Christians Who Don't Want to Feed People—Aren't Jesus Christians

Well, we’re in the “Jesus didn’t say we should feed people” portion of the fall of American Evangelicalism.

I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised, as the Conservative Church has had one foot in Hell and one on a banana peel since it rubber-stamped a sexual predator to our highest office a decade ago.

Still, it’s heartbreaking watching millions of supposed Christians reach a new collective moral bottom and freshly grieving the collateral damage to humanity it is causing.

In the face of 41 million people already living with food scarcity being pushed further toward the precipice edge by the loss of SNAP, my social media feed and inbox are both crammed with an unsettling jumble of performative sermonizing, snarling outrage, and insult-to-injury mockery from people who want to declare themselves Jesus followers, while fiercely, unrelentingly opposing the entirety of his life and work.

“No", they will say with arrogant condescension, “you’re taking Jesus out of context,” when the context is Jesus feeding people and telling his followers to do the same. They will assassinate the character of millions of supposedly lazy strangers whom they claim are “abusing the system.” They’ll engage in all manner of theological gymnastics, wildly contorting lines of Scripture to abdicate responsibility for the suffering around them.

They will do whatever they can to avoid loving their neighbor.

It’s time we all called bullshit on the empty religion of these gaslighting, self-appointed saints and refused to allow them to practice such prolific hypocrisy unopposed.

In their defense of discarding Government-subsidized care programs, many of these closed-fisted blessing hoarders argue the Church, not the Government, should care for people, but this is all deflection; a clever bit of goalpost moving by people who really just don’t want to be decent. Ironically, these are the same people relentlessly asserting that America is a “Christian Nation.” (Funny how that only seems to be true when it results in people losing body autonomy, marriage equality, and refuge from tyranny, but I digress.)

The problem is that they (the very people who voted in the politicians currently dismantling healthcare, de-funding public schools, and eliminating meal programs) are the same people filling the estimated 350,000 Evangelical churches in this country (which apparently were already supposed to be doing this caring for humanity, but are not.)

The truth is, if these same people who call the Evangelical Church home had been following Jesus’ example all along, we wouldn’t be having these conversations. If these professed men and women of God were truly burdened to love their brothers and sisters as they would Jesus, the hunger of tens of millions here would be a non-issue.

But we do have this epidemic of poverty and pain and hunger, and the disheartening truth is that these Christians are the very people always loudly telling the least to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps,” neglecting the fact that they have no boots to begin with. These people don’t see the ironic tension of a supposedly “Christian nation” that can’t or won’t care for its most vulnerable, brimming with followers of Jesus in leadership who somehow can rationalize that not feeding people is the compassionate response.

The unavoidable truth is that Conservative Evangelicals don’t want their Government or the Church to lift people who are in need. They’d prefer to live with the fictional narrative that poor people are poor because they don’t want to work, or that those living with food scarcity are doing so because of some moral failing or bad decision. This story allows them to keep the stuff they have, to ignore the call to love their neighbor as themselves, and to feel morally superior in the process.

Look, MAGA religious people can post all the Scriptures they want, they can plaster their feeds with Charlie Kirk memes, and they can proselytize till the cows come home or until Jesus comes back. Still, they can’t escape the reality that the elemental, compassionate heart of Christ’s work was the tangible love of the people in his path. Anything that works to disobey that is straight-up heresy and spiritual rebellion.

Conservatives are welcome to slander strangers and protest the sharing of resources and celebrate the suffering around them and assert their right not to give a damn about anyone but themselves—but we can’t allow them to pass the buck to God while they do.

Christians who refuse to feed people aren’t Christians.

That’s the Gospel truth.