Evangelical v. Biblical Compassion

The United States of America spends over $1.8 trillion each year on welfare programs and public education systems that consign millions of people to lifetimes of ignorance and poverty, provide substandard housing and medical care, separate fathers from their families, and lead many young black men to prison or an early death.

The federal government joins with state and local governments to take more than $100 billion of dollars each year from American taxpayers and give them to the wealthy executives and stockholders of U.S. and multinational corporations with multi-billion dollar market caps.

Laws that mandate minimum wages, force unions on employees and employers, and make it illegal for consumers to purchase many goods and services hamstring the American economy, put millions of Americans out of work, and reduce the quality of life for millions more.

Bring up the injustice caused by big government through these and other interventions in our lives in many churches and you’ll hear crickets. However, throw out a few choice phrases like white privilege, the oppression of women and LGBTQ+ Christians, and social injustice and you’ll get a firestorm of outrage calling for the heads of the most convenient perpetrators; most recently a few Catholic high school boys.

Why is this?

I’d suggest two main reasons. First, Christians often don’t do a very good job of reading and applying their Bible. Second, when they lack the wisdom available in God’s Word, Christians turn to the world for its wisdom.

Before we get too far down this path, let me note that all Christians suffer to some extent from discerning Biblical wisdom and applying it to our lives and to the world around us. This is because we are all sinners that sin in every aspect of our lives.

Yet there is also a greater neglect of reading and meditating on God’s Word that goes beyond this general problem. Which leads to some significant problems with the church’s theology. For instance, Ligonier Ministry’s State of Theology survey reports that 53 percent of evangelicals agree that “Everyone sins a little, but most people are good by nature.”

The problems with the church’s theology and its application aren’t restricted to the ignorant masses, however. This has been demonstrated by learned men from Cardinal Jacopo Sadoleto and John Wesley to Tim Keller. It is also seen in theological concepts such as Arminianism and Reformed Two Kingdoms that are held by a significant portion of the clergy and elders in the church.

In particular, the church–both informed leaders and the less informed laity–seems to have problems when it comes what the Bible tells us about how to deal with the world outside the church. Yes, we are to repent of our sins and believe in Jesus and be baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but what in the heck are we supposed to do with civil government and cultural divides?

To help us work through these divides and discover the biblical guidance for how Christians should think about the structure and function of government, I’ll be writing a series of on-again-off-again posts, looking at both the vast harm being done by our government today and at the Christian–and usually private and charitable–alternatives to Big Government. I hope that in doing so I will help my fellow evangelicals and reformed friends take a closer look at what the Bible really teaches about the purpose of and restrictions on government and the expansive scope of Christian liberty and charity.