In a recent bishopric meeting, (sorry, this may become a regular thing) we were discussing how best to use fast-offering funds to assist members in need. As often happens, the conversation turned practical: what kinds of aid are appropriate, where lines should be drawn, and how to exercise discernment rather than reflex. At one point, our bishop recalled a conversation he had with a neighboring bishop. He asked him whether they ever used funds to help members pay their mortgage.
The response was immediate and confident: that’s a drug that’s hard to quit.
The meaning was clear. Once someone receives help with housing, they become dependent. Better not to start something that will be difficult to stop.
The comment passed quickly, but it lingered with me. Not because it was cruel—it wasn’t offered with malice—but because of the worldview it revealed. The metaphor itself was doing a great deal of work. Housing assistance was framed not as stabilization, mercy, or mutual care, but as addiction. The recipient, implicitly, was recast as someone whose moral agency weakens in the presence of help. Aid becomes a substance; charity becomes a risk.
Almost immediately, my mind went to King Benjamin’s sermon.
“Perhaps thou shalt say: The man has brought upon himself his misery; therefore I will stay my hand…
But I say unto you, O man, whosoever doeth this the same hath great cause to repent.”
King Benjamin anticipates not generosity gone wrong, but generosity withheld. He names the familiar justifications we use to protect ourselves from obligation—the stories we tell about why help will ultimately harm the one who asks for it. His answer is not managerial. It is theological.
“Are we not all beggars?”
That question reframes the entire discussion. It collapses the imagined distance between giver and receiver. It refuses the fantasy that need is a personal failure rather than a shared human condition. And it makes the logic of “staying our hands” spiritually dangerous, not prudent.
This raised an unavoidable question: is the claim actually true? Do people get “hooked” on housing assistance? Or is this a culturally inherited talking point—one that sounds like wisdom but functions primarily to justify restraint?
When we look beyond intuition to evidence and lived experience, the addiction metaphor quickly breaks down. Housing assistance is not a consumable good. It is not discretionary. Rent and mortgage payments are fixed obligations that do not diminish desire through satisfaction. Most people who need help with housing are responding to acute disruption—job loss, illness, divorce, inflation—not seeking an easier way of life. The idea that such assistance creates dependency misunderstands both the nature of the need and the psychology of receiving help.
More importantly, it ignores a central truth: most people do not like asking for help. Particularly in religious communities that prize self-reliance, requesting financial assistance is often accompanied by shame, fear of judgment, and a sense of personal failure. If dependency were easy or attractive, bishops would not spend so much time reassuring members that it is acceptable to receive help.
The concern about “dependency” usually rests on a deeper set of assumptions—that people will choose reliance if allowed, that suffering is an effective motivator, and that charity must be tightly rationed to preserve moral character. These assumptions feel responsible. They sound like stewardship. But they owe more to modern individualism than to scripture.
King Benjamin does not instruct his people to calculate incentives. He does not ask whether generosity will produce the desired behavioral outcomes. Instead, he ties mercy directly to one’s own standing before God:
“For the sake of retaining a remission of your sins…”
This is not sentimental charity. It is costly, ongoing, and relational. Mercy here is not a one-time transaction that leaves both parties unchanged. It is a posture toward reality—one that acknowledges that we all live, continually, on borrowed breath.
None of this is to say that discernment doesn’t matter, or that aid should be thoughtless. Dependency can exist, but it does not arise from too much mercy. It arises when help is stripped of relationship, dignity, and shared responsibility. The answer to that risk is not withholding, but accompaniment—walking with someone through instability rather than policing them from a distance.
The “drug” metaphor ultimately reveals less about recipients of aid than about our own anxieties. We are afraid that mercy will not be clean. That it will ask more of us than we planned to give. That once we see someone’s need clearly, we may be unable to unsee it.
And that fear, more than misplaced generosity, is what King Benjamin warns against.
If we are all beggars, then the question is not whether help might be misused. The question is whether we are willing to remain in relationship long enough for mercy to do its slow, human work.
All of this places us squarely within the scandal of Jesus’s own ministry.
From the beginning, Jesus does not merely soften moral edges; he rearranges the furniture of righteousness.
