a reflection
There is a question we like to ask ourselves and one another: what relationship should faith have to public policy?
Often we’ll respond to ourselves with something like “none,” informed as we are by the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. There must be a separation of church and state. This might lead us toward a firm intellectual and abstract argument about the nature of laws and how they ought to work, which is the sort of theoretical debate many of us associate with the Supreme Court, who, while discussing a particular case of individuals with standing, tend to pontificate about the hypothetical and concern themselves greatly with “what ifs”.
Perhaps just as often we’ll respond to the question about faith and public policy with sensible discretion. We’ll offer a limited and fearful response, tempered greatly by the images of public officials campaigning in large evangelical churches. Many of us bear wounds from the frequent invocations of faith as a reason for discrimination or gratuitous public policy decisions.
Christian faith and our common scripture has been used to defend slavery, destroy reconstruction, oppose the civil rights movement, create segregation academies, and on and on — and that’s just for the defense of racism! There are many other causes, including sex and gender discrimination, ableist and eugenicist policies, anti-immigrant and refugee statutes, the criminalization of the poor, to name just a few.
Many Americans have so come to associate the relationship between faith and public policy as a demonstrable evil that they couldn’t imagine ever thinking of it differently. But for many who knew her, Frances Perkins, the esteemed secretary of labor and co-architect of the New Deal, proved that we are wrong to shut the door. That faith can be a great motivator and barometer for our own sense of that relationship for ourselves.
In Deuteronomy (15:7-11), we are reminded that the limits of generosity are often self-imposed, or systemically-imposed, but that does not mean they are good or right. For, in the eyes of God, there is to be no such limit. No such rationale or prudence that would restrict our sense of fairness and equity toward one another. It is hard to consider a 2,800 year-old text so presently revolutionary, but this is.
It says that if there is anyone in need, don’t be “hard-hearted or tight-fisted” toward them. Open your hand to help meet their need, “whatever it may be.”
We’re used to hearing this kind of consideration and generosity from the pulpit in any church. Even if it comes with the most obvious of caveats — that allow us to ignore the plights of others. Most commonly, this is a semantic excuse of vague language: “what we can afford.”
Which, as we can see at the national level, for example, can offer handy rhetorical cover. Some say we cannot afford to give nearly $600 million to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting or $800 billion in Medicaid funding, but somehow we can afford a $5 trillion tax cut. Afford, then, is a weasel word that allows a lot of room for interpretation.
But Deuteronomy itself doesn’t suggest anything like this. Much the opposite. It demands we honor the dignity of the person if we can. This is why the standard in both Hebrew and Greek Scriptures is generosity. If you have two coats and you see someone without one, you give one. It is not a statement about the possession of coats, but on one’s relationship to the one without.
The text from Deuteronomy doesn’t stop there, however. It continues:
“Be careful that you do not entertain a mean thought, thinking, ‘The seventh year, the year of remission, is near,’ and therefore view your needy neighbor with hostility and give nothing; your neighbor might cry to the Lord against you, and you would incur guilt.”
Remember that every seventh year we declare a Sabbath year of freedom and restitution. We open farms and forgive debt. So the Deuteronomic law is saying Don’t look at the calendar to excuse you from giving. As followers of Jesus, we might say that daily bread is daily/ Therefore, denying people bread today is our fault.
How can we not hear these teachings and want to reshape our world to more closely honor these laws? These laws that Moses, the prophets, Jesus, and the Apostles wrote so frequently about.
Here I will honor those intellectual butterflies that spring up in the stomach. That recognizable feeling of fear that comes from rhetoric and philosophy. We might worry about what it would mean to argue for a deeply-devoted person of faith holding the highest offices — a hypothetical that has been the constant fret of generations. But so rarely has one found such synergy in government and in church as Frances Perkins. Her work to feed more people fed more people. Her work to lift more people out of poverty lifted more people out of poverty. Her commitment to working people raised the dignity of working people.
And almost as proof to the moral and rhetorical power of her work, political opponents have spent 80 years trying to destroy it. Trying to claim moral authority, trying to convince us not to seize this same moral authority. To recognize that doing the right thing can also spur the economy. As many economists and activists will remind us, we can give everyone healthcare and it will reduce the cost of it.
What Frances Perkins reveals to us is just how compatible Christian tradition is with our needs; how deeply it can speak in response to the moral deficits of our time. That we must, upon seeing a person is hungry, choose to feed them from our own plate. And, through faith, find the plate will soon be refilled.