How to Think About Using Government Funds for Christian Charity

Recurrent and recent debates about Medicaid, USAID, and PEPFAR have brought up a perennial question about Christian political theology: is it right to spend taxpayer dollars on works we might consider charitable? There are many admonitions throughout the Bible to be charitable to the poor, but only a few where we are told to pay taxes. It is not hard to find people who are not themselves Christian throwing around Bible verses about “the least of these” as they apply to government policy—a legacy, no doubt, of Christianity’s incredible influence in shaping the ethical landscape of Western civilization. Yet it is unfair, unwise, and unbiblical to assume that the government ought to be the mediator, guarantor, or vehicle of Christian charity or works of mercy.

However, when we reject the simplistic assumption that every Christian teaching about doing good to those in need applies to the government’s actions, we must not fall into the opposite error. The resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead is far too monumental to leave any sphere of life untouched by its implications. There is a distinction to be made between Christian charity and state policy, but the two are not exclusive domains of action that must remain separate in order to maintain ethical integrity. Justice and charity are not the same thing, but they often work together when it comes to political common goods.

There are three key reasons why it is right and good for the government to spend taxpayer dollars on providing for the poor:

1. Providing food, shelter, and medical care for the poor is a matter of justice and charity
2. The Church has used government funds for Christian charity for nearly two millennia
3. There will always be areas where Christian charity is necessary, even if the government is providing for some needs 

1. Providing food, shelter, and medical care for the poor is a matter of justice and charity.

The only specific duties given to governments in the New Testament can be found in Romans 13:1-7 and 1 Peter 2:13-17, which enumerate the punishment of evil and the praise of good. The narrowest reading of this passage would be extremely libertarian and only require the government to run a judicial system, and even police would be limited to arresting people who have already committed crimes, since these passages say nothing about preventing crimes from happening in the first place. Which crimes are liable to government intervention are still up for debate in an argument that relies on Biblical prooftexts to define the scope of the government’s authority. Christians who say “show me the verse where the Bible says to use my tax dollars to help the poor” should probably avoid using roads and highways built by the government if they want to be consistent with their principles.

There aren’t any Bible verses that tell us what kinds of policies that Christians should or shouldn’t support in a democratic republic. Thus, we have to draw on a wide variety of ethical principles from God’s Word and from the natural law that God has written on our hearts. A lot of matters come down to questions of prudence and wisdom. In the Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas makes the case that giving to the poor is a matter of justice, not charity: “whatever certain people have in superabundance is due, by natural law, to the purpose of succoring the poor.” At a fundamental level, the most narrow reading of political authority in the New Testament can be summed up thusly: God has given human governments power over life and death to prevent the deaths of those under authority.

The simplest example is the most extreme: if a police officer (an agent of the state) sees a man shooting at a civilian, the police officer is duty-bound to shoot the attacker. In doing so, the police officer is acting with authority on behalf of the government; some power of the ruler is devolved to him in order to protect the lives of innocent bystanders. The government must take this power very seriously; governments that kill without accountability tend to lose their legitimacy very quickly or require terror and brutality in order to compensate for that loss.

Fire departments and septic systems are more indirect, but still relevant: most of us agree that it’s good for the government to use our tax dollars in order to make sure that our houses don’t burn down and that people living in towns and cities don’t spread cholera. We only count on the government to distribute food directly in emergencies or natural disasters, but we also entrust a certain amount of power to agricultural agencies to prevent famines and keep food relatively inexpensive. When it comes to shelter, in most cases the government’s role is to protect the most vulnerable people while ensuring that the regulatory environment is open enough to allow the market to build enough housing that people want. Government provision of medical care is far more a matter of prudence, but it is right to expect that good rulers acting justly under the authority given to them by God would not let their citizens die of preventable diseases.

As long as we live in biological bodies, “biopolitics” are unavoidable and a natural law perspective does not distinguish between the government’s role in preventing a malicious human actor that threatens your life or a nonhuman virus, fire, or cancer cell. In either case, the government has a responsibility to prevent deaths that it is capable of preventing. I’ve written elsewhere about justice in health care, community health, paying for health care, and reforming America’s health care system, but here it should suffice to say that there are some functions related to our health that the government does well and others that it does not.

Oliver O’Donovan puts it simply in The Ways of Judgment: “Wrong, and nothing else, is the necessary condition, but also the sufficient condition, for governmental intervention.”

2. The Church has used government funds for Christian charity for nearly two millennia.

It is only in the last century or so that many have adopted the reductionistic, libertarian belief in a “secular” state that handles matters of justice while “private” charity (including the Church) is responsible for helping people in need. The history of the Church demonstrates countless instances of Christians using public monies for charitable ends for as long as there have been Christians influential enough to demand that the government care for the poor. Perhaps most instructive is that of the origins of the hospital; Christians have been responsible for a number of revolutionary changes in healthcare over the centuries, but hospitals were among the most fundamental ideas that Christianity brought to the world.

The closest thing that we can find to hospitals as places where people could go in order to get better (as opposed to physicians, surgeons, herbalists, or astrologers working privately) are temples to Aesclepius where people desperately appealed to the god of healing and sometimes saw priest-healers. As Christianity grew throughout the second, third, and fourth centuries after Christ, churches began to set up poorhouses and other institutions to care for the indigent called xenodocheia. As Timothy Miller’s book The Birth of the Hospital in the Byzantine Empire carefully traces out, our modern conception of a hospital as a place where sick people go in order to be cared for grew out of these institutions and the Christians who ran them. Once Christians began to have some influence on political power, Gary Ferngren explains:

The mingling of the divergent interests of church and state led to “the Christianization of euergetism,” in which the bishops assumed a major role as public spokesmen for the poor, a role that, together with their status as major distributors of charitable funds, increased their prestige and status within the city and even with the imperial government. They preached frequent sermons on the necessity of giving alms and used funds from collections, contributions, and legacies of the rich, together with public monies, to maintain an extensive ministry to the poor in the distribution of gifts and the building of permanent charitable institutions like hospitals.

