Christian charity and taxes
From Thomas Woods' The Church and the Market (page 196):
This seems like two crucial points missing in our moral dialogues today. First, advocates of the use of state power to solve social dilemmas are generally optimistic about the ability of the people who make up the government to resist the temptation to abuse their powers, even as many also tend to find the current U.S. government to be persuasive evidence of Satan's presence on Earth. If the existence of social problems are, as these same folks generally contend, the result of bad actions by people (price gouging, racism, etc.) in the private sector and the Republican Party, why then is it legitimate to assume that the government is populated largely by people able to resist the temptations of power and self-interest?
Second, because something is right does not mean it is mandatory or that it should be mandatory. If we mandate charity, is it really charity for it is no longer the result of a voluntary choice? If we accept the idea that life on earth is a mere prelude to eternity, then it becomes far less important that we cure every problem. Only in a secular world view in which this is all there is does it matter so critically that all suffering be ended right now. The moral obligations to the poor are placed on us because they are a test of our response - it is our actions in helping or not for which we will have to answer.
To say that the demands of Christian charity are binding on the Catholic conscience, and that these demands must inform the pious man's disposition of his property, is something very different from claiming for the state a right to violent interference with a man's use of his property if he is considered not to be sufficiently generous towards his fellows. He will have to answer to God for his lack of charity toward his fellow man, to be sure. But to claim that the state is obligated to seize his possessions violently is a mere statement of opinion. Moreover, surely it at least possible that the dangers inherent in granting the state such powers could be so great as to render wealth redistribution undesirable even to those who might otherwise support it.
This seems like two crucial points missing in our moral dialogues today. First, advocates of the use of state power to solve social dilemmas are generally optimistic about the ability of the people who make up the government to resist the temptation to abuse their powers, even as many also tend to find the current U.S. government to be persuasive evidence of Satan's presence on Earth. If the existence of social problems are, as these same folks generally contend, the result of bad actions by people (price gouging, racism, etc.) in the private sector and the Republican Party, why then is it legitimate to assume that the government is populated largely by people able to resist the temptations of power and self-interest?
Second, because something is right does not mean it is mandatory or that it should be mandatory. If we mandate charity, is it really charity for it is no longer the result of a voluntary choice? If we accept the idea that life on earth is a mere prelude to eternity, then it becomes far less important that we cure every problem. Only in a secular world view in which this is all there is does it matter so critically that all suffering be ended right now. The moral obligations to the poor are placed on us because they are a test of our response - it is our actions in helping or not for which we will have to answer.
Posted by Andy Morriss on
Monday November 21, 2005 at 4:59pm
Charity is a function of a life lived in imitatio Dei. As God freely gave his only Son, so too we are charitable. Note, here, that I do not use the term "giving" charity or "doing" charity. Charity is habitus that comes from living the Christ-life.
I think I Corinthians 13, while generally overused by unoriginal clergy at weddings, is instructive. "And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing." (v. 3) And this would be a voluntary giving of goods! Can charity ever enter in when goods are taken?
On point one, the state-power crowd, I would contend, simply has transferred allegiance to "public religion". They have a nifty sacrificial system, priests, and a theology in which the human is deity. They compel funding of their faith in the same manner that state churches are funded-by a form of ecclesiastic tax. The problem is that the outworking of the religion, wholly uninformed by true charity because you can't let such notions into such a model, is unable to be truly benign no matter what the intentions of those who worship at the altar of government.
Just a few observations from this corner of the ecclesia militans.