As his work gathers momentum, his most prominent sermon—on the mount if you’re reading Matthew, on the plain if you’re with Luke—opens with a declaration that would have sounded less like comfort and more like provocation.
“Blessed are the poor in spirit.”
Or, if you prefer Luke, Jesus doesn’t bother with the qualifier. He simply says, “Blessed are you poor,” and lets the statement detonate without softening the blast.
In a world where status, position, power, pedigree, and material abundance were widely understood as evidence of divine favor, this was not pious encouragement. It was a theological reversal. To suggest that the poor—not the disciplined, not the respectable, not the visibly successful—were the most blessed would have sounded dangerously close to heresy.
And Jesus doesn’t stop there. He turns directly toward those insulated by wealth and issues a warning that still makes us uncomfortable:
“It is harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.”
Why turn the world upside down like this? After all, it’s difficult to argue against the safety, security, and options that riches provide. Wealth works. It cushions. It protects. It creates distance from risk, from need, from vulnerability.
But that distance is precisely the problem.
Jesus is not importing impossibility. He doesn’t say the rich cannot enter the kingdom—only that it is hard. And then, almost immediately, he guards against despair: “With God, nothing shall be impossible.” The door is not locked. But it is narrow in a particular way. What must be preserved—even in abundance—is the posture of dependence.
This is where Jesus and King Benjamin are speaking the same language.
King Benjamin’s question—“Are we not all beggars?”—is not rhetorical humility. It is an ontological claim. It insists that dependence is not a temporary condition to be outgrown, but the permanent truth of human life before God. Breath itself is borrowed. Stability is provisional. Self-sufficiency is, at best, a useful fiction.
When we talk about aid as “a drug that’s hard to quit,” we reveal how deeply we fear that truth. We worry that receiving help will deform someone’s character, as if dependence were an aberration rather than the ground of grace. But Jesus’s scandalous insistence is that the kingdom does not belong to those who manage need well—it belongs to those who know they have it.
The danger of wealth, then, is not possession but insulation. Riches make it easier to forget that we are beggars. They allow us to imagine that need is something that happens to other people, and that mercy is something we extend from a safe distance rather than a shared condition we inhabit together.
This is why Jesus blesses the poor and unsettles the rich. Not because poverty is virtuous or wealth is evil, but because the kingdom of God is built on dependence, and anything that dulls our awareness of that reality makes entry harder.
Seen this way, King Benjamin’s warning lands with even greater force. Withholding mercy in the name of prudence is not neutral. It is spiritually corrosive. It trains us to believe that need disqualifies rather than binds us together.
If Jesus is right—and if King Benjamin is right—then the risk is not that generosity will make someone dependent. The greater risk is that security will convince us we never were.
Discussion questions
- How does our fear of creating “dependency” shape the way we see people who ask for help—and what does King Benjamin’s reminder that “we are all beggars” ask us to see instead?
- When Jesus blesses the poor and warns the rich, what does that teach us about the kind of spiritual posture we should cultivate when we give—or receive—help?
Wheat & Tares 
I couldn’t agree more.
I think about this a lot. And I can’t tell if my divided thoughts are a reflection of a divided nature within me (let’s call them Spirit-inspired and natural-man-inspired), or of a tension between lived experience and listed ideal. Or, of course as is most likely, some combination thereof.
Because it sure does seem that the teachings are quite clear, as you have laid out here and before. I guess my struggle is more in the implementation?
I would not be surprised if/that most people who receive mortgage help would find it to be aid for a short period of time, and do their best to resolve underlying issues to move past that (finding new/better employment, moving to more affordable digs, whatever). I guess my struggle (internally) is about those who truly do not care and are not embarrassed to be receiving help, but in fact kind of present as though it is their entitlement – I have experienced those kinds of people as well. Where there is no long-term change or improvement, though it is objectively possible.
So, that is not me arguing that the fear of dependency is legitimate, necessarily. Rather, I think I’m just trying to say that dependency IS possible – and is that the desired outcome? As you note, perhaps God’s goal is for ALL of us to fully recognize our complete dependency on him. But from a temporal perspective, and particularly a perspective of finite resources (realistically speaking from a local administrative perspective, since a local Bishop would not realistically have access to the billions at church HQ), what happens if we commit our resources to someone who longer-term choose NOT to change their circumstance that required the assistance to begin with (and, again at least objectively, has the ability to choose to make that change), leaving that resource unavailable to someone else with perhaps a more dire need that could have been met if the resource wasn’t already committed to the first?
