Cutting Food Benefits for the Poor Is not a Christian Move

Last updated on: November 8, 2023 at 11:10 am by Rodney Kennedy

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Cutting Food Benefits for the Poor Is not a Christian Move 2023-11-08T11:10:15-06:00 Rodney Kennedy

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Conservatives can’t wait for House Speaker Mike Johnson to get down to the real business of government – reducing food benefits to the Americans most in need of assistance. The program, formerly known as food stamps, now SNAP, has been identified as a major target by Republicans. SNAP stands for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the country’s largest anti-hunger program that serves 41 million low-income American. Conservatives want to trim the rolls who now receive food benefits. There’s always a roll conservatives want to reduce – from voting rolls for immigrants, African Americans, to other minorities to SNAP rolls. When someone says SNAP, conservatives crackle and pop with enthusiasm for the chance to slash holes in the social safety net. They sound like they have all become “Rice Krispies” Republicans.

The furor over food escalates by the day. The Republican Study Committee, Freedom Caucus hardliners, and other Republicans are pressing to include SNAP reductions in the next farm bill. Rep. Dusty Johnson, South Dakota, has authored one of the leading GOP bills to enact stricter SNAP work requirements.

The desire to target nutrition spending exposes the lack of empathy among Republicans. No longer interested in “compassionate conservativism,” Republicans are in the mood to keep food off the tables of the needy.

Mike Johnson, the new speaker of the house sounding like a Southern Baptist preacher in love with alliteration says, “So we’re going to return these programs to being a life vest and not a lifestyle, a hand up and not a handout,” Johnson said on the call, adding that Republicans were “proud of these reforms.” His “preacher” rhetoric sounds good, but the harsh reality is that if his rhetoric becomes policy, poor people will go hungry.

As a senior member of the conservative-leaning Republican Study Committee, Johnson backed proposals to roll back food aid expansions under Biden and block states from exempting some work requirements for SNAP. In 2018, Johnson referred to SNAP as “our nation’s most broken and bloated welfare program.”

I don’t believe our political leaders should be messing with God’s poor.

Mr. Johnson, who started his term as speaker by insisting that he has a “biblical worldview,” must be reading the Bible differently from me. When a conservative reads the words of Jesus in Matthew 25:” I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me,’” he has a ready explanation. The conservative says that Jesus is only talking to Christians and to individuals. He will point to how many evangelicals are “Good Samaritans.” He will list all the funds that local churches provide to feed the hungry, soup kitchens, breakfast brunches, and meals. And with those facts in place, the conservative goes down to his house justified. But in Matthew 25:32 there’s an indication that Jesus is not only talking to individuals: “All the nations will be gathered before him.” If a nation has the food resources, the financial means to feed the hungry, then the judgment of God falls on its head if it refuses to provide for others. Any worldview that takes away from the poor is a selfish, greedy, uncaring perspective and not worthy of being called “biblical.”

I am glad that Mr. Johnson opened the door for such a biblical debate, I am happy to oblige.

Pharaoh of Egypt not Jesus of Nazareth

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First, I am tempted to believe that conservative members of Congress are more like Pharaoh of Egypt than Jesus of Nazareth. Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann sheds the light of truth on a possible answer to the question.

Pharaoh is a metaphor. He embodies power – absolute, worldly power. He has a food monopoly, and he uses food as a weapon. By his own actions and those of his food czar, Joseph, Pharaoh advanced the claims of the state against his own subjects, achieving a monopoly on land and on the food supply. That land and food supply became a tax base whereby wealth was systematically transferred from the peasant-slaves to the central monopoly.

The Sons of Eli Not Jesus

Fork photo by Jonathan Borba

Second, I see conservative members of Congress as more like the sons of Eli than Jesus. Why do conservatives persist in being the sons of Eli? Now the sons of Eli were scoundrels; they had no regard for the Lord or for the duties of the priests to the people. When anyone offered sacrifice, the priest’s servant would come, while the meat was boiling, with a three-pronged fork in his hand, and he would thrust it into the pan, or kettle, or cauldron, or pot; all that the fork brought up the priest would take for himself. This is what they did at Shiloh to all the Israelites who came there.

You thrust the three-pronged fork into the cauldron, and you take out vast portions for defense, for the corporate world, for the wealthy, for the interests of the powerful, and you leave the leftovers for the poor. I know the members of Congress who are determined to cut a hole in the social safety net. I call you by name. You are Hophni and Phinehas.

Let them remember the word of the psalmist:” God abandoned his dwelling at Shiloh, the tent where he dwelt among mortals” (Psalm 78:60). Caryle Marney, in a sermon translates “The Lord came no more to Shiloh.” God stops showing up at places where the poor are abandoned, rejected, not treated with respect.

Karl Menninger once told Marney that preachers needed to be more like Amos. In Menninger’s eyes this required one action. “Preach! Tell it like it is. Say it from the pulpit. Cry it for the housetops. What shall we cry? Cry comfort, cry repentance, cry hope.”

In the spirit of Amos, the spirit of the prophetic tradition, especially the African American prophetic tradition, I accuse conservative members of the House of Representatives of not caring enough for the poor and the hungry. Listen, if you think that a biblical worldview means imposing the book of Leviticus on the nation, you are sadly wrong. You can’t claim a biblical worldview and leave out the prophets. These were the clear-eyed, visionary men and women of God. The prophets were not shaken reeds, smoking lamps, earthen vessels, spent arrows. They spoke truth to power.

If Amos preached his message in the House of Representatives, what would happen? “Therefore, because you trample on the poor and take from them levies of grain, you have built houses of hewn stone, but you shall not live in them; you have planted pleasant vineyards, but you shall not drink their wine. For I know how many are your transgressions, and how great are your sins—you who afflict the righteous, who take a bribe, and push aside the needy in the gate.”

“Take away from me the noise of your songs;
I will not listen to the melody of your harps.
But let justice roll down like waters,
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”

Before Amos can finish his sermon, the gavel pounds over and over from the Speaker. His words are meant to silence the prophetic voice of Amos: ‘O seer, go, flee away to another land, earn your bread there, and prophesy there; but never again prophesy in the Capitol, for it is the king’s sanctuary, and it is a temple of the kingdom.’”

There’s more about feeding and caring for the poor in the Bible than even a good evangelical can quote from memory. I am not confident that evangelicals can be persuaded to abandon their deep-seated animosity toward the hungry poor even if 300 verses of Scripture are quoted to suggest a need for evangelical repentance.

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