Responsibility, Blame, and the Criminalization of Need

We're responsible even when we’re not to blame.

As our nation considers the question of who, when, and how we’ll allow immigrants to come into the US, and our president leads with his well known moral constancy, it is worthwhile to consider what Christians believe about the relationship between responsibility and blame. 

The answer is easy. The life of Christ, and the parable of the Good Samaritan make the same point: We are responsible for the welfare of others even when we are not to blame for their suffering. And as Christ showed on the cross, it isn’t just a matter of innocent victims. As he took responsibility for us because of our entirely self-inflicted sin, so we have responsibility even for those who brought their problems on themselves. 

The problem we face living out a Christ-like life is that we have multiple overwhelming and conflicting responsibilities for the welfare of our neighbors and family. They are overwhelming because no amount of personal time and energy will solve even one of these problems. I know a woman who has given her life, every minute of every day, to promoting the welfare of orphaned children. Still, there are more and more orphans every year. The list goes on of those types of individuals to whom any one of us or our whole community could give everything without solving their problems. 

Even Jesus could not cure all the diseases of his Galilean world, or feed all the hungry in his neighborhood. Even in the first century a meal for 5,000 was a drop in the bucket of hunger. 

Then there are the conflicting needs. The victim on the side of the road calls for a Good Samaritan, but the person who passes by may have a sick child at home, a dying mother, or just a job that will be lost if he’s late again. The moral demands on our time and energy never offer simple choices.

So we are all caught up in the complex ethical problems created by overwhelming need and competing goods. And we have no choice but to make difficult choices about how we’ll use our personal and social time and resources to take responsibility for our neighbors, regardless of their blame.

And that is as it should be if we are followers of Christ. The unease, the psychological pressure from making moral choices, helps us grasp God’s love for us. It cuts off our self-righteousness at the roots, and leads us to fully embrace God’s gracious judgment on our lives; far more gracious the that of our neighbors or than the judgment we so regularly render on others.

Unfortunately we’ve found a way to avoid those moral choices. It relieves our psychological pressure. And ultimately it relieves us of reliance on God. We’ve found a way to maintain and even increase our human self-centeredness and the autonomy to which Sin continually calls us. 

We’ve discovered the criminalization of need. 

By making human need a crime we’ve alleviated ourselves of responsibility for it. After all, what decent Christian person should support crime? Drug addiction, alcoholism? Make either the addict a criminal or the behaviors that follow a crime and you don’t have to help addicts get sober.  You just thrown them in jail. Poverty? Make debt a crime, whether it an inability to pay traffic fines, for example, or failure to pay taxes, and you can safely and quickly toss poor people out of their homes as a prelude to putting them in jail and never take responsibility for helping them out of poverty. 

And what if children are being murdered by gangs, refugees are fleeing from from war, or pregnant women are starving to death? Make migration across national borders a crime and you can shuttle them into pens, or let them die in the desert of thirst, or just shoot them down when they run. Because Christians in a Christian nation don’t have to take responsibility for criminals. 

Jesus knew something about the criminalization of need. Hungry on the sabbath? Too bad, eating is a crime. Sick? Whoops, healing on the sabbath is a crime. Did you happen to get mugged on the road? Well being unclean is a crime and I don’t have my rubber gloves to help you up. Blind? Yeah, that’s a crime too - your parent’s if not yours. Maybe you need to pay your tithe, but got your salary in the emperor’s coin? Well its a crime to use that money. 

The enemies of the gospel have always maintained their righteousness and ignored their responsibility for the welfare of their neighbors by criminalizing need. Its the oldest trick in the book. So it is surprising that Christians who actually have that book, and claim to know its author, and accept the validity of his rebuke of those who use this trick, have used it themselves. Indeed Christians in Congress and in the Whitehouse, fully supported by their Christian constituencies across the US are still using it: a nation of whitewashed tombs.