I guess I’m really trying to say, I agree with the idea in theory that the injunction is not to decide who we give aid to, since we are all beggars, but in the earthly now I struggle with that, since giving to one means I no longer have that to give to another.
Extremely difficult problem. I have personally given financial support to people to get them over a rough patch and even paid their education expenses and fund their business startups to help them become self-sufficient. There has come a point in some of these relationship were I simply had to quit because the needs became endless. On a related note, the Church is celebrating its membership growth in Africa. But many of the people are joining the Church on a “prosperity gospel” basis and are hoping that the Church will provide assistance for their very real needs, including food, malaria treatments, school fees, etc. Many of these people live in countries where there is government corruption, disease, crime, civil wars, food shortages, etc. Other countries have plundered their resources. The Church is willing to provide some level of financial assistance to these Africans but within limitations. But the Church would rather focus on “spiritual self-reliance” such as scripture study, prayer, obeying Church leaders, temple ordinances, etc. As noble and essential as those practices may be, they cannot solve problems like government corruption, military coups, genocide and malaria. I wish I had the answers. I believe the Church could do much more such as using its vast wealth to set up heath clinics in third world countries.
I am going to join Adam and Tom who replied just before me. Yes, but… in theory I agree with you and frequently want to argue with a certain MAGA relative who thinks that just because they worked hard and now have millions, that *anybody* can do exactly the same and disabilities or rotten luck, or layoffs don’t exist. If someone is struggling, it is always their own fault in her book. And I just supper hate that blame the victim attitude.
So, yes, I 100% agree with you, but …there ARE people who are just users. They will whine about need, just to have some bleeding heart give them, say, money for their prescriptions drugs, just so they can continue to spend on premium TV, a phone subscription that is into luxury, on-line gaming, pet food for several large dogs, and eating out all the time. Our previous bishop had been helping her out of his pocket because even in our middle to upper middle class ward the fast offerings didn’t go far enough because we also had a trailer court with lots of needs. So, eventually his bishopric said we just cannot keep helping Jane Doe, because we have been helping her for 10 years now. So, he continued to help to the tune of about $500 a month out of his own pocket. So, we get a new bishop and he says nope to the situation, but he really is a great guy and doesn’t want to cut her off if she needs help. So, he gives me and my husband a special calling to teach her to budget and live within her means because she had a decent job. Lots of people live off of a similar job, without needing help. So, we are to gain her trust, go through her spending and see where the money is going, teach her to budget, and get her off church welfare. She resisted right from the start. She suspected something fishy about her “new home teacher couple,” and was actually hostile suddenly where she had been friendly before. So, we start with the hostile take over of managing her budget. Why do you need premium TV? Well, I need it for Animal planet because that occupies the dogs while I am at work. Big dogs, small mobile home, dogs locked inside for 9 hours=the dogs like to watch the animal shows and so she “needed” it. Let’s leave that and come back to it. We didn’t want to touch why three big dogs yet. So, we went through all her bills looking for ways she could cut back her spending. She was spending more on TV and other subscriptions than we did, yet couldn’t make her most basic needs for her medicine? But she always had a “reason” she just needed that supper expensive whatever. She got more and more hostile and all our efforts to be kind and gain her trust were just met with hostility. She did not want to give up any of her luxuries in order to stay within the money she made. Having things paid for by other people was just too nice of a deal. So, her sob story was always about, “I can’t pay for my prescriptions,” or “I can’t pay the rent.” But the money she earned was going into premium TV and fast food for 3 meals a day, expensive hobbies, and on line gaming. Details of story changed to protect the selfish. So, after months of three evenings a week trying to “earn her trust” and teacher her to budget and all, we reported back to bishop, “go cold turkey and cut her off.” And she moved out of the ward, probably looking for new soft hearted bishops she could scam.
