joy cometh with the morning

None Of These Departments Are In The Bible

Photo of a robin perching on a gate

A correspondent sent me this, and it's hijacked my brain to a fairly significant degree:

Screenshot of a post that reads "Speaking on Nick Robinson's Political Thinking podcast on Friday morning, Badenoch suggested it could be "argued that" the Budget was unchristian. When pressed on the remark, the Tory leader explained: "In early Christian times, there was no state or welfare, so I think that you can argue that, actually."

How are we to interpret this? The most charitable would be "she said something silly, realised it was silly, but is trying to front her way out of it". This is... maybe not a characteristic desirable in the leader of a major(?) political party, but it's at least a recognisable human behaviour. However, I've been captivated by the thought that this is maybe something she actually believes. She said:

"In early Christian times, there was no state or welfare, so I think that you can argue that, actually."

So, we've got the assertion that in "early Christian times, there was no state or welfare", being used in support of the argument that the latest Budget, or certain aspects of it, were "un-Christian"[1]. Let's try and approach the argument first. Is she saying, like a TikTok influencer[2], "none of these words are in the Bible"? Is her argument that, if something wasn't around at the time of the early Church, that it's bad or wrong, and shouldn't be legislated about? If we were to take this seriously, what would the competence of government be?

This is a question confounded slightly by the fact that (of course) her assertion is incorrect. This is the way the Gospel of Luke dates Christ's birth:

In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.)

Syria there being the Roman province encompassing Nazareth etc, Quirinius being the Roman governor of said province, and Caesar Augustus of course being the founder of the Roman Empire, a polity that, while not in the modern sense a nation-state, is pretty indisputably state-ish. The New Testament is absolutely full of Jesus and the disciples' interactions with agents of the Roman Empire: centurions, tax collectors, governors (those with a passing familiarity with the Easter story might remember the name 'Pontius Pilate') etc etc.

What about welfare? Well, there are mentions of welfare within the church itself, like this from the book of Acts:

All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need.

So states and welfare[3] are in. That's good because if there weren't states then by these rules we're setting up here the government should probably abolish itself. But what else might be on the chopping block? Let's have a look at the main government departments and see what makes the cut:

So we're not writing too much off here, but removing DCMS, DSIT and DESNZ would still be a pretty big effort for a frankly rather niche theory of government. And this was originally about the Budget anyway—how much is there that could be called "un-Christian" in there? The main measures are to do with tax and as we all know you should render unto Caesar blah blah blah. Looking through, nothing really strikes me as "un-Christian". Arguably removing the two-child benefit cap is explicitly Christian: "Whoever is kind to the poor lends to the Lord, and he will reward them for what they have done." I don't think it was a good budget! There's way more that could've been done! But I think this is a frankly barking angle for criticism.

Look, the fact that the leader of HM Opposition (still, just about) is happy to go on a BBC show (a podcast yes, but still!) and put forth the suggestion that a measure of whether aspects of a Budget are good or effective is whether or not they conforming to some vague notion the social relations prevailing in "early Christian times" just shows a comical level of unseriousness; thought-terminating cliche posing as insight. What makes matters worse is that she's not even a Christian! She's agnostic![5] She doesn't even have a religious reason for saying something this goofy! What are we even doing here?

  1. even though I've written that in quotes you can see it's actually written "unchristian" in the post, but my internal style guide is telling me that we want the capital in there so it's getting hyphenated. ↩︎

  2. or whoever it is that says this phrase. I don't know, I'm old. ↩︎

  3. Even if you discounted that as religiously-inspired charity and insisted only on state-provided welfare, while not featuring in the Bible directly, in 123 BC Gaius Gracchus introduced the grain dole—initially a heavily-discounted (and from 58 BC, completely free) allowance of grain to Rome's urban poor, which was, of course, still around in those "early Christian times". ↩︎

  4. I'm really happy with this joke, and if you didn't think it was funny that says more about you quite frankly. ↩︎

  5. I've said it before, I'll say it again: I am sick to death of conservatives who aren't actually Christians trying to use their imagined version of Christianity as an argument—or worse, trying to offer advice to the Church on the basis of what they imagine its problems are. ↩︎