The Raleigh News & Observer’s ‘Under the Dome’ column (11/14/05) raises an interesting point about assistance for the poor. Certainly all compassionate religious leaders and groups exhort the better-off to care for the worse-off in society. But a column head that reads: “Democrats: Jesus wouldn’t cut aid to the poor” claims no moral high ground on this score.
A fairly cursory scan of some teachings attributed to Jesus fails to reveal the places in which Christ exhorts us to forcibly take from one group in order to serve the needs of another group. In many, many places there are references to the obligation and the virtue attached to giving one’s riches away for the betterment of others. Even charity is a two-way street, though, in that it serves the corporeal welfare of the needy while providing for the spiritual welfare of the affluent. In all of this charity talk, I read the subtext ‘voluntary.’ This makes sense. Involuntary actions cannot be virtuous (or truly wicked, I suppose).
So–would Jesus cut (state-distributed) aid to the poor, or would he object to the wicked stealing of others’ wealth as a means of facilitating pretended virtue? Even in historical times, I cannot imagine that stealing one man’s goat to feed the hungry, for example, would have passed the virtue ‘sniff test,’ so I suspect that the authors need not have bothered asking whether more involuntary goat-wealth transfers would be considered the right thing to do.