So, there are people who will take full advantage of other’s generosity. There are welfare cheats. We sometimes need to do tough love to make people man up and get self sufficient. And it can be hard when you see stuff like the above, not to become cynical and stop wanting to help.
But most of the time, for most people, giving without strings attached is best.
Based on my anecdotal experience in a bishopric seven years ago, we did provide rent/mortgage support and it did not in fact turn into an addiction. It filled a short term need and then the support ended. Do with this information what you will.
When I give a few bucks to a panhandle, that’s it.
Weather he spends it on drink, or drugs, or doughnuts is up to him. I’m just listening to the words of a rabble rouser from a backwater called Nazareth, “It is better to give, than to receive.’
I recently read There Is No Place For Us by Brian Goldstone, which was quite revelatory to me, from a (relatively) privileged white collar middle-class background. Obtaining secure housing in late-capitalist America is a rigged game, and the vulnerable working poor are most frequently on the losing end. That is, the millions of Americans who are actually working in whatever low-paying jobs they can get, trying to scrape out a living within a system that continues to kick them while they are down. The “welfare queens” and abusers of the system are more the exception than the rule.
For an LDS bishop to liken housing assistance to a drug addiction is offensive, and unnecessarily vilifies the poor. Sure, secure housing is “addictive”, but only in the same sense that oxygen, clean water and nourishment are “addictive”; these are all things humans need every day to survive.
Back when I was a ward financial clerk, I signed many checks for housing assistance, including for a handful of “frequent fliers” who were supported month after month, for at least the entire 1.5 years I was in that calling and probably beyond. My then-bishop tended to err on the side of generosity (good for him) but had no clue about what to do next. He gave some well-intended financial “advice” to each person who requested aid, but he was a well-off dentist who had no clue how systemic/multi-generational poverty cycles work. So rather than directing them to resources or empowering them work towards self-sufficiency, he just kept giving handouts until (presumably) the stake president told him to cut people off after a certain point. Sometimes it takes experts like social workers to help people break those cycles to climb out of poverty. Overworked, unpaid, out-of-their-depth local bishops are ill-equipped for this kind of work, however well meaning.
And of course, there are bishops out there who are paternalistic and judgmental, channeling the spirit of Ezra Taft Benson in their understanding of the “evils of the dole” and pulling one’s self up by the bootstraps, and demonize those who supposedly bring poverty on themselves. Pretty much the opposite of what Christ would expect us to do. Unfortunately, such negative attitudes towards the poor have a lot of traction in the current social/political zeitgeist.
I wish I could edit: “panhandleR” “whether”
You just call on me brother, when you need a hand
We all need somebody to lean on
I just might have a problem that you’ll understand
We all need somebody to lean on
Right-wing propaganda has infected Mormondom to the point that many Mormons have a blame-the-poor mentality. The poor are poor because of their bad choices. They are bad examples. They did not or don’t work hard enough. They cannot be trusted. We help them best when we show them tough love, push them away, and thereby make them learn to pull themselves up by their boot straps. Those who manage to pull themselves can then come back and tell other poor folks to do the same. Being poor is almost like a drug. They way to overcome poverty and dependency is to overcome something wrong inside you. Government programs create a cycle of dependency. It is embarrassing to be poor and to need help.
According to this philosophy, the rich are to be admired. They are rich because of their work and effort. They made good choices and we should aspire to be like them. They can be trusted. Never does it occur to them that many of our rich are rich because of government contracts, luck, ruthlessness, entitlement, cheating, and stealing.
Here is the catch. If you don’t believe in government programs to help the poor, then you should be in favor of non-profit charities to help the poor, right? So then, you should be strongly in favor of the church being a helping hand to the poor, right? That’s what fast-offering is for, right?
The bulk of Jesus’s message was helping the poor and needy and castigating the rich. So much of the church members have forgotten Jesus’s message.
