A lot of Americans are asking these days why so many Christians seem to believe that selfishness is virtuous, and that voting for lower taxes rather than greater care for others is a good thing. Even people with little or no knowledge of Christian teaching are vaguely aware that Christians are supposed to care about poor people. And they happen to be right. Many places in the Bible speak to this topic, both in the Old Testament and the New. In general, God encourages concern for the poor at all times. This fact ought to inform the way Christians vote regarding secular government, but it does not seem to.
Why not?
I think I know part of the reason, and I would like to share it for those who want to understand how conservative Christians think—especially Evangelical Christians who say that the Bible is the final authority for faith and practice—or else who are Christian themselves and who feel an urge to support government poverty relief but have been told that it would be unchristian to do so. No, it would not be unchristian. But let’s look at why so many Christian have come to believe that it is wrong.
First, let’s look at a few of those Bible passages, to establish the Christian starting point:
Proverbs 21:13 He who shuts his ear to the cry of the poor will also cry himself and not be answered.
Proverbs 28:27 He who gives to the poor will never want, but he who shuts his eyes will have many curses.
Proverbs 14:31 Whoever oppresses the poor shows contempt for their Maker, but whoever is kind to the needy honors God.
Ephesians 4:28 He who steals must steal no longer; but rather he must labor, performing with his own hands what is good, so that he will have something to share with one who has need.
I John 3:17 But whoever has the world’s goods, and sees his brother in need and closes his heart against him, how does the love of God abide in him?
So how do Christians reason their way from a Biblical emphasis on helping the poor to a secular emphasis on “What’s mine is mine. . .keep your hands off!”?
First, there is ordinary human nature. Some degree of selfish motivation is universal because we are all descended from Adam, and Christians are not exempt from human nature.
Second, there obviously are some people who self-identify as “Christian” who are nothing of the sort, but I am not talking about them at all, so let’s move on to. . .
Third, there are rationalizations that are very convincing-sounding, even to a genuinely committed Christian. These are the rationalizations that I want to focus on, because I am familiar with them. The reason I am familiar with them is because I was taught them by Christians whom I respected, and, to my shame, I believed them for years. But I no longer believe them. Here is what I once believed, followed by how my understanding regarding those things has changed.
First, the faulty beliefs:
1) Equality of opportunity is important, but equality of results is nowhere promised in the Bible. It is no concern of mine if some people have the opportunity to do well, but fail because of their own faults.
2) “Welfare” programs are generally a bad idea because they do more harm than good, by fostering an attitude of dependency and encouraging laziness.
3) Most people who are poor get that way through their own irresponsibility. What they need is not a government program but a change in the way they personally approach life.
4) The best cure for poverty is a strong economy, and Republicans are better at managing the economy than Democrats are. “A rising tide lifts all boats.”
Later on I discovered one more rationalization I was not familiar with until after I began to question the above beliefs. Ironically, I first came across it while skimming through a Christian school history textbook published by a popular fundamentalist Christian publishing house. I will say more about “Not Yours to Give” a little further on.
Regarding those four basic beliefs, over time I began to see that I was simply mistaken about some of my assumptions, and I also had failed to take a lot of Bible principles into account. Seeing “the rest of the story” made a huge difference in my outlook. Here is what I ended up concluding:
1) True equality of opportunity has not yet arrived in America. My assumption was based on naïve “ivory tower” thinking that does not match reality. The majority of American poverty is not the result of people’s own poor performance on a level playing field.
2) The belief that welfare encourages laziness is another example of unverified “ivory tower” thinking. Just because a conclusion is reasonable does not make it factual, and just because it may in fact be true sometimes does not make it true all the time.
3) I came face to face with my own self-righteousness here. When I thought that other people’s poverty was usually caused by their own irresponsibility, what I was really saying to myself was, “Anybody who is not as good as I am at taking care of themselves is a moron who deserves to fail.” Pretty arrogant, no? Besides that, it is statistically simply not true that welfare usually goes to “undeserving” people. It turns out that a huge percentage of the unemployed population got that way through circumstances entirely outside of their control. When your employer “downsizes” you and then you simply cannot find another comparable job, that has nothing to do with bad personal habits.
4) Watching the economy in the early 2000s is what finally turned me against the “rising tide” principle, also known as “trickle-down economics.” A rising economic tide absolutely does not lift all boats. And it was reading all those conservative justifications for abolishing the minimum wage entirely that finally pushed me over the edge. Whereas I used to be in full agreement that “redistribution of wealth” was morally wrong, I now believe that the real problem is not redistribution of wealth, it is the ungodly concentration of wealth in the first place. I would prefer to see prevention before the fact of concentration rather than redistribution after the fact, but either way, liberals have an absolutely valid Biblical point regarding inequality of income, whether or not they mention the Bible. Interestingly, the prophet Nathan referred to that very principle of fairness when he relayed to David God’s own judgment on David’s sin. That was one of many Biblical passages that convinced me that the liberal position regarding inequality of income is closer to the Biblical view than the conservative position is. Also, there was the discovery that in the years since World War II, Democratic administrations have an edge over Republican administrations in regard to the economy. That discovery surprised me, but it was another lesson in how one should check out one’s assumptions, and not just blindly accept them because they seem reasonable.
Finally, let’s talk about that “Not Yours to Give” principle. It is based on a story about Tennessee Congressman David Crockett (yes, that Davy Crockett), and how he was taught by a wise old farmer in his home district that the Constitution does not allow for the giving of federal funds to any private individual. (The story contains some historical inaccuracies, but I will gloss over that and treat it as a parable.) Anybody who agrees with this interpretation of the Constitution will of course support every Congressional effort to cut back—and someday eliminate entirely—every form of welfare. That would include, for starters:
food stamps
unemployment benefits
disaster relief
Social Security
Medicare
etc.
The “Not Yours to Give” story does have a certain logic to it, but it is completely fallacious. First, it misreads the Constitution, and, second, it did not originate with Christian thinkers, but with secular fiscal conservatives. And yet the place where I first saw this story was in a Christian school history textbook published by a well-known fundamentalist publishing house. This no doubt somewhat explains why the story is so popular among conservative Christians. However, the publishing house in question is connected to a university that did not admit black applicants until 1972, and then only because it lost a federal equal rights lawsuit, and had to choose between either losing its non-profit tax status, or admitting black applicants. It should not be a surprise that a Christian source that can be so wrong in one area concerning Biblical ethics can also be wrong in another area.
My conclusion is that supporting secular government policies that provide material assistance to the poor is better than supporting policies that favor the rich to the detriment of the poor (concerning which the Apostle James also voiced a very strong opinion.) And that is why I now vote Democratic rather than Republican. Neither party is Christian, but the Republican Party is, on balance, further away from Biblical standards than the Democratic Party is, and I am OK with voting for the lesser evil.
