When Jesus says, “The poor you will always have with you” (John 12:8), he is, among other things, quoting from Deuteronomy 15: “Since there will never cease to be some in need on the earth, I [God] therefore command you, ‘Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land’” (v. 11).
Christians know that God commands us to help those who are poor, and to both give and receive depending on our need (Acts 11:29; 2 Corinthians 8:1- 6). Sometimes this command is straightforward. After hearing that an acquaintance is facing hardship, I might contribute some school supplies or donate to a GoFundMe. Or sometimes others can meet my needs. Friends dropped o meals when my children were newborns. But things get complicated when we’re talking about poverty and need within society as a whole— an issue the Israelite leaders faced in Deuteronomy, and one that we face today.
Questions about poverty, and the role of government in providing basic needs for the least well-off, came up in light of the July 2025 budget bill that significantly cuts funding for Medicaid and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits. The bill cuts $1.1 trillion in federal healthcare spending over the next decade, which the Congressional Budget Office estimates will increase the number of Americans without health insurance by 7.8 million in 2034. It also cuts $186 billion from SNAP. Estimates about the impact of those cuts are less certain because each state handles SNAP cuts differently. However, the Urban Institute and Center on Budget and Policy Priorities suggest that between 1.4 million to 2 million children may lose food benefits.
The impacts of these cuts won’t all be felt immediately, but polling shows that a majority of Americans think the bill will help the wealthy and harm low-income people. This may be one reason that Americans overall don’t support the bill’s provisions; polling in June indicated that 49% of Americans opposed the bill while 29% favored it.
Does christian thought help us?
Christians in our society might wonder whether and how we should apply our religious values to policies like this. The Bible isn’t a policy document, but it has a lot to say about wealth and poverty. Does Christian tradition give us any guidance when we consider government tax policies and programs like Medicaid and SNAP?
Some leaders seem to think so. House Speaker Mike Johnson requested prayers for the bill to pass when it was introduced in February. (Previously in 2023, Johnson told a gathering of supporters that God had prepared him to bring his party together by speaking to him in the middle of the night and guiding him to act like Aaron, then Moses, in his political career.) Meanwhile, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries quoted the Bible during an eight-hour-plus speech arguing against the bill’s passage, and several clergy were arrested after blocking a street outside the U.S. Capitol to pray while the Senate voted.
Communal care for the poor in the Bible
Commands to care for the poor run throughout the Bible. Jesus blesses the poor and hungry, promising good things to come (Luke 6:20-21). He states that those who feed the hungry feed Jesus himself (Matthew 25:34- 40). He admonishes religious leaders for tithing herbs and spices while neglecting justice and mercy (Matthew 23:23).
In Matthew 23, Jesus seems to be following in the footsteps of Hebrew prophets like Jeremiah and Amos, who called their national community to task for exploiting the poor and critiqued the actions and policies of rulers. In Jeremiah 22, God tells Jeremiah to instruct the king: “Go down to the house of the king of Judah, and speak there this word, and say: Hear the word of the LORD, O king of Judah…you, and your servants, and your people who enter these gates … Act with justice and righteousness and deliver from the hand of the oppressor anyone who has been robbed. And do no wrong or violence to the alien, the orphan, and the widow, or shed innocent blood in this place” (Jeremiah 22: 1-3).
Jeremiah further admonishes the king of Judah for mistreatment of workers: “Woe to him who builds his house by unrighteousness and his upper rooms by injustice, who makes his neighbors work for nothing and does not give them their wages” (Jeremiah 22:13). Biblical texts—both this text and passages in Leviticus and Deuteronomy— command landowners to pay fair wages and leave part of the harvest for the poor—not as charity, but as a religious obligation not to appropriate goods that rightfully belong to those in need.
Dr. Laura Alexander is associate professor of religious studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. She is author of the textbook Religion and Human Rights: An Introduction (Routledge 2024).
This excerpted article appears in the December/January/February 2025-26 issue of Gather. To read more like it, subscribe to Gather.