I’m a currently serving financial clerk for my stake, so I review financial statements and see where things go. Welfare assistance is the only category of financial transaction involving local wards for which bishops are not given a fixed budget. Some wards consistently spend more than the fast offering contributions they receive, and some consistently less. The stake as a whole can go from net positive to net negative from month to month. I think this is the right approach, not to put direct budgetary pressure on bishops for how they use those resources. Even though the bishops know they have some leeway, and they do sometimes spend quite generously, they will always be keenly aware of this, that they are using a resource that is ultimately finite. When resources are finite, it is impossible for bishops not to be thinking in terms of dependency. The fast offering program is a great way to assist people experiencing temporary hardship, but there will always be those among us with long-term needs that the program isn’t really equipped to handle. That is what is going to be on bishops minds (at least I imagine it would if it were me, having not been bishop). What I observe is that most of the time the assistance is quite temporary, but sometimes it can last a while or be recurring. Those situations are where it gets tricky, and make me be glad not to be the bishop. If someone’s once-temporary situation doesn’t appear to have a long-term resolution, when is it right to ask someone to consider changing their housing arrangement? I think this happens, and I’m sympathetic to bishops who worry about it, though I probably wouldn’t use a drug metaphor to describe the situation.
A couple of other commenters have brought up the problem of entitlement. I think it’s a real and valid concern. I think there are two potential types of judgments being made by bishops. There are the inescapable pragmatic judgment calls about the nature of the need, its scope and expected duration, and the availability of resources to address it. And then there are judgments about the attitude of the receiver of the gift. Maybe that’s where the words of Jesus and King Benjamin become relevant. Can we, even if we don’t think a gift is being received with gratitude or being used well, still graciously offer it when we can see there is legitimate need?
Not to excuse the lack of graciousness in the receiver, but I think it’s important to remember there are many ways to be wealthy or poor. Poor mental health is one of those. I had the privilege of ministering to an elderly woman whose family had mostly abandoned her as she fell into dementia and lost her abilities. She had been very independent, fixing her own vehicle and then one day she but the transmission fluid in the wrong place and couldn’t fix her car. She then walked into town and was scammed by a car dealer who took her money and gave her the truck but a title never appeared. Problem after problem appeared and the stories she told me no longer matched the realities I was present for and was told about by other ward members. She was angry, confused and depressed but still abandoned by her family and in need of basic assistance. We informed the agency that should help neglected elderly people and they put her on a list to get to her next year. A wonderful gentleman in our ward tried to help her with the car difficulties. He told me he gave up because she wasn’t grateful. While I respect his boundary of deciding if he has something to give beyond what is owed to his family (see Mosiah 4), I think her poor attitude actually showed her to be among “the least of these” we are told to help in Matthew 25. And so I continued to try, while being clear with what I could do, and what I simply didn’t have the resources to offer. Her family finally showed up for her when she was in hospice dying of breast cancer. But I have no regrets for helping her with a ride to get food, or even marijuana for the pain she suffered. Walking with her in her struggle taught me a lot.
Joseph Smith once said that it’s better to give to 10 beggars where 9 of them turn out to be charlatans, rather than risk missing the one soul in genuine need. In this, he was completely in line with the teachings of Christ in the New Testament (as this excellent post has detailed), as well as not only King Benjamin but the majority of the prophets in the Book of Mormon. Smith also sought to establish a United Order of neither-rich-nor-poor in the Midwest, as Brigham Young also sought to do in the Rockies, all of which was in harmony with Acts 2:44-45, 4 Nephi 1:3, and D&C 42:30-39.
It drives me absolutely bonkers, then, that we as a church have collectively drifted so far from our own best teachings! The scriptures fairly beat us over the head, repeatedly and explicitly, about how we should treat the poor, and yet so many of us still seek every single excuse and justification to wriggle out of it. In this, we are of course no different from the rest of mainstream Christianity, but aren’t we supposed to be something different, something better, the “Restored” Church after all? Sometimes I wonder if the decline in youth retention nowadays is best explained by the simple fact that if so many of their church leaders clearly don’t believe the scriptures, then why should they? Teens and young adults are inexperienced and often ignorant, but they aren’t dumb: they can smell out hypocrisy a mile away. It is we “wise” elders who have forgotten how to do so, having had it beaten out of us by the endless petty and cynical compromises of adult life; it is one of the many ways in which we must become again like little children if we are to inherit the Kingdom of God.
