Jamin Bradley

“A quart of wheat and three quarts of barley for a day’s wages—but do not harm the oil and wine!” This was the proclamation of the third horseman of the apocalypse. He and his rider represented the economic downfall of society—the kind of thing that eventually happens in every kingdom once it has embraced power at the expense of others. As N.T. Wright notes on this passage, “Ordinary commodities, the staple diet of poor people, shoot up in price; luxury items, oil and wine, stay the same, allowing the rich once more to get richer at the expense of the poor.”

According to the Associated Press, with the passing of The One Big Beautiful Bill, it is estimated that America will experience “$1.2 trillion in cuts, largely to Medicaid and food stamps, by imposing work requirements on able-bodied people, including some parents and older Americans, making sign-up eligibility more stringent and changing federal reimbursements to states.”

As we can all imagine, this change is a huge risk to America’s poor and vulnerable—the exact people that the Bible expects personal and governmental responsibility to be invested in. Yet this appears to be a bill in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. According to the Guardian, “The Yale Budget Lab found that the bottom 20% of US households would see their incomes drop by 2.9% on average over the next decade, and the second lowest quintile – moderate-income households – would suffer a 0.4% loss of income on average. But the richest 20% would see their incomes rise by 2.3%. Those in the top 1% would see their incomes climb by $29,585 on average.”

How did we end up here? By pointing to corruption as our reasoning for drastic change. If there are able-bodied people out there taking advantage of a system meant for good, then we can claim those stories as our scapegoat for overhauling everything, even if it gets others killed. Just a few short months ago, Elon Musk got away with the same methodology: figure out where good systems have embraced corruption and then tear it apart, regardless of the consequences (which still have yet to reveal themselves in full). When we gut and defund important systems like this to address corruption (which exist in all systems and need to be addressed in wise ways), we miss all of the peripheral activity that our massive changes cause. (John Oliver recently did a great job of showing such activity in a recent report.)

I get it: systems change. But if Christians are going to support massive changes, our focus should be on systems that aim for love, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and so on. Let’s take risks on supporting the vulnerable, not defunding them. As always, address corruption where you find it, but don’t destroy lives to do it.

Of course, corruption isn’t even really the problem here. If it were, we’d care more about Trump’s 34 felony counts of falsified business records. We have a millionaire creating a world that works for people like him but takes great risks with the poor—whom he, like many wealthy individuals, is out of touch with. For example, I recently read an article in which a man worth about $14 billion decided to leave his fortune to his 106 children, saying, “I want them to live like normal people, to build themselves up alone, to learn to trust themselves, to be able to create, not to be dependent on a bank account.” This statement is so out of touch, given that each child would currently receive about $131 million each. There’s nothing normal about that.

We yield ourselves over to the old mentality that if you just try really hard, you can “pull yourself up by the bootstraps,” which used to be an old sarcastic idiom referencing an impossible feat. But leave it to us Americans to decide that the impossible is possible and that everyone should be able to defy reality if they just try hard enough. We have to start admitting that this is not true and that there are so many variables in the lives of the poor that we don’t know because we haven’t experienced it ourselves. We have to stop defending ourselves and hear other people’s stories.

Medicaid is important. Food stamps are important. The poor are Jesus and we are to serve them, both personally and governmentally. May we who have always been able to afford oil and wine not be so caught up in our riches that we miss the fact that others can’t even buy wheat and barley anymore. The third horseman always knows how to unbalance a kingdom of power, and we do not belong with him, but with the horseman of righteousness.