Caring for the Poor

Today is July 4th, but I'm having difficulty finding anything to celebrate other than a day off work. We are living in a time when our freedoms and our services are disappearing... and our neighbors are disappearing, too. They're going to foreign torture prisons and hostile countries, or some are being detained in detention (concentration) camps where their holders joke about feeding them to alligators. Yesterday, they announced that children will be sent to the cages we saw on the news in Alligator Auschwitz, too. My heart is shattered.

Amidst the increasing police state within which we are living is the passing of the so-called "Big, Beautiful Bill" by a slim margin through Congress and the Senate. Votes against the bill called it "ugly," "cruel," and the "worst piece of legislation to ever pass through Washington." It is set to strip 6 million children of food, 13-16 million Americans of healthcare, and to add hundreds to thousands of dollars in taxes and utility expenses to the lowest 20% income bracket of the country. Also, the cuts to Medicaid will result in the closure of rural healthcare centers, depriving all who live in those areas of the care they need. It's a devastating blow to the majority of people in our country.

An argument that I’ve been hearing from Christians in regard to why they continue to support Trump and even applaud this bill, is because they believe he’s doing God's work by tearing down "big government." In this way, he is turning back the care of the poor to the people. These Christians argue that caring for the poor is the work of the Church, which Jesus gave us to do, and therefore it should never have been done by the government.

It's an interesting argument. I agree Jesus told the Church to care for the poor. I quote Matthew 25 frequently in this blog. However, my gut reaction to this argument is typically something like, OK, then what is your church doing to prepare to care for the 6 million children who will go hungry under this new bill? Or, what is your church doing to prepare for the millions of people who will lose their health insurance? How will your church provide care to the sick? Or, what is your church doing to prepare to help the poor pay for their increasing bills?

People get mad at me for asking those kinds of questions. But really, I don’t see the Church stepping up in these big ways to take care of people who are being stripped of their benefits and protections. Do you? Seems to me that while the Church might complain about big government, we don't truly want he responsibility of taking care of the poor. We want the poor to take care of themselves. Which is very hard to do when you live within a system designed to keep you poor and to punish you if you try to escape poverty.

It should be noted that in the early church, for centuries even, the Church did take care of the poor. The majority of hospitals and schools and food programs were run by churches. Churches even cared for prisoners, immigrants, and refugees. At some point, that shifted. The Church stopped doing the work and governments took it over.

What happened?

When I was studying the Reformation movement last semester, I learned about a major shift that happened during that movement for women. Martin Luther in particular was responsible for this shift by redefining the most holy thing a woman could do from dedicating her life to service to God, to staying at home and being a wife and mother. In fact, he went around and tried to forcibly close the convents and make the nuns marry Protestant men. Now, the Protestant movement was important and accomplished many good things, but it also caused a lot of damage - especially to women. Here’s where I think this is connected. In my early church class, we learned that it was women who led a lot of the welfare movements. It was women who opened hospitals and schools and food kitchens. So, if the women were now being restricted to the home, who was doing that work? My guess is, it got left to the wayside, in which case, the government had to pick up those types of programs.

Another factor I think may have come into play here is urbanization. It was easier to take care of your neighbors when you knew all your neighbors, and lived in a small, mostly agricultural community where you could share the bounty of the land. Urban settings have become more and more common over the last hundred or so years, and society has changed as a result. It is incredibly difficult to know your neighbors, especially with the values of independence and individualism that we hold so dear in the Western world. Not only that, but in an urban center, you are completely dependent upon outside resources because you cannot live off the land (since you don’t have any). Therefore, there has to be a number of available resources.

Brené Brown, who writes a lot about empathy and compassion, once said that we have a double standard in our culture, where if someone wealthy pays for someone to cook for them and buy their food and clean their house and watch their children, no one blames them for that. No one judges them for not doing those things themselves. But when you have a poor person who also needs help with those things but can’t afford to pay for them, we judge and shame them. The only difference is what’s in their pocketbook.

We have created a system that keeps people stuck in poverty, especially in our urban centers, and then what? And then we fail to take care of them. It seems to me that supporting programs that help the poor, regardless of whether they be governmental or nonprofit or church-based, is important Christian work.

So, what is the answer? I do not believe that our churches are equipped or prepared to take on the great need that is about to come in our country. I hope, truly hope, we will try. The Bible calls on us to seek justice, show mercy, and walk humbly (Micah 6:8). The Bible calls on us to love our neighbor (Matthew 22:39), welcome the stranger (Matthew 25), and remember the poor (Galatians 2:10). Let's do the work with as much as we can.

But, where we fall short, we may need to call upon governmental programs to help. Then the advocacy work will be key, as this government doesn't seem that interested in helping the poor, at all.

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