A dear Christian friend and I have been carrying on an extended conversation about politics, Scripture, immigration, poverty, and the responsibilities of Christians in public life.
We disagree about a good many things politically. But she is a friend I love and respect, and our disagreements take place within a shared Christian faith. That matters to me. One of the purposes of these conversations is not simply to win an argument, but to understand where our differences actually lie—and, when necessary, to challenge one another.
Recently, our conversation turned to Speaker Mike Johnson. My friend expressed deep frustration with Johnson’s conservative Christianity, particularly his views on immigration and the social safety net. She questioned how someone who claims a “biblical worldview” could support policies she regards as inconsistent with Scripture’s repeated concern for “the widow, the orphan, and the stranger.” In her view, those policies are not merely mistaken; they reflect a Christianity that is insufficiently compassionate, inclusive, and loving toward one’s neighbor.
I think that judgment is unfair—not only to Johnson, whom neither of us knows personally, but more broadly to conservative Christians who sincerely attempt to think biblically about these questions and nevertheless arrive at different political conclusions.
And that raises a much larger issue.
One of the recurring themes of this blog is Celebrating God’s Good Creation—receiving the world God has made as good, learning to see our neighbors as bearers of his image, and taking seriously our obligations toward the poor, the vulnerable, the foreigner, the family, the community, and the larger political order in which we live.
Christians should care about “the widow, the orphan, and the stranger.”
Of course we should.
But precisely because Scripture matters, we also have an obligation to read it carefully.
Biblical ethics cannot simply be lifted out of their historical, literary, covenantal, and theological contexts and then attached to whatever contemporary political program we happen to favor. A biblical command may establish a genuine moral obligation without settling every prudential question about how a modern government should fulfill—or assist its citizens in fulfilling—that obligation.
That distinction is enormously important.
“Care for the poor” does not by itself tell us how large the federal welfare state should be.
“Love the stranger” does not by itself establish an immigration quota.
“Seek justice” does not tell us which political party’s economic program is the Christian one.
Those conclusions require additional arguments—arguments from Scripture, certainly, but also from history, economics, law, human nature, institutional competence, and the actual consequences of particular policies.
And conservatives are not exempt from that discipline. We can proof-text our politics too. Christians on the Right should be every bit as careful about turning prudential judgments into divine mandates.
But neither should progressive Christians assume that their preferred public policies simply are the biblical ethic, leaving Christians who disagree to explain why they are somehow less compassionate, less loving, or less faithful to Jesus.
That is the issue behind the following response to my friend.
I have left much of it in the conversational form in which it originated because I think that form captures something important. This is not an abstract argument with an ideological opponent. It is a disagreement between Christian friends who care about one another and are trying—sometimes rather pointedly!—to understand how our common Scriptures should inform our very different political judgments.
And if Christians are going to disagree politically, that seems to me a much healthier place to begin.
Here is what I wrote to her.
From Biblical Principle to Political Policy
I’ve given your comments about Mike Johnson more thought, because I think they raise a much larger issue than Johnson himself.
I think you’re being genuinely unfair to conservative Christians.
You’re certainly free to disagree with Johnson’s policies, his political alliances, his judgment about Trump, or his interpretation of particular biblical passages. I disagree with plenty of politicians myself.
But you moved rather quickly from disagreement with Johnson’s political judgments to describing his Christianity as “unchristian,” “exclusive,” and “unloving”—and even suggesting that he is essentially a power-hungry fool willing to kiss whatever ring is necessary. In this case, Trump’s.
That is a sweeping judgment about a Christian brother neither of us knows personally.
More importantly, I think it reflects a tendency among some progressive Christians to assume that their preferred political policies follow rather straightforwardly from Scripture.
I don’t think they do.
Liberal Christians are capable of abusing Scripture to support their political preferences every bit as much as conservative Christians are.
You rightly emphasize the biblical commands to care for “the widow, the orphan, and the stranger.” So do I. Those are genuine Christian obligations.
But there is an important question between the biblical command and the political program:
What particular government policy follows from it?
That is where I think progressive Christians often make an enormous and largely unexamined leap.
The Bible tells us to care for the poor.
It does not tell us what the federal welfare budget should be, what tax rates should be, how expansive Medicaid should become, or that increasing government spending necessarily equals increasing Christian compassion.
Those are prudential political judgments.
Catholic political philosopher/theologian Michael Novak was especially helpful here. His vision of democratic capitalism was never simply “markets good, government bad.” A healthy society, he argued, rests upon mutually supporting institutions: democratic government, a free economy, and a strong moral-cultural sphere made up of families, churches, charities, neighborhoods, voluntary associations, and other institutions of civil society.
There is an enormous amount of human life between the individual and Washington, D.C.
