The illfare state: Why the Welfare State doesn’t work

For more than a century now, the task of looking after the poor has been given over to the state. But at the beginning of the 21st century, the welfare states of most Western nations have come to resemble a bunch of ghastly old tower blocks that were hastily thrown together in some badly thought-out urban renewal project, and which are tottering this way and that, about to collapse into chaos and mayhem at any moment.

Margaret Thatcher once remarked that “the problem with socialism is that sooner or later you run out of other people’s money,” and the Greeks are right now finding out that this is indeed true. Next in line could well be Italy or perhaps Spain or Portugal, while the United States may go on for a few more years before it too goes into meltdown. The formerly prosperous Western nations are in the process of discovering that the pot of gold was not without a bottom after all, and that decades of, as Rudyard Kipling put it, “robbing selective Peter to pay for collective Paul” is not only unsustainable in the long run, but also highly toxic and with consequences that will reach long into the future.

So why doesn’t the Welfare State work in the long run? There are at least five reasons.

The first is that it is a system based on the forced redistribution of wealth from one group of people to another. The key word here is forced. As the main benefactor of the poor, the modern Welfare State appears with a kindly and charitable face. But the reality is of course that the state itself has no money of its own, but must rely instead on threatening its citizens with jail in order to gather in its “charitable handouts.” Hardly in keeping with the eighth commandment, and so never particularly likely to receive the long-term blessing of God!

Second, the state is not, and was never meant to be, an instrument of grace. The Biblical origins of civil government find their roots in God’s instructions to Noah after the flood that, “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made He man” (Genesis 9:6 KJV). The instruction was given to man in order to prevent—in an organized and judicial way—the kind of lawlessness that had existed before the flood, from taking hold again. The origin of the state and its role is therefore 100 percent coercive from top to bottom—an instrument of pure justice, rather than pure grace—and as Romans 13:4 shows, the role hasn’t changed since that time. All of which means that any attempt to turn what is fundamentally a coercive institution into a means of grace for the needy is a bit like trying to perform open-heart surgery using a machete.

Third, the Welfare State encourages apathy among those who receive from it. The old adage goes, “Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day; teach him how to fish and he will eat for a lifetime.” The Welfare State catches a lot of fish for a lot of people, but it does not, and cannot, teach a person how to catch fish and to be self-sufficient. On the contrary, it leaves a lot of people standing open-mouthed each day, waiting for yet another fish to be dropped in. And worse than this, it encourages many to choose lifestyles which are evidently self-destructive, in the knowledge that they can live such lives and still get fed. Why bother going fishing when someone else will catch fish for you!

Fourth, it discourages genuine charity. It does this in at least three ways. Firstly, by taking away vast sums of income through taxation, it means that people have less left to give to the poor. Secondly, because the system is easily abused, it becomes extremely difficult to work out who the genuine poor are and who are “poor” because they will not work. And thirdly, it can create a sort of cynical apathy among people, along the lines of, “Why should I give anything to anyone? The state takes my tax money, the state can fix the problem.”

But the fundamental problem with the Welfare State is that it lacks the omniscience needed in order to carry out what it purports to do—that is, to be a benefactor to the poor. Even leaving aside its dubious methods of collecting money, it would need to know the circumstances of each individual, each family and each community in order to know how best to allocate resources and how to do so without inducing great harm. Of course this cannot possibly be done by so gargantuan an institution, and so its method of allocating resources more resembles carpet-bombing than it does targeted, personal assistance to those who most need it. Such a system inevitably does more harm than good, which in turn means that it then requires even more money to try to alleviate the disasters caused by its own lack of divine omniscience. And so the system bloats itself up until it reaches a point where the only thing left is for it to explode at any moment.

So if this system is doomed to fail, what is the Biblical alternative? The first principle of Biblical welfare is individual giving, not mass redistribution of wealth. The description of the righteous man in Psalm 112 says that “he hath dispersed, he hath given to the poor” while the depiction of the righteous woman in Proverbs 31 says that “she stretcheth out her hand to the poor; yea, she reacheth forth her hands to the needy.” Likewise, in the parable of the Good Samaritan, the Samaritan himself had compassion. He himself bound up the victim’s wounds, then he himself set the man on his own beast, took care of him himself, and then paid for the inn out of his own pocket. He did not go about demanding the redistribution of oil, wine, donkeys and money. He did what he could with what he had.

The second principle of Biblical welfare is that it ought, in the main, to be personal and relational. Although there is nothing inherently wrong with sending funds to a cause thousands of miles away, we are called to love our neighbor as ourselves, which means that we must begin with those closest to us before we set ourselves to minister to those more distant from us. During His earthly ministry, Jesus could have healed anyone, anywhere in the world, but in healing the person immediately before Him, He gave us the pattern that we are to follow, which is of helping those with whom we come into contact.

The third principle is that families are meant to be self-contained units of welfare. Parents today are increasingly leaving the care of their children to the nursery or crèche and at the opposite end of things, children are increasingly leaving the care of their elderly parents to the nursing home. But Biblical welfare simply doesn’t look like this. Biblical welfare looks like parents raising and nurturing their little ones, and it looks like children requiting their parents (1 Timothy 5:4), which in rather unsophisticated terms may mean something like this: They changed your diapers when you were helpless; you change theirs when they are helpless.

Of course, in practice families are fragmented and just do not behave like this anymore. But the answer is not for the state to step in and assume the role of provider. It was this that chiefly led to the fragmentation of families in the first place! No, it is at this point, that the fourth principle of Biblical welfare applies. Where individuals and families are either unable or unwilling to care for their own, it is the Church that is to be the means of grace and the instrument of charity. Here a redistribution of wealth does occur, with church officers using funds supplied by individual members to give to those in need. But unlike the Welfare State’s coercive method of collecting money, and its carpet-bombing-style allocation of those resources, a church collects its money through the voluntary giving of its members, and it allocates them through personal contact with the recipient, firstly to those of the household of faith and then to those outside (Galatians 6:10).

Individual Christians, Christian families and the Church as a whole have, over the past few generations, ceded welfare to an institution that was never designed for the purpose. And now after a hundred years or so of this arrangement, the debts have piled up, the family is fragmented and we may be about to find great poverty coming upon us. No government program will solve this, and a Biblical solution will not work overnight. Any solution will be the product of careful and prayerful thought about what we can do for the needy as individuals, families and churches.

Unfortunately, Protestants are often scared of this kind of stuff as it is said by some to be going down the social gospel road. Well, the Gospel is a social gospel. This is not to say that anyone is saved through anything other than faith alone—they are not—but if our gospel does not have social ramifications, then how authentic and how Christ-like is it? The next few decades may well provide Christians, Christian families and churches with unparalleled opportunities to show just how authentic and Christ-like our faith really is. Pray God that we don’t miss this opportunity to show the world what true welfare really looks like.

Rob Slane is the author of The God Reality: A critique of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. A former atheist, Slane is now a member of Emmanuel Church in Salisbury, England, where he and his family live.