“If a man shall not work…” and SNAP

I wrote a thing on Medium on October 30, and Hank Green posted a video two days later where he says a bunch of things I said in my thing. And since Medium looks like it's all premium (pay to read content), I'm going to paste it here. Hank Green and I might have the same brain? Although he didn't delve into the religious aspect of this.

Also, I didn't talk about the fact that most people on SNAP work because I don't think the people who don't like government safety nets really care at all. They just like to throw around sayings like "If a man will not work..." to justify cruelty.

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“If a man shall not work…” and SNAP

In 2 days, people who receive assistance from SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) will stop receiving benefits until the government reopens, if then.

I’ve seen a lot of alleged Christians gleefully marking the end of this social safety net, and one of the scriptures I hear bandied about in times like these is: “If a man shall not work, neither shall he eat.”

I believe that our current environment of mostly unbridled capitalism has skewed what we (and by “we,” I mean US citizens at large, and Christians specifically) consider “work” to mean only one thing: generating an income.

Before I get into that, let me break down a bit where that scripture comes from and to what it is actually referring:

Thessalonians is a Pauline letter to the church at Thessaloniki. In the bit where Paul warns the church about idleness, he says, “We hear that some among you are idle and disruptive. They are not busy; they are busybodies.”

Do you know who had the luxury of not working? Rich people. Poor people had to work to have anything.

Furthermore, Paul, in talking about how he and his compatriots labored when he was with the Thessalonians, indicated that some people DO have an actual right to assistance. “We did this, not because we do not have the right to such help, but in order to offer ourselves as a model for you to imitate.”

So he’s saying, “We paid for our food; we didn’t want to burden you. We certainly could have insisted, but we didn’t.”

The Old Testament has plenty of examples of “social safety nets,” one of which we see at work in the book of Ruth.

In the book of Leviticus, we find this command: “When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Leave them for the poor and for the foreigner residing among you. I am the LORD your God.’”

Then in the book of Ruth, we find the titular widow following after the laborers in Boaz’s field in order to feed herself and her widowed mother-in-law.

In her position in society, Ruth likely had zero options to “make a living” in the way we view that through the eyes of capitalism. She was reliant, not on the kindness of strangers (though Boaz certainly seems kind enough), but on wealthy people following the commands of their god to make sure that poor people did not starve.

There are hundreds of scriptures about caring for the poor, needy, traveling, and aliens. Here are just a couple:

“There will always be poor people in the land. Therefore, I command you to be openhanded toward your brothers and toward the poor and needy in your land.” Deuteronomy 15:11

“If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth.” 1 John 3:17–18

There have always been richer people and people with fewer resources. In the same way, there have always been people who look down on and judge people in desperate circumstances, whether it’s that their situation is a condemnation from a god, or that it’s a product of their own sloth.

The fact is, the more money that is hoarded by the richest people, the less there is to go around for everyone else. There are 800 billionaires in the US, representing 0.0002% of the population, who have 1/2 of the country’s wealth. And the bottom 50% of all US citizens have only 2.5% of the wealth in our country.

This is a blatant injustice in a time where tax codes advantage corporations and billionaires. While small businesses struggle with high costs and taxes, some corporations have such favorable concessions from local, state, and federal governments that they often pay no taxes at all.

Case in point: Tesla paid $0 in federal taxes from 2018–2022. In fact, they received over $1M in “refunds.” During that same time, their executives received over $2.5B. When they moved into Austin in 2020, they received a 20-year package of tax rebates in an area that could use some economic stimulation rather than neighbors who light up the night sky like it’s Friday night in Texas.

(Side note: “ecological paradise,” he said. WHERE IS THE ECOLOGICAL PARADISE, ELON? Dumping waste into the Colorado River hardly counts.)

The same holds for wealthy people who both illegally evade paying taxes and can pay CPAs to use legal loopholes to avoid paying taxes that should rightfully be remitted to the government to fund our infrastructure and programs.

The richest of “us” are wealthy beyond most people’s imaginations (including higher class people like doctors and attorneys). And the poorest… honestly, the same.

There’s a perverted enmeshment between the Protestant work ethic and capitalism that threatens to ruin our economy and our country. (And I’m not even going to go down the rabbit hole of fascism, our government murdering people in other countries because reasons, threatening to occupy states and countries because reasons, etc.)

“Good that those people aren’t getting the money I worked for! They should make their own money!”

If you’re just self-centered prick who doesn’t claim any morality greater than “every man for himself,” then okay. Think this. It basically makes you a monster, but, hey, that’s what Halloween is for, right?

