Whether a person is American or from another country, whether they live next door or half a world away, whether they are our best friend or a complete stranger, Christianity compels its followers to care for them and to help them. Today, this core Christian value is under threat, not from foreign enemies but from our own government, which has proudly proclaimed that the U.S. Agency for International Development is going into the “wood chipper.”
And while the sudden suspension of the USAID program is among a number of disappointing actions taken by the new administration, what is particularly alarming is that it’s destroying this humanitarian work with the tacit (if not explicit) support of too many people who cite the Gospels as their guide.
With the latest announced cuts in federal spending, many of the programs that have helped people in need across the globe are at risk.
While I am not in a position to judge all of the policies or practices of USAID, I do know the agency is charged with caring for vulnerable children throughout the world. The U.S. is — and should be — the largest donor for children in the world. Yet, with the latest announced cuts in federal spending, many of the programs that have helped people in need across the globe are at risk, such as the AIDS relief effort credited with saving 25 million lives, mostly in Africa.
Funding cuts will also hurt Christian charitable groups that receive financial assistance from the U.S. government. Two of the largest organizations, Catholic Relief Services and World Vision (an evangelical organization), are heavily dependent on government funding to perform their lifesaving work: Catholic Relief received 64% of its revenue from government contributions in 2022; World Vision received 44% in the same year. Both are now facing massive layoffs.
Also disturbing to me are radical cuts to efforts by the Department of Housing and Urban Development to provide relief for areas hit by major disasters in the U.S., and layoffs at the Federal Housing Administration that threaten to disrupt its ability to provide the mortgage insurance on which millions of Americans depend.
All this by an administration that so far has enjoyed strong support among Christians. The situation leads me to wonder whether some Christians have made a single issue or two the sole determinant of their political views and, by doing so, have sold their souls in a Faustian deal for political power. According to an NBC News exit poll in the 2024 election, 63% of voters in the “Protestant or other Christians” demographic supported the new administration. If we restrict this to white people, the number climbs to 72%. Fifty-nine percent of all Catholics and 63% of white Catholics voted for Donald Trump. White evangelicals supported Trump with 82% support. These numbers represent a solid bloc of Christian voters.
This level of support makes me deeply concerned that many will associate Christianity with this administration’s policies, like the closing of USAID and cuts to other programs that provide assistance to the poor. In particular, I worry that the younger generation will either come to dismiss Christianity as amoral or identify with it for its relationship to political power rather than its moral and spiritual principles. Neither option is acceptable in my judgment.
I worry that the younger generation will either come to dismiss Christianity as amoral or identify with it for its relationship to political power rather than its moral and spiritual principles.
At a recent discussion of my colleague Phil Gorski’s work “The Flag and the Cross,” which explores the rise of Christian nationalism, I asked Gorski whether Christianity had become a dirty word. He responded, “You are right as dean of the divinity school to be worried about this.” When I asked a good friend who was the senior pastor of a large church in Manhattan what he thought of this, he said he had quit using the word Christian to describe himself and preferred to use “follower of Jesus Christ.”
In “Where Love Is, There God Is Also,” one of Leo Tolstoy’s most famous short stories, a cobbler named Martin takes a friend’s advice to read the Gospels. One evening, he hears a disembodied voice promise to visit him the next day. Martin watches but only meets an old soldier, to whom he gives some hot tea; a woman with a baby, to whom he gives a cup of soup and an old cloak; and a woman in a confrontation with a boy who has attempted to steal an apple. Martin makes that situation right by giving the boy the apple and compensating the woman.
In response to a knock at his door that evening, Martin asks, “Who is it?” and each of the people he’d met that day steps forward to say, “It is I,” only to disappear. Martin returns to his reading and sees: “I was hungry and you gave me meat; I was thirsty and you gave me drink; I was a stranger and you took me in.” This is perhaps the most famous interpretation of the parable of the sheep and goats in Matthew. In my judgment, the “parable” draws on the ancient literary tradition of deities who disguise themselves as humans to see how humans treat strangers.
The proposed closure of USAID and the pulling of funds from other agencies and groups that care for the “hungry … thirsty … stranger … naked … ill … imprisoned” is anti-Christian at its core. It reflects a rejection of a basic value that Jews and Christians (and many others) hold as sacred. Christians may disagree about a number of important issues, but the imperative to care for the downtrodden is not one of them. Pope Francis and Gabriel Salguero, president of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition, have raised their voices in protest.
It is time for many of the rest of us to join them.
Gregory E. Sterling
Gregory E. Sterling is Dean and Professor of New Testament at Yale Divinity School. He has published more than 110 scholarly papers and has authored or edited 10 books on early Christianity and related subjects.4