Even the idea that it is virtuous to be generous to the poor and weak was a novel Christian invention, which meant that rulers were henceforth judged on their treatment of vulnerable people. (As the post-Christian right gravitates towards pagan ideals, we see this virtue once again being judged poorly by those who despise the weak.) Centuries of Christian reflection on Scripture and practice in generosity led to a revolution in social mores that endures even now, as Tom Holland has discussed in his book Dominion.

The close connection between church and state when it came to the poor endured through late antiquity and the medieval era, and the Reformation did not slow it down. As Allen Calhoun’s chapter “Taxation and Welfare,” in Protestant Social Teaching: An Introduction explains, Christians theologians have never questioned that there is a role for the state to play in alleviating the needs of the poor. Martin Bucer argued not only that congregations ought to be active in caring for the poor around them, but also that they should appeal to the government for funding if local need outstripped their ability to give. There has simply never been a time in history when church and state didn’t work together to help the poor.

3. There will always be areas where Christian charity is necessary, even if the government is providing for some needs.

Justice may be a matter of making sure the most simple bodily needs are met, but Christian charity has always sought to care for people holistically. One of the simplest ways that this works out goes back to the days of the xenodocheia: the government pays Christian organizations and church ministries to perform charitable work. Depending on where and how the work is performed, communicating the Gospel may be explicit (e.g. hospital chaplains preaching to people in a waiting room) or implicit (an invitation to come to the church after giving out food and clothing.) There are some places in the world where only Christians are willing to risk the danger of delivering aid that is paid for by the government.

There are also many places where the government is weak or has chosen not to act. For example, my own work of training healthcare professionals in low-income countries through long-term mentoring doesn’t have any grants from governments or NGOs. I’ve dedicated my life and career to it because I think it’s extremely valuable, but I rely on the private charity of friends and churches in order to do it. Many poor families in developed countries are full of chaos and strife brought on by cycles of violence and sin, and many of them need the intervention of Christians who can walk alongside them and help them learn how to live godly lives alongside their needs for food and medical care.

Coda: International and Domestic Aid

One key element in recent debates relates to questions of citizens vs. non-citizens. It is often assumed that foreign aid for people in distant countries and help for immigrants (legal or illegal) should only be dispensed after helping citizens. This would seem to follow from the principle of ordo amoris, in which our love for God helps to order our loves such that we have our most pressing obligations to our immediate families, then our nearest neighbors, and our more distant neighbors, and then the rest of the world after that.

However, this is not a fair assumption. For one, the modern nation-state with its concept of citizens divided by strict borders does not really follow from natural law principles. Nation-states like the U.S. are more like empires than the Biblical “nations.” Wealthy empire-nations like the U.S. exist as they do because of the work of people in other nations, which means that we have at least some moral obligations to people outside of our borders.

There is a meaningful ethical distinction between citizens and non-citizens that requires greater investment in the use of government funds towards citizens, but this has more to do with the shared love of a common good that binds people together and less to do with the idea of fellow citizens as the next circle in the ordo amoris beyond one’s family or neighborhood. Alasdair Macintyre notes that the “type of collectivity whose bonds are simultaneously to extend to the entire body of citizens and yet to be as binding as the ties of kinship and loyalty” is impossible.

Practically speaking, then, we could say that a government should ensure that its citizens' basic needs for food, shelter, and medical care are met while also helping non-citizens proportionate to their need and its ability. In the U.S., this has played out in spending trillions of dollars for Medicaid and Medicare and billions of dollars for foreign aid. Especially when it comes to emergency food aid or the provision of antiretroviral drugs for HIV, the U.S. government glorifies God in its actions when it prevents the death of non-citizens. We can debate the prudence of various endeavors, but from the standpoint of political theology foreign aid is an entirely legitimate category of spending.

Conclusion

Pope Benedict XVI has a beautiful meditation on the intertwined nature of justice and charity in Caritas in veritate:

The more we strive to secure a common good corresponding to the real needs of our neighbours, the more effectively we love them. Every Christian is called to practise this charity, in a manner corresponding to his vocation and according to the degree of influence he wields in the pólis. This is the institutional path — we might also call it the political path — of charity, no less excellent and effective than the kind of charity which encounters the neighbour directly, outside the institutional mediation of the pólis. When animated by charity, commitment to the common good has greater worth than a merely secular and political stand would have. Like all commitment to justice, it has a place within the testimony of divine charity that paves the way for eternity through temporal action. Man's earthly activity, when inspired and sustained by charity, contributes to the building of the universal city of God, which is the goal of the history of the human family

Justice and charity are not domains of action firewalled from each other. There are things that the government ought to do that churches and individuals ought not to do, and there are things that only the Body of Christ can do that the government should never attempt. Yet when it comes to helping the poor, the consistent witness of history is that Christian civilization has long seen justice and charity as intertwined efforts, using the money that the government collects to fund works of mercy.

NOTE: Much of this material is drawn from my master’s thesis if you are interested in more in-depth arguments about the same.