Christians therefore have to ask more than, “How much money does government spend?”
Does a policy actually help people flourish? Does it strengthen families? Encourage work, responsibility, independence, charity, and community? Does it help people escape poverty or inadvertently create dependency? Does it strengthen institutions close to the person in need—or unnecessarily replace them with distant bureaucracies?
Those are Christian questions too.
Does America Really Abandon the Poor?
Here is something else I think gets badly distorted in these conversations:
Where exactly is this supposed unconcern for the poor and marginalized?
I am not claiming that America has no poor people. Of course we do.
We have homelessness, mental illness, drug and alcohol addiction, broken families, elderly people who struggle, people who fall through bureaucratic cracks, and neighborhoods suffering stubborn multigenerational poverty.
All of that is real, and Christians should care deeply about it.
But poverty is not synonymous with destitution, and progressive rhetoric frequently blurs the distinction.
Listen to some progressive Christian critiques of American capitalism and you could easily conclude that masses of Americans are simply abandoned without food, medical care, shelter, or institutional support while conservative Christians stand around quoting Adam Smith and shrugging their shoulders.
Where is this America?
I’m not seeing it.
We have Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, SNAP, housing assistance, school meals, disability programs, unemployment insurance, earned-income tax credits, state and local assistance, food banks, church ministries, rescue missions, Catholic and Protestant charities, the Salvation Army, private foundations, and community organizations.
And there is another rather obvious fact that ought to complicate the claim that America simply does not care for vulnerable people:
We are approaching $40 trillion in national debt.
Obviously, the entire debt cannot be attributed to social programs. We spend enormously on defense, government operations, emergencies, and many other things—and now more than a trillion dollars annually merely servicing accumulated debt.
But a very large portion of federal spending goes to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, veterans’ benefits, and other income- and health-support programs. Mandatory federal spending alone is projected at roughly $4.5 trillion in 2026.
Whatever else one thinks of American government (which includes both parties), the claim that we have simply decided not to care for vulnerable people is difficult to square with the evidence.
We can argue about whether these programs are well designed, whether some should be larger or smaller, about eligibility, work requirements, fraud, dependency, federal versus state responsibility, efficiency, and whether particular programs achieve what they promise.
Given a national debt approaching $40 trillion, we had better have those arguments seriously.
A society spending trillions every year on retirement security, health care, food assistance, disability, housing, and other forms of social provision cannot plausibly be described as a society that simply does not care about the poor.
That accusation is long on slogan and exceedingly short on evidence.
And fiscal stewardship is itself a moral question. Government cannot indefinitely promise benefits without asking who will pay for them, what obligations are being passed to future generations, and whether the economic system creating the necessary wealth remains healthy enough to sustain those promises.
[Source: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61882? ]
The American poor are surrounded by an enormous public and private network devoted to helping people in need.
Can those systems fail? Absolutely.
Can they be improved? Certainly.
Can people still experience genuine misery despite them? Of course.
But that is very different from saying our society simply does not care for the poor.
So let me ask an even more pointed question:
Who exactly on the conservative Christian side is advocating destitution?
Who is saying, “Let the widow go hungry”?
“Let the orphan sleep in the street”?
“If somebody cannot afford food, too bad”?
I know of no serious conservative Christian political movement advocating anything remotely like that.
Conservatives argue about how assistance should be structured. They worry about dependency, incentives, fraud, family formation, work requirements, federal versus local responsibility, and whether government programs crowd out institutions closer to the people they are intended to help.
You can disagree with those judgments.
But disagreeing about how best to help the poor is not the same thing as disagreeing about whether the poor should be helped.
To describe conservative efforts to reform, limit, decentralize, or impose conditions upon a program as evidence that conservatives do not care about “the widow and the orphan” is, frankly, polemical fantasy.
You have to establish that a proposed policy actually abandons vulnerable people—not merely demonstrate that government spends less money than you would prefer.
This is where Novak’s insight returns: the moral question isn’t simply, How large is the government program?
The question is: What actually helps human beings flourish?
Sometimes government is indispensable.
Sometimes families do it better.
Sometimes churches and local institutions do it better.
And I would argue that employment and sustained economic growth do more lasting good than another government benefit.
Christian compassion requires us to care about the result, not merely the mechanism.
When Caricature Becomes an Invitation to Socialism
There is another reason this rhetoric matters beyond whether conservative Christians feel unfairly maligned.
Ideas have consequences. Caricatures do too.
If young people are repeatedly told that capitalism leaves the poor destitute, conservatives don’t care whether vulnerable people eat, Christians on the Right ignore “the widow and the orphan,” and immigration restrictions exist because conservatives don’t love “the stranger,” we should not be surprised when some conclude that the economic and political system itself is morally corrupt.
