Churches and the Welfare State

The Washington Post ran a troubling piece this week on a D.C. woman struggling to survive on welfare. Age 41, with 5 of her 6 children at home, she spends her time waiting for government checks, queuing at food banks and worrying about survival. She’s had jobs but quit, logically calculating that welfare benefits collectively pay more than employment. At times previously in homeless shelters, she now has a subsidized apartment. And for all her hardships, she has food and access to medical care.

Her parents were heroin addicts. All of her children apparently are illegitimate by 5 different “gone again” deadbeat fathers who evidently have no serious involvement with their offspring or their mother. She is generous, taking in children of even more troubled relatives. Congress recently cut food stamp benefits by 7 percent for recipients, reacting to the tripling of costs over the last decade, with 47 million now receiving. This woman has more than compensated as her children now age into qualifying for their own benefits. One daughter commendably at least declines routinely to carry her food stamp card in an attempt at least partly to resist a dependency mindset.

Yet overall another generation enters dependency on the Welfare State with little hope for any better. Likely if government benefits tripled, this woman, besides perhaps relieved of some food bank lines, would not be appreciably better off, only even more tightly dependent.

When Congress recently voted to constrain food stamp spending, the Circle of Protection loudly protested. The Circle includes the National Association of Evangelicals, the National Council of Churches, the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops, Sojourners and several other religious groups. One liberal Baptist lobbyist warned Congress they were violating “values Jesus embodied.”

It’s hard to discern Jesus in the coarse, deadening, bureaucratic, depersonalized political transactions of the Welfare State with which some church elites equate the Kingdom of God. Unlike Jesus, they seem to think that humanity materialistically can live by bread alone, and that compassion is primarily hundreds of billions in government checks, regardless of impact and outcome.

How can people like this woman cycling through generations of welfare dependency escape into a better, more empowered existence? Church lobbyists for the Welfare State often seem uninterested in the question. Instead they often judge the spiritual health of others by the extent of their support for ever increasing government spending. They imply The Last Judgement will depend largely on views regarding congressional votes.

Sixty years ago, before the Great Society, when rates of illegitimacy were one tenth today’s, this woman and millions of others would have had to depend largely on family and churches for assistance. That more personal network, while not as robotic in mailing checks, would have had more genuine interest in her well being, and in ending or preventing her indigence. They also would have influenced her against having illegitimate children, especially by deadbeats fathers. They may have been annoying, but they might have spared her and her children decades of food bank lines and unending anxiety.

Churchly enthusiasts for the Welfare State often don’t see the persons they champion as moral beings but merely as victim recipients of their own political compassion. All people of every income are sinners who need and respond to incentives. All of us are susceptible to enervating, crippling dependency and inertia if permitted. We all need motivating.

Statistics indicate that in America persons who finish high school, avoid substance addictions, and don’t have illegitimate children, have little chance of chronic poverty. Avoiding divorce further improves the odds. But churchly advocates of the Welfare State oddly and cruelly withhold this information, which disrupts their political narrative.

On a related note, here’s a fascinating recent article in Slate.com about the infamous 1970s era Chicago “Welfare Queen” of whom candidate Ronald Reagan often spoke as an icon of government fraud and waste. Besides her flamboyant thievery, she also had a monstrous criminal career.

The Welfare Queen scandalized generations old enough to have grittily survived the Depression and recall life before the Welfare State. After 70 years of nearly continuous prosperity, few Americans today are as distressed by grandiose fraud, much less mere chronic dependency. Instead, we mostly just shrug. Meanwhile, millions of lives across generations are consigned to the hopelessness of a permanent underclass. Church groups, at least, should offer better in their public witness.