silly. To tell his followers to be mindful of a particular group doesn’t necessarily preclude the rest of humanity’s responsibility to each other. If I tell my kids to pick up their trash, I’m not sending a message to every other parent on my block that their kids can litter because my kids will pick it up.
Christ’s major point is that he cares about what happens to the those on society’s bottom rung. It would be irresponsible for Christians to not encourage everyone to do all that they can to protect them.
What happened to the Christian nation?
In America, there’s a lot of talk about being a “Christian nation.” Typically the people who are the most concerned with viewing the nation as Christian are the same people who don’t believe it’s the government’s job to take care of the poor. And while I don’t believe that a nation can even be Christian, I’m often left scratching my head at what the words “Christian nation” mean to these people.
When I tell them that the word “Christian” isn’t an adjective that you can simply tack on to random nouns, they tell me that “Christian nation” means that the country was founded on Christian principles and its laws were based on Judeo-Christian values. But if that’s the case, then taking care of the poor would be one the country’s primary objectives.
Think about it. When God was running a theocracy out in the desert, welfare was baked into his laws:
- Tithes were collected and this was a provision for the Levites, as well as immigrants, widows, and orphans.
- Farmers were not to pick their fields clean so that the poor could come through and glean.
- Every seven years, creditors had to release their neighbor’s debt.
- Every 50 years all of the wealth that the rich had amassed was redistributed to its original owners.
Reading the Pentateuch gives you a real understanding of how particular God was about taking care of the poor. It seems irrational to me to say that a country is based on Judeo-Christian values and then argue that spending tax dollars on the helping the poor is “wealth redistribution” or robbery through taxation. I mean, taking what the rich have accumulated and giving back to the original owners every 50 years seems like an actual example of wealth redistribution—and it was sanctioned by God.