Church, State and Economic Justice

Last week Keith Burgess-Jackson posted a short entry that took liberals to task for invoking Jesus in support of programs to redistribute wealth:

I’m tired of hearing liberals claim that Christianity supports wealth redistribution of the sort Democrats propose. Perhaps I’m ignorant, but I don’t know of any occasion in the Bible in which Jesus made political recommendations. He appears to have told his followers that they should distribute their excess wealth to the needy, but he didn’t tell them to take other people’s wealth (against their will) and distribute it to the needy. That’s theft! In short, Jesus was addressing individuals, not plumping for egalitarian tax policies. He was persuading, not coercing. He was a moralist, not a politician. Perhaps if liberals spent more time giving of themselves and less time trying to coerce others into giving, the world would be a better place by their standards.

I think a couple of points of clarification might be in order. First, unless we’re willing to say that all taxation is theft (and thus become anarchists), it’s hard to say why taxation to fund anti-poverty programs is any more objectionable than taxation to fund highways, or NASA or the war in Iraq.

Secondly, and more to the point, we have to ask what, from a Christian perspective, are the duties of government with respect to the poor? Keith is right that we don’t have much in the way of direct political pronouncements from Jesus in the New Testament. Though, it should be pointed out, there is the bit about rendering to Caesar, which has usually been interpreted as a command to pay the taxes that are due.

Moreover, we have to remember that Jesus and his disciples lived in a time and place where participation in the policy decisions of the government was out of the question. As citizens in a democratic polity we have greater freedom (and therefore a greater responsibility) to try to influence government policy for the common good.

Most fundamentally though, we have to remember that the God of Jesus is the God of the whole Bible. And the God of the Bible certainly has a lot to say about the way we should treat the poor. In the Old Testament in particular, God demands that we show justice toward the poor, not merely charity. Rulers are explicitly enjoined to defend the rights of the poor and vulnerable, and duties to the poor were incorporated into the Old Testament law.

But to say that treatment of the poor is a matter of justice and not just charity seems to imply that the poor have rights to, at least, the basic goods needed to live (e.g. food, shelter, basic medical care) and to participate in the life of the community. A society that fails to provide this could not be considered just. And if the government is that agency charged with defending the rights of its citizens, then it’s hard to see why the government should not act as the guarantor of last-resort of these basic rights.

This doesn’t mean that existing government programs are the best way to help the poor. It appears that some of them have been counterproductive in many ways. And it also doesn’t settle the question of what level of government (local, state, federal or some combination) is best equipped to address poverty. But it does seem to mean that there is a public moral responsibility to combat avoidable, involuntary poverty.

Also, the fact that the government has responsibilities in this area doesn’t excuse the churches and other institutions from engaging in acts of charity. The church does well not to expect the state to usher in the Kingdom of God. In fact, the church provides a more credible witness to the state when it can point to how the poor in its own midst are cared for and how everyone’s needs are met. But the church can still work for relative improvements and incremental advances in securing justice.

At the end of the day this is just one more instance of the question of whether Christians or people of other faiths have the right to bring their religiously-informed “moral values” to bear on matters of public policy. If they can do so with respect to abortion or same-sex marriage, why shouldn’t they do the same with respect to poverty, a concern that is far more prevalent in the Bible?