Some people say this:

“Care for the poor should be handled by private institutions like the Church, because it is morally wrong for the state to coerce charity.”

I find it weird this is trotted out as conventional Christian political wisdom these days, and often given the flavor of tradition, as though this were always the order of things and we’ve only now departed from it. I’m not so convinced myself. To break this down into constituent parts:

“Care for the poor should be handled by (1) private institutions like the Church, because it is morally wrong for the state to (2) coerce (3) charity.”

(1.) “private institutions like the Church”

This part of the formulation is less about the identity of the Church and more about the methods the Church is presumed to have for funding her poor relief efforts. That is, I don’t understand people who argue the Church should be solely responsible for poor relief to be fixated so much on the institution as on its institutional limitations. In other words, they don’t think the Church actually has the teeth to get anyone’s money away from them, which is why they prefer it to the state. But we can test this hypothesis: do we all agree the medieval setup was better, when the Church ran  poor relief but absolutely could and did levy a compulsory tax? To quote a beleaguered professor I incessantly bother,

“The Church’s coercive role was seen, at least in the early modern Jesuit tradition, as part of a wider indirect temporal authority – indirect as exercised only for supernatural ends. That authority was part of a wider picture of the Christian community as essentially committed in respect of its temporal resources, both private and political, to the supernatural end.  And the obligation to pay tithes was very much part of this, enforced by both Church and by the state as the Church’s agent.”

Pink’s observation of the early modern period was even more true of the medieval, when the Church enjoyed even more widespread authority. (A few threads of which were arguably unpicked by the Black Plague and other developments at the close of the High Middle Ages.) Pink goes on, in his paper on Suarez and Bellarmine:

“Enforcement of the canon law on heresy, as of canon law on other matters, historically involved not just the Church, but also the Christian state. But this involvement of the state was understood by the Church of Hobbes’s time not as the state’s voluntary cooperation under its own authority, but as fulfilling an obligation on the state to enforce the Church’s authority. Christian rulers were bound by their own baptism not only to meet canonical obligations themselves, but to help enforce them on their baptized subjects.”

This arrangement aligns well with Giles Constable’s explanation of the Church’s use of state apparatuses to enforce tithing in the early medieval period in Monastic Tithes: From Their Origin to the Twelfth Century:

“In view of the well-established precedent for tithing, it seems unnecessary to seek any more specific of elaborate reason for the civil enforcement of tithes than the general concern of the early Carolingian kings for the interests of the Church and for uniformity of practice throughout their realm.”

Medieval kings, in other words, had a very special role in relation to the Church; I’ve written on this before. Sedulius Scottus, the early medieval Irish poet of distressingly little exposure, captured this well in On Christian Rulers, writing in part: “indeed, a King is notably raised to the summit of temporal rule when he devotes himself with pious zeal to the Almighty King’s glory and honor.” If you have the crown, in other words, you’re obligated to use your talents and abilities for the benefit of the Church just like everyone else is; for Kings, this means, in part, the civil enforcement of tithes. At least this was understood to be the shape of things then: so the Church, as a private institution, absolutely had within its authority the capacity to enforce a form of taxation.

But I doubt the proponents of this line of thought are much desiring a return to this — most are, in fact, completely scandalized by the idea. And I’m not stumping for it either. I’m just putting forth the reality of the option to emphasize that this isn’t about the Church, or even about the Church’s privacy as an institution; it’s about the perceived limitations on the Church’s capacities. If you wipe those limitations out, suddenly there’s no more preference for the Church. So this isn’t really a religious argument in total: it’s more of a political one.

(2.) “coerce”

Point of order: coercion is a normative term in this sense. It means the forced yielding of that which is rightfully yours. Christian wisdom holds that if the poor haven’t enough, then your excess is not actually yours.(Tithes aren’t yours either.) Augustine:

“But we possess many superfluous things, unless we keep only what is necessary. For if we seek useless things, nothing suffices…Consider: not only do few things suffice for you, but God himself does not seek many things from you. Seek as much as he has given you, and from that take what suffices; other things, superfluous things, are the necessities of others. The superfluous things of the wealthy are the necessities of the poor. When superfluous things are possessed, others’ property is possessed.”

“In this life the wrong of evil possessions is tolerated, and among them certain laws are established, called civil laws, not because they bring human beings to make good use of their wealth, but because those who make evil use of it become thereby less injurious.”

The law can’t force you to be good. But it can make sure your evil doesn’t inordinately destroy poor people. Some of these laws will be property laws, and insofar as they produce an incursion only on superfluity, they’re completely licit and you are not being coerced because what is being taken is not yours. Of course, since we’re only trying to produce order and a basic standard of living for everyone here, this doesn’t require we seek after all superfluity; just so much that all necessities are met.

(3.) “charity”

The strangest part of the whole argument. Let’s all say it together: welfare is not charity and welfare is not trying to be charity and there are many forms of poor relief which are not charity and that is all okay.

It actually took a while for caritas to be conflated with alms-giving. Eliza Buhrer does a good job of tracking the original translation of Paul by Jerome that gave us caritas in the sense that would eventually become charity — a few hundred years later. So the two aren’t synonymous: caritas is only the underlying spirit that can be expressed in material alms-giving. As John Henderson notes in Piety and Charity in Late Medieval Florence:

“Poor relief throughout late medieval Europe was supplied by a series of interlinking systems from the Church and State to the craft guild, confraternity and hospital to more informal networks of parenti, amici, vicini (‘kin, friends, neighbours’). Underpinning all these systems lay the highest theological virtue, Charity, which provided the moral justification for the preservation of peace and the maintenance of order and the Buon Commune.“

Buon Commune = common good, basically. Constable also notes in Monastic Tithes that tithes were also considered wholly distinct from charity, even though they were understood to be used for the care of the poor. The point here is that the theological virtue Charity (or caritas) is the justification for many different types of poor relief — but it is not identical to them, just as the justification for me being patient is the love of my neighbor as myself, though my patience is not identical to this love — merely a manifestation of it. Similarly, though we may see the State’s efforts to relieve poverty as a manifestation of the spirit of caritas, that is only because it is caritas that leads us to pursue order and justice. But when the state relieves poverty, it is not “charity” in the same sense as interpersonal alms-giving. And that is just fine.

Because interpersonal alms-giving and other interpersonal acts of charity will and should persist even though the state has a hand in the relief of poverty. One example: here in the USA, where not all people can afford healthcare, we see charities offering to pay for the treatment of children with cancer, we see charitable hospitals requesting funds on TV, we see campaigns for donations to individuals struggling to pay healthcare costs on twitter and facebook. But in the UK, where the NHS provides single-payer universal healthcare, you see charities offering to pay for families to stay at hotels near the hospitals where their loved ones are being treated. Point is: there are always needs to be met, even when a basic standard of living is provided via state programs. Christianity, as this little dip into medieval Christian history hopefully suggests, is a religion of fantastic imagination; there are all kinds of ways to help people out there, and the Body of Christ is pretty good at soothing its members. I don’t have any doubt that Christians will always be able to find ways to act in caritas, even with robust welfare states.

All of this comes to a rather modest point, which Christians in European and Latin American nations seem quite obviously comfortable with — there is nothing about Christian history or philosophy that inherently militates against any and all state relief of poverty.