Christian Public Policy and Its Challenges
Christian Public Policy and Its Challenges
Welfare and Almsgiving
The biggest issue that Christians have is the formulation of biblical truth into public policy.
Policy inevitably slots into the system or framework that the government is based upon, and it will never be a direct analog of Scripture (unless someone founds a country directly on the Bible one day).
The reason why so many Christians support cancerous public policy based upon "social justice" principles is due to this misapplication of biblical truth inside the framework of governance.
Giving poor people free money through government programs sounds like "almsgiving," but it is functionally not almsgiving as it lacks all the things that almsgiving forces the individual or the Christian institution to do. For example, almsgiving requires a sacrifice for a Christian participating in the practice. They have to give up something that they would rather keep to someone who is in need. At the same time, there is a responsibility hidden within almsgiving that one does not wantonly give away money--a degree of responsibility to discerning how to give and who to give to. These traits are not present within the process that government programs use.
Government programs have issues first "discerning who to give to" and second, defining "how it is a sacrifice." The government doesn't actually sacrifice anything when it gives money away (both due to financial industry reasons and the concept of acquiring power through wealth). The government can give money away and never sacrifice anything because it gains power in its giving away of resources, while the individual Christian typically (if giving is done properly) loses both the resource and the power associated with it; thus, individual Christians accomplish giving a proper sacrifice. By “power,” I mean that the government will do something that looks like almsgiving, but in reality, it is enslaving a population to its whims as a unexpected (or expected) consequence by buying their allegiance and loyalty.
Also, the government only uses a relative understanding that comes from empiricism to try and figure out who to give to. The government is tempted to give to client populations that preserve its own power, and even when it attempts to give in innocence, because its giving is public, it always ends up expanding its sovereignty in its own willpower rather than giving it up. In the Bible, wealth transfer only happens in one direction: from the unrighteous to the righteous. There is no other form of wealth transfer present in the Bible, not one based on race, or on sex, or on historical wealth disparities, or on some other human quality, but wealth is simply taken from the unrighteous and given to the righteous.
1 Now the Lord had said to Moses, “I will bring one more plague on Pharaoh and on Egypt. After that, he will let you go from here, and when he does, he will drive you out completely. 2 Tell the people that men and women alike are to ask their neighbors for articles of silver and gold.”
When God tells Israel to borrow “articles of silver and gold” from the Egyptians to take for themselves, it’s because he has judged Egypt and found them wanting, and as part of that judgment, he is allowing the Hebrew people to take their wealth (from unrighteous to righteous). There are other passages that back this up as well.
22 A good person leaves an inheritance for their children’s children,
but a sinner’s wealth is stored up for the righteous.
Since the government doesn’t make a biblical distinction in how it redistributes wealth, it sinfully gives to sinners as much as it gives to the righteous, which is ungodly. It takes from the righteous and sinners equally to give to others, which is ungodly. As a secular entity, it has no way of judging such a thing, and it can never “give life” by supplying sinners as much as it supplies the righteous (or even less so for the righteous) and robbing sinners as much as it robs the righteous (or even more robbing of the righteous…).
This is why welfare initiatives have always failed as they are not submitted to biblical logos. There is no concept of sacrifice in government tax requirements for example. Because one does not get to choose if their taxes support a government social justice initiative, they cannot meaningfully give “taxes” as a sacrifice. “Choice” is key. The government uses “force” not “choice” in all its actions, another reason why it’s incapable of performing the Christian disciplines.
The “liberal” or “progressive” Christian (if such creatures exist) fundamentally expect the government to perform Christian acts that the government cannot perform or is legally required to perform in a way that shuns biblical logos. Their confusion (if they truly are Christians) is that they have not thought through if the government can even fulfill the biblical expectations that an individual Christian can fulfill or the body of Christ (congregants and institutions) can fulfill.
In other words, the government is incapable of any reasonably righteous form of almsgiving. It simply cannot meaningfully perform the act.
Thus, it should never be expected to perform the act.