But if you’re someone who claims to believe in a God who repeatedly commanded followers to care for the poor, how can you celebrate the fact that people are in nutritional danger when these benefits are cut off?

“The government shouldn’t be doing that; the church should.”

Great. I’ll tell you: We have benefitted so much from Hill Country Ministries and their monthly fresh food giveaway here in town. We have also appreciated what used to be the Old Farm Community Center Food Pantry in Lago Vista. Now mostly just one woman who gets food from local food banks and donors, delivers it to people in need in the community, then gives what is left away every Friday at the post office.

These programs are outstanding, and people’s generosity is admirable.

However, these programs require that you’re able to be at a certain place at a certain time to access them. Many people can’t because they don’t have transportation, or because of their work schedule.

A preloaded card that allows you to select your own groceries is so much more accessible. Also, only about $7 per day, so it’s not like anyone is able to overspend or overuse the largesse of the US citizenry. Do you know that averaged out over the whole population, we each contribute less than $1 per day to SNAP? Lower earners contribute less, and higher earners more.

Don’t you think that’s the way it should be?

If you’re able to win capitalism and make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, congratulations! But don’t you need to pay back into that system? Where did the idea of noblesse oblige go? Why don’t wealthier people feel responsible for making poorer people’s lives better if they can?

And ESPECIALLY Christians: Where is the concern for fellow image-bearers? Why are you so obsessed with forcing every living being to “earn” what God seemed to consider a basic condition of existing: the ability to acquire sustenance.

As Americans, we have to stop equating the ability to generate an income as a mark of high morals and entitlement. White collar criminals make a lot of money by exploiting and cheating people. Do their riches indicate God’s favor?

If hard work means a god will bless you by directly providing everything you need, then nearly every single person I saw in Haiti should be more wealthy than most people I’ve seen in the US.

That’s not the way it works, though.

We all live under a transactional system where work -> dollars -> the ability to have the things you need to survive.

An artist might make a thing of beauty that stirs emotion deep within the soul of all who view it, but if they can’t charge a lot for their creation, does that necessarily mean that they’re not contributing to society?

A mom (like me) might keep the home’s schedule, clean, do car repairs, mow the yard, help neighbors when they need it, cook for everyone, mend clothes, find sales, steward resources wisely, homeschool, etc. But none of that brings dollars into our household. So is what I do sloth and taking advantage of someone else’s work?

What about retired people? I know a lot of people who worked very hard (including my parents) and who now live off of the money generated and saved during their careers. If you want to get technical, they’re not “working,” though I’d argue that they both still contribute to society through service to their friends and family.

Honestly, the closest thing we see to retirement in the Bible is the man who had built up so much wealth that he had to build bigger barns and only had to worry about what he was going to eat. In the Bible, God demanded his life of him when he thought about retirement! I am not down with that, of course, but I think there are a lot of retired Christians ironically angry that there are less wealthy people on government assistance.

Finally, without going too deep into the ablism inherent in our society, what about people who cannot work at jobs to earn an income at all? Is there not an inherent dignity in human existence that implies access to life-sustaining resources?

Where is the empathy and the awareness that most of us are closer to total financial collapse than we are becoming so rich we will never need to think about money again?

I feel like the God of the Bible knew that we’d be like this, and that’s why he mentioned over and over again that we need to make sure everyone’s taken care of. If you’re a Christian, can’t you view your tax dollars creating a safety net as part of your obeying what your God told you to do?

It does not make sense to me that those of us who are comfortable would ruffle that someone with fewer resources than we have would get a small break. That they would be able to buy their kid a birthday cake. That they would get to celebrate the weekend with a steak. That they might buy sodas to take to a cookout.

In conclusion: Our government’s social safety nets, such as they are or have ever been, are necessary and humane. If you are in a position where you genuinely feel like your tax burden is harming you financially to the point that your own household is at risk, then I hope you’ll join those of us banging the drum for billionaires and corporations to pay their fair share of taxes.

Decades have taught us that “trickle down" does not work. While executives and businesses like Walmart and Amazon get richer and richer, WE pay for their exploitive employee practices with things like SNAP and WIC and other programs that their employees require as they are not paid adequately for their hard work.

Can we please stop cannibalizing each other and get mad at the real culprits here: oligarchs, billionaires, and everyone who enables them?

And can we stop hating poor people for being in the circumstances they’re in? It could very easily be any of us at any time. I learned this at Street Cafe in Las Vegas, and have been reminded of it as more time wears on wherein my husband is unemployed. It’s been 16 months, and do you think he does not want to work? Hundreds of applications, and maybe 3 sets of interviews going nowhere. If we lose it all, do we “deserve” it?

Where is our humanity, countrymen and alleged Christians? Where?