Evangelicals and Entitlements

A number of influential evangelical leaders have issued a statement on the budget fights in the federal government. The group includes a few men that I greatly respect—including Gideon Strauss, Ron Sider, and Richard Mouw—and I appreciate their willingness to address this concern from a Biblical perspective.

But the proposal suffers from some fatal flaws, as my friend Jordan Ballor notes :

There is very little principle in this statement, which purports not to “endorse any detailed agenda.” The basic principle communicated is: “We ought to care for the poor because God does.” This is of course laudable and true, as is the commitment to “intergenerational justice,” as long as that is defined as not living today on the backs of the unborn and not code for something else.

But the rest really just consists of leaps in logic largely based on unstated assumptions about the role that government should have in administering that care. To wit: “To reduce our federal debt at the expense of our poorest fellow citizens would be a violation of the biblical teaching that God has a special concern for the poor.”

Given the current state of affairs, which the statement acknowledges is a “crisis,” I don’t think it is helpful  to energize the grassroots to petition to save particular programs from scrutiny and reform . Things are so bad that  everything should be on the table. The situation is not an either/or between social spending and military spending, as Claiborne and Wallis would have it. It’s a both/and, and that includes entitlements.