My internet life has begun to bleed into my real life. I am now invited from time to time to argue with people about social insurance and Christianity. Without fail a feature of those arguments is as follows: my opponent on the political right leads with a correction to my view of them. They lament in a sort of victimized way that I have depicted them as not caring for the poor. This is uncharitable, they say: of course they care about poor people. It’s only that they feel charity must come from the heart, not from the state; they point out that charity just doesn’t count unless it’s voluntary, and that my argument that the state should provide some standard of living for its citizenry is therefore misguided, attempting to produce charity out of bureaucratic statecraft.

This is probably the most common argument contra social insurance or welfare that I get out of the Christian right. Sometimes it’s formulated as purely scriptural, e.g. “Well, Jesus said care for the poor, but he never said we needed to use the state to do it.” But it’s always the same basic argument, e.g. that welfare is an attempt to legally force charity, thus rendering the charity spiritually bankrupt and invalid.

State programs may affect the same people that private acts of charity affect, but state programs are not and are not intended to be‘charity’ as such. Just states that provide robust social insurance regimes may be seen as formed in the spirit of caritas, but that doesn’t make their social insurance programs anymore ‘charitable’ than, say, their water treatment plants or public school systems.

So those who confuse social insurance programs with charity make two mistakes: (a) they believe that the directive to give charitably can only be expressed as material charity on the individual level; (b) and they believe that government programs that offer benefits are only in danger of infringing upon charity when they are used primarily by the poor. This means that they believe, however implicitly, that charity is mainly for the poor .

(a) The directive to give charitably can only be expressed as material charity on the individual level.

Historically, Christians haven’t understood charity to mean purely material gifts of subsistence per se. John Bossy, in Christianity in the West 1400 – 1700:

“It would be idyllic to suppose that medieval charity was a relationship into which money did not much enter. But it was not relevant to the majority of the situations where charity was in question, and all the ‘corporal works of mercy’ (feeding, clothing, hospitality, visiting the sick and imprisoned, burying the dead) could perfectly well be carried on without any money changing hands. This was in keeping with the sensible if unheroic view expressed in the canon law that charity was better directed to those with whom one was in some actual relation (that is, one’s kin or neighbors) than to perfect strangers.”

Charity begins, it seems, in the home; it’s also best expressed in these relational ways. This turns the conservative objection to welfare on its head: where conservatives would say giving out assistance through the state saps charitable interactions of their relational qualities, the same is equally true of any charity given to a stranger. So your massive private organizations doling out assistance would be no different, on that count, than the state doing it. If you give money to Doctors Without Borders, that’s great! And it’s private. But it’s no different than a tax the state converts to welfare in that you’re still just giving money to someone else that is eventually passed on to the needy. Similarly if you give money to a food bank, that’s a wonderful thing to do! Do that. But it is no more relational than being taxed and having that tax money eventually fund SNAP. In either instance, the person who gets the food has no more relationship with you than they did before.

Which means, at the end of the day, charity as a relational function is going to occur equally whether assistance is run on a massive private scale or massive public scale. You’re either going to go sit with your sick neighbor or you aren’t, visit imprisoned loved ones or not; but the point is that big structures will always be equally impersonal. Which is fine, because charity can be carried out perfectly well without a strictly material basis. So that charity must be conducted on an individual level is true, but it’s not an argument against public assistance programs: the private ones that would take their place would be just the same on that count.

Addressing these arguments in turn:

(b) State programs only infringe upon the charitable mission when they primarily aid the poor.

You just will not find arguments against public school, public water treatment, public roads, or public parks saying that they violate the principle of charity. That is because those things are used by everyone. But the same ethos that produces all of those public works produces social insurance: the idea that it’s just that there are common things available to support the common good. Or, as Gilchrist explained of the medieval welfare recipient: “Nor was this type of relief regarded by the recipient as charity; instead he treated it in the way that we treat state maintenance today.” The widespread relief programs available in the medieval era, such as they were (variable and somewhat spotty), weren’t identified precisely with interpersonal acts of charity. They were another expression of concern for the total society, and so too should we imagine social insurance today.

States formed in the spirit of caritas feature all these contributions to the common good, because they all support the health of the whole society. Here’s Pope Francis, speaking on caritas:

The growth of inequality and poverty threaten inclusive and participatory democracy, which always presupposes an economy and a market that does not exclude [people] and which are equitable. It deals, then, with overcoming the structural causes of inequality and poverty. In the Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii gaudium I wanted to point out three basic instruments for the social inclusion of those most in need: education, access to health care, and work for all (cf. n. 192). [...]

The principle of Caritas in veritate is extremely topical. A truth-filled love is, in fact, the basis on which to build the peace that today is especially desired and necessary for the good of all. It allows one to overcome dangerous fanaticisms, conflicts for the possession of resources, migrations of biblical proportions, the enduring wounds of hunger and poverty, human trafficking, injustice, and social and economic disparities, imbalance in collective goods.

Education, healthcare, work — these are all things which the state in some form or another has a role in the provision of, or can, and perhaps should in the American context. As Pope Francis points out, these are all beliefs he comes to through the principle of caritas-in-veritate, or charity in truth. This means there will of course be a charitable impulse behind the formation of a state that provides services that support the common good, but it doesn’t mean that all charity will be identified with those provisions, or that those provisions should be understood as fulfilling the duty of charity we’re all charged to carry out in our relationships.

And it also points to another notable truth: charity isn’t just for the poor, and the poor using something doesn’t mean it’s necessarily charitable. We can support the poor, for instance, because a failure to do so damages our participatory democracy; this isn’t charity as much as the type of state maintenance Gilchrist references. Similarly we may for the same reason fund education and sanitation in a public way, but these aren’t acts of charity but acts of order and justice, (though caritas underwrites our love for these things in the first place.) The charitable impulse should and can apply to all, while individual acts of charity do seem well suited for the relational, and we can have all these things simultaneously, without any damage to charity.