"That's Not the Govt's Job, It's the Church's"

A Response Informed by Scripture & Church History

“That's not the government's job, it's the Church's."

I don’t know about you, but as USAID gets gutted, cuts to Medicare and Medicaid appear to be passed, and elements of US political leadership seem intent on gleefully dismantling layers of provision for the most vulnerable among us, I’ve heard this response from many Christians over the last few days.

But what if instead of holding to this simple refrain, we model what the Early Church practiced, which really got on the nerves of Rome's last pagan Emperor: Julian the Apostate.

An Irritated Emperor

In the early 300s, the last pagan emperor of Rome, Julian the Apostate, wrote to a pagan priest that:

“[W]hen it came about that the poor were neglected and overlooked by the [pagan] priests, then I think the impious Galilaeans [i.e., Christians] observed this fact and devoted themselves to philanthropy.”

He elsewhere wrote to another priest:

“[They] support not only their poor but ours as well, all men see that our people lack aid from us.”

As a former Christian who had converted to paganism and who desired to see a resurgence of the old Hellenistic faiths and philosophies, Emperor Julian was frustrated by the appeal of the Church to the common people.

He rightly identified that the Christian Church was flatly outdoing the pagans in love and provision for the needs of others, and he was so distressed by the gap that he confronted pagan priests about it.

However, at least as far as I'm aware, the Church never said, "No, the Roman government can't support the poor! That's our job!," or "No, the Pagans can't support the poor! That's our job!"

'Instead, they simply continued to put their heads down and do the work, leaving minimal needs available for the pagans to fill. It almost reads like a competition of goodness, and the Christians were winning.

Now to the Present Day

Sadly, today I do not have confidence that this would be the case. While Christians do give more on average than non-Christians, it is not nearly at the scale necessary to feed the poor, shelter the homeless, care for the orphan, or heal the sick.

If it was, we wouldn't have any need for the government programs that do these things. The government bureaucracy wouldn't be able to keep up.

So when I hear Christians say, "That's not the government's job, it's the job of the Church," all I really hear is, "I don't want my tax dollars going towards that, AND I'm not going to voluntarily meet that need EITHER. They'll just have to suffer."

And that's just kind of messed up.

Christians should be the first to cheer the universal conviction of God's morality in the heart of man, derived from the Imago Dei we're shaped in.

It was Christians who began the first social programs, as we knew a Christ-like society is one who exemplifies the actions praised by Christ Himself in Matthew 25:34-36.

Social welfare and foreign aid exist because the plethora of Christians in our society shaped it to behave more Christ-like! I don’t know about you, but if we can have a society following the example praised by Christ in Matthew 25 as a collective whole, that’s a plus to me!

As a quick reminder, here’s what He says there:

Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.

“‘For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat; I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink; I was a stranger and you took me in; I was naked and you clothed me; I was sick and you took care of me; I was in prison and you visited me.’”

It is pretty strange to me that most Christians in the US seem to want their government and society at large to do less of all of this.

Wait, Do We Want “Christian Laws” or Not??

What's funny to me is how we hear a lot of Christian Nationalists advocate for things like putting the Ten Commandments on the walls of schools, or forcing specifically Christian moral restrictions on others.

But they never advocate for the Two Greatest Commandments to go on walls. This despite Jesus Himself saying that the entirety of the Law hinged on these two things. They similarly never argue for a government to operate based on Matthew 25:34-36.

The moment you shift the conversation from government limitation of sins of COMMISSION to sins of OMMISSION, from prohibition OF actions to exhortation TO action...suddenly they get real quiet. 🦗🦗🦗

Suddenly it's "well that's not the government's job."

Bullcrap. We live in a democracy (and yes, a representative democracy IS a FORM of democracy). As such, the shape of the government will naturally derive from the morality and priorities of its people.

It's for this reason that I always say that the only viable way to a "Christian nation" is to create a nation of actually Christians. If 100 million voters shared the vision of Christ for the world, their government (and society) would probably line up pretty nicely with the actual ways of Christ.

Don’t Leave Me Yet, Libertarians & Conservatives

But hey, even if you are just authentically libertarian in your belief that the government just could never be a good provider of aid, you don't need the government to stop offering services in order to outcompete it.

Do good. Meet needs. Feed the hungry. Support the healing of the sick. House those who lack shelter. Welcome the refugee. Help the former criminal reenter successfully.

Church, feel free to outdo the government and meet all humans' needs. Then it should be easy enough to get the government to stop offering services that no one's using, because no one needs them any longer. That's your only option if it's "not the government's job."

And you know what? As a Christian, I'd love to see us outdo the governments of the world in Good in such a way that Presidents write letters (or perhaps memos or emails) to their agencies saying: "Hey, those Christians are making our social services entirely irrelevant. You need to do a better job at actually meeting needs or I'll have to cut your funding."

That'd be pretty dang cool.

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Also, the video I posted today to Instagram is a nice additional bit of information pertinent to all of this. I bet 99% of you will learn something new in this video.