Render unto Caesar

 

A thought just occurred to me, and I’m surprised it never occurred to me before.


Progressive Christians point to the 2000+ verses in the Bible that command people to take care of the poor and say that this means Christians should advocate for government programs that take care of the poor.


Conservative Christians say those verses mean that individual Christians, and churches, should take care of the poor, instead of the government.


However, Mosaic law assumes a theocracy*. It assumes that the priests are the ones governing Israel.


So the thought that occurs to me is this:


Money given to the temple/church IS money given to the government, under Mosaic law.


10% of the gross as a bare minimum, plus other offerings for holy days (which are numerous). And it's given primarily for the purpose of providing basic necessities for the poor.


In addition, you're supposed to leave behind some of your harvest for the poor to glean - rather than squeeze every ounce of profit possible out of your business, you must leave some of your profit for whoever needs it.

And you're supposed to forgive any debts owed to you every seven years.

And you're not supposed to charge interest on those loans.

And all of this is the law of the land. These rules aren't suggestions for people who choose to live a moral life... they're part of the constitution.


In other words, the original Biblical model of the kind of government God wants... is one where people who have money give a hefty percentage to the government so it can be redistributed to people who don't have money, and the rich are legally prohibited from keeping the poor in debt.


(And if you don't like that, wait till you find out that the first Christian church was a commune, where God struck two people dead for lying about whether they'd given all the money they were supposed to give for the good of the community...)

 

* We all know, of course, that a theocracy has no place in our country. Even the conservative Christians who want a theocracy know that, when they see a NON-Christian theocracy arise - they are more appalled than anyone at the idea of a theocracy if the religion in question is Islam. The point is that the conservative Christians who think that our country should be governed by Biblical principles, once again, ignore what governing by Biblical principles would ACTUALLY mean in practice.

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