While the growth of the welfare and administrative state that chokes black opportunity has been pushed first and foremost by the political and theological liberal elite, Bible-believing churches must claim their share of the blame. While rightly striving to maintain historical Christian orthodoxy amidst the collapse of the Western church in Europe and much of America, many evangelical Christians have failed to use Scripture to build a thorough understanding of how God designed government and people as they exchange their property in the marketplace—commonly known as the fields of political science and economics.

Read Part 7 here.

The negative consequences of the welfare state for blacks should not surprise Christians who pay attention to what the Bible says, especially those who have also read Marvin Olasky’s, The Tragedy of American Compassion.

While we are debating how to use government to be more compassionate, Olasky writes “generations are being lost. Crack babies in inner city hospitals tremble and twitch uncontrollably. Teenage mothers, alone with squalling children, fight the impulse to strike out. Women in their thirties, abandoned by husbands, wait for their numbers to be called in cold welfare offices. Homeless men line up impatiently at food wagons before shuffling off to eat and drink in alleys smelling of urine.”.

In the introduction to Olasky’s book, Charles Murray points to the problem behind the government “compassion” that has come to dominate the way we help the unfortunate today:

More money is not going to make competent mothers of incompetent ones, nor conscientious mothers of irresponsible ones. More money is not going to bring fathers back to the children they have sired and then abandoned. Indeed, the guarantee of an income above the poverty line, no matter whether the father stays or not, is more likely to break up families than reunite them—another of the grim but commonsensical findings of the Negative Income Tax Experiment. A guaranteed income is not going to reduce drug abuse or alcoholism. It probably would not even reduce homelessness much—the number of homeless who are on the streets just because they don’t have enough money for an apartment is small compared to the number who are there for complex reasons.

While the growth of the welfare and administrative state that chokes black opportunity has been pushed first and foremost by the political and theological liberal elite, Bible-believing churches must claim their share of the blame. While rightly striving to maintain historical Christian orthodoxy amidst the collapse of the Western church in Europe and much of America, many evangelical Christians have failed to use Scripture to build a thorough understanding of how God designed government and people as they exchange their property in the marketplace—commonly known as the fields of political science and economics.

The failure to adequately study Scripture for guidance on political science, economics and other public policy issues has led to a poor understanding how to apply Biblical doctrine to the debate over public policy in much of the evangelical church. Too often, church leaders dismiss policies calling for reducing the size and scope of government as “conservative,” when in fact they are “biblical,” and instructive in helping us love our neighbor as ourselves.

God designed the world to work in a certain way. Just like God ordained laws of nature to determine the workings of creation, so God ordained laws to determine how people act. People are supposed to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion” by working and then voluntarily trading the fruits of their labor with each other, known as exchange, to meet all their needs. When exchange in the market does not supply the needs for some, Scripture call on people to be charitable to their neighbors by giving of the fruits of their labor to those whose labor has not been so fruitful.

Olasky writes, “The model of American generosity toward those in greatest need stressed personal aid in times of disease.” Yet today’s church leaders, both liberal and evangelical, too often default to government to take this role, dismissing those who espouse the biblical model of individual compassion that Olasky’s book so well lays out.

No one is our neighbor when we allow government to act as the go-between and remove the role of the church and individuals as the means of charity. Americans, including Christians, too often walk past the poor and needy today just like the priest and the Levite did the Samaritan, assured that the government will take care of them—when in fact the opposite is true.

Blacks are not in poverty today because white Americans have failed to adequately pursue “racial reconciliation.” Neither is this the cause of the continued segregation of blacks and whites in many churches across America. The most proximate cause is the government policies of the last 60 years that sadly have replaced and replicated racial—and racist—attitudes that had held back blacks but were dissipating in America through the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s.

The politics of the welfare state are now perpetuating subcultures that keep many blacks in poverty on the plantation, without education and without fathers. Yet because these policies are sources of power for both white and black liberals and other supporters of the political establishment, they continue in place while condemning many blacks to impoverished and dysfunctional lives.

Too many in the evangelical church ignore this corruption and instead place the blame for the poor condition of blacks on whites and their racism. This approach will be no more effective in helping blacks out of poverty than was the medieval Catholic Church’s use of indulgences in getting parishioner’s ancestors out of purgatory.

Bill Peacock is a member of Redeemer Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Austin, Texas. His writings on religion, culture, and politics can be found at www.excellentthought.net.