And waiting in the wings is the Democratic Socialists of America saying, in effect:
Exactly. We have the alternative.
As a student of twentieth-century history, that concerns me enormously.
The numbers suggest this is not imaginary. In Harvard’s Fall 2025 Youth Poll of Americans ages 18–29, only 39 percent expressed support for capitalism, while 29 percent supported democratic socialism. Among young Democrats, support for democratic socialism reached 63 percent. [Source: Harvard IOP]
That does not prove progressive Christian rhetoric is causing young people to embrace socialism. But it certainly tells us the cultural soil is already fertile.
Young Americans are considerably more open to democratic socialism than many older Americans realize. So overheated rhetoric about the supposed cruelty of capitalism is not harmless theological posturing.
It helps create the moral atmosphere in which socialism can present itself as the compassionate Christian—or simply compassionate human—alternative.
If you teach a generation that our economic order is fundamentally a machine for enriching the powerful while abandoning the poor, eventually some will believe you. Once they accept that premise, greater political control of economic life, radical redistribution, weakening private ownership, and moving economic decisions away from markets can begin to sound remarkably attractive.
But what if the premise itself is badly distorted?
What if the remarkable story of the modern American economy is not mass destitution, but extraordinary prosperity coupled with enough productive wealth to sustain Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food and housing assistance, disability benefits, vast charitable institutions, churches, hospitals, universities, foundations, and countless other forms of assistance?
Then radically restructuring the wealth-producing system may not be the obvious act of compassion it is advertised to be.
A thriving market economy is not opposed to caring for the poor.
Its productive capacity is one of the things that makes sustained care for the poor possible.
Before wealth can be redistributed, somebody has to create it.
Before government can fund Medicaid, somebody has to generate the taxable economic activity that pays for Medicaid.
Before churches and charities can give generously, families and businesses must have something to give.
That doesn’t mean markets are morally self-sufficient. Novak certainly didn’t believe that. Markets require law, virtue, strong families, honest institutions, moral restraint, and a culture that understands that wealth carries obligations toward others.
But seriously impairing the productive economy in the name of compassion can eventually leave us with less ability to be compassionate.
My concern isn’t that young people care too much about the poor.
I want them to care about the poor.
My concern is that we are teaching them a false story about why poverty exists, what America already does for vulnerable people, and which economic arrangements give us the greatest capacity to help people flourish.
If progressive Christians contribute to that false story by suggesting that conservative Christians favor an economic order built upon indifference to “the widow, the orphan, and the stranger,” they bear some responsibility for the conclusions young people eventually draw.
You don’t have to convince someone explicitly to become a socialist.
Sometimes you only have to convince him that capitalism is morally indefensible.
The socialists will happily take it from there.
What Does “Love the Stranger” Actually Mean?
And that brings me to immigration.
What exactly is unchristian about restrictive immigration policies?
Another large theological leap often occurs here:
The Bible says to love the stranger; therefore restrictive immigration policies are unchristian.
But quite a bit is being smuggled into that conclusion.
We need to enter imaginatively into the world of the people to whom those biblical commands were actually given.
When the Hebrew Scriptures command Israel to care for “the stranger,” what kind of stranger are we talking about?
The ger of the Old Testament was not simply the ancient equivalent of anyone, from anywhere, who wished to enter Israel and live there on whatever terms he preferred.
He was a resident alien living within Israel’s social, legal, and religious order.
Israel was repeatedly commanded not to mistreat him, exploit him, or deny him justice. Those commands are morally serious, and Christians should take them seriously.
But that is not the entire biblical picture.
The stranger was also expected to live under the laws of the community that received him. Again and again the Torah speaks of one law applying to the native-born Israelite and the stranger living among them.
That is an important hermeneutical point.
Do we really imagine that a faithful Israelite understood “love the stranger” to mean:
Someone may enter our community, disregard our laws, reject the moral and religious convictions that define us, ignore the obligations of membership, and nevertheless insist that the community owes him all its benefits simply because he is a stranger?
I don’t think the biblical text supports that.
There is a useful Christian analogy here.
The Church welcomes people as they are.
Of course it does.
But it does not say they are expected to remain exactly as they are.
“Come as you are” does not mean “nothing about you must ever change.”
Entering a community brings obligations as well as benefits.
Israel, the Church, and the Modern State
The analogy, however, only takes us so far.
The United States is not ancient Israel, and neither is it the Church. That distinction matters enormously.
Ancient Israel was a covenant people, and the Church is the worshiping community of the New Covenant. Both are constituted by theological claims about God, truth, holiness, worship, moral discipline, and membership.
The modern American state is not.
