I’m concerned about a trend I see in the evangelical church.

In particular, what I see is a crisis arising because of the acceptance of government action as the sole means of addressing poverty.

The bottom line is that the state is not the best way to get aid to those who need it.  Perhaps some circumstances may require it, but questions of the expense of government bureaucracy (meaning that the monies given are significantly eroded before they actually get to the people in need), the inability of bureaucracy to respond to the particulars of a person’s situation, and the crisis we have as a result of the distancing of people from those in need, all suggest to me that the middle orders of society could do a better, more responsive, and more faithful work.

By crisis, I mean that we have a culture of people who ‘have’ who can live their whole lives totally detached from the poor because of the posture of government. Government stands between the rich and poor in our society, and treats the question of the rich poor divide wholly in materialistic terms. The result is a dehumanization of people – both poor and rich – who see only the stereotype told in their own narrative. The rich see only lazy people who don’t work and live off the dole; the poor see only greedy corporate pigs who won’t share. Neither narrative is true – but government, by it’s very posture as the only means of addressing poverty, perpetuates those narratives. Government is the opposite of community – and only community can really care for those in need.

I think the failure we’ve fallen over in the west, really, is the Rousseauian conflation of community and state. The result is, as de Tocqueville said, a soft despotism where real community (the middle orders from which Rousseau thought everyone needed to be liberated) are destroyed and replaced by one massive state ruling over lone individuals who can never resist state power. And we see the fruit of that today – suggest that the government won’t do something, and people wonder if that means it won’t be done at all. Suggest that the government shouldn’t do something, and people assume that means you think it shouldn’t be done at all.

I’m concerned that evangelicals have been buying into the state/community conflation – and so assuming that care for the poor necessarily means more government. But Jesus’ call is not for more government – it’s for us, personally, to take up the Kingdom work assigned to us.