So when Scripture speaks about receiving the stranger within Israel—or Christians speak about welcoming someone into the Church—we are speaking about communities whose identities include explicitly religious and moral obligations.
The Church welcomes the sinner as he is, but does not tell him that remaining exactly as he is constitutes discipleship. Christian community is ordered toward conversion, holiness, worship, discipline, and ultimately salvation.
Its welcome is therefore both more radical and more demanding than anything a secular state can properly require.
That is precisely why we must be careful about directly applying these biblical texts to modern immigration policy.
The United States government is not charged with making disciples, enforcing Israel’s purity code, administering sacraments, or preparing citizens for eternal life. It is a civil government governing a religiously plural population.
The biblical command to care for the ger certainly teaches enduring moral truths about justice, hospitality, protection from exploitation, and concern for vulnerable people.
But it does not follow that the institutional obligations of ancient Israel, the Church, and the American state are identical.
To pretend otherwise is not contextual biblical interpretation. It is a category mistake.
In a sense, it attempts to preserve the fruit while severing it from the root.
Human dignity, care for the stranger, concern for the poor, forgiveness, sacrificial love, and solidarity did not simply materialize from nowhere. Within the Christian moral vision they grow from deeper theological convictions about creation, the image of God, sin, covenant, redemption, and human nature.
A secular government can adopt some of those moral fruits—and I hope it does.
But when they are detached from the anthropology and moral framework that gave them meaning, policies built upon them can become confused or contradictory.
Compassion without prudence can become sentimentality.
Hospitality without law can become disorder.
And moral aspirations detached from a truthful account of human nature can fail the very people they were intended to help.
Ancient Israel itself demonstrates the broader principle.
Hospitality did not require cultural self-erasure.
Compassion did not mean lawlessness.
Protection of the stranger did not mean abolishing the distinction between Israel and the nations.
That is why it is too simplistic to take “love the stranger” and move immediately to the conclusion that restrictive immigration policies are somehow unchristian.
Scripture gives us a moral duty toward the stranger.
It does not give us an immigration quota.
It does not tell us how many immigrants a modern nation should admit, what asylum law should look like, whether someone who entered illegally must automatically be allowed to remain, or exactly how government should balance obligations toward newcomers against obligations toward existing citizens—particularly poorer citizens who may bear some of the costs of large-scale immigration.
Those are prudential questions.
A Christian can reasonably believe that a nation should welcome immigrants generously and control its borders.
A Christian can believe immigrants should be treated humanely and immigration laws should be enforced.
A Christian can care deeply about foreigners and believe government has special obligations toward its own citizens.
Those propositions are not contradictions.
Large-scale immigration also affects labor markets, schools, hospitals, housing, public budgets, and communities. Those consequences do not disappear merely because the immigrant has understandable reasons for wanting a better life.
And the working-class American has moral standing too.
Tell an American worker who loses a job or sees wages pressured by cheaper labor that his Christian obligation is simply to celebrate because the newcomer who displaced him is now economically better off.
That doesn’t strike me as a particularly sophisticated Christian social ethic either.
The poor around the world understandably want to come to America precisely because America remains extraordinarily prosperous and, compared with most societies in human history, extraordinarily generous.
That hardly proves America is an uncaring country.
Quite the contrary.
We remain a remarkably generous country—even with an admittedly unlikable President like Trump sitting in the White House. 😂
Back to Mike Johnson
Which brings me back to Mike Johnson.
You said his support for “ALL of Trump’s policies, no matter the harm” makes him unchristian, exclusive, and unloving.
But that is an enormous claim.
What evidence do we have that Johnson supports literally every Trump policy “no matter the harm”? And what specific harm are we talking about?
How do we know what he thinks privately about Trump?
How do we know whether his support on a particular issue reflects cowardice and lust for power rather than a sincere—possibly mistaken—prudential judgment about what he believes is best for the country?
You don’t know the man personally.
Neither do I.
And I’d be willing to bet he’ll be relieved when the Trump years finally end.
Until then, I’m willing to extend a Christian brother the same charity I hope I would extend to you: he can reach political conclusions with which I disagree without therefore being stupid, corrupt, unloving, or unchristian.
Criticize his policies?
Absolutely.
Show me where his reading of Scripture is wrong?
Let’s have that discussion.
Show me that a particular policy is actually harming poor people?
Let’s look at the evidence.
But “he disagrees with progressive Christian political judgments, therefore his Christianity is unloving and inconsistent” is not much of an argument.
Conservative Christians do not have a monopoly on biblical interpretation.
But neither do progressive Christians.
And perhaps all of us need to be much more careful about confusing our own prudential political judgments with the Gospel itself.
That, more than anything else, is the point I’m trying to make.
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