Not that there aren’t exceptions in local leadership; my current Bishop confided to me during our most recent tithing settlement that he’s been writing checks for housing assistance left and right for the many Hispanic members of our ward who’ve been forced to cut back work hours due to the vicious anti-immigrant policies of the current administration; that though he’s technically supposed to do an official evaluation of these members via the RS presidency to determine genuine need and make a budget and teach “self-reliance” or whatever, he decided “yeah, we’re not doing that.” A budget and self-reliance pamphlet will not help when ICE is regularly raiding your neighborhood and deporting bread-winners even if they are here “legally.” If these Hispanic members say they need help, he just gives them help. In this, I suspect King Benjamin, Joseph Smith, and the Savior of the World all heartily approve.
Are there certain entitled poor people who sometimes game the system? There are way more entitled rich people who do the same, and far worse—a great many of whom are currently in positions of high power. We waste so much energy wringing our hands about the former, while utterly ignoring and excusing the latter. In this, I deeply suspect the Savior is not well pleased.
Here’s the thing: there are many people in the Church who just do the Christ-like thing.
Over and over again.
Of such is the Kingdom o f Heaven.
As we all know, Jesus declared that: “You shall have the poor always with you.” We must be cautious about doing anything that flies in the face of this teaching.
The LDS assistance program was and is designed as short-term relief, until people can “get back on their feet,” so to speak. For those who can’t ever get back on their feet, there are government programs. If some bishops turn short-term relief/assistance into mid-term or even long-term assistance, that won’t break the system as long as it is relatively rare. If a bishop chooses to do so, let’s be generous and conclude that it is the right thing to do in those relatively rare circumstances.
I think the OP is too harsh on the “drug that’s hard to quit” comment. If someone loses a job and then loses their apartment, they are kicked out or move on because they lost their job. If a bishop approves paying their rent for six months, then cuts it off, the displaced person says they are kicked out or move on because the bishop stopped paying their rent. So yes, bishops have to be careful and selective about the extent and duration of the assistance they provide.
The whole self-reliance obsession in LDS leadership preaching and practice deserves its own discussion. In my stake, they are energetically promoting the latest set of self-reliance stake meetings/seminars. It’s the topic that just won’t die. To me, it seems like they are beating a dead horse at this point.
Really good discussion here.
From the op: “The concern about “dependency” usually rests on a deeper set of assumptions—that people will choose reliance if allowed, that suffering is an effective motivator, and that charity must be tightly rationed to preserve moral character.”
This fear of helping people is accurately summarized. We, as a society, have been trained to withhold help because it will rot someone’s moral character. The truth is that everyone needs a place to live, food, clothing, and medical care. And yet society has gotten very tight-fisted about spreading those resources around.
I agree with JB who pointed at the entitlement rich people have. Shareholders fire the CEO if the profits don’t increase every quarter, leading CEOs to find ways to squeeze customers and employees who are already struggling. The richest of the rich expect more and more tax breaks. The entitlement to riches causes a lot more harm than a poor person who might feel entitled to help with the rent. But of course, the Church doesn’t have bishops confronting the entitlement of the rich people.
There are a few freeloaders. There are many many more who genuinely need help and genuinely do their best. I worry about my son. At some point in his life, he’s going to look like a freeloader because his disabilities are invisible, and part of his disability is difficulty communicating. Once I’m gone, how can he explain his needs and limitations? I hope he finds people willing to help him. I wish our society as a whole was a lot more generous with poor and middle-income people. Not everyone can work a full-time job. I wish we took the wealth away from rich people and spread it around in the form of cheaper food, housing, and medical care.
It’s hard to condemn someone who needs a place to live and can’t earn enough money to pay for it themselves.
I served in a small branch that was too remote for a bishop’s storehouse, so the branch president bought the groceries himself. He always bought the best quality of everything, because he believed that that’s what the Savior would do. Jesus wouldn’t cheap out on His gifts to the needy.
I think it’s a difficult conundrum trying to determine whether the financial assistance is helping the person or making them dependent, but that’s a paternal question–literally a paternal one because the best analogy I can think of is how we help our kids when they need financial assistance. Do we bail them out? How many times? What’s their long-term plan? What’s preventing them from being financially independent? They are still learning how to adult.
But here’s a key difference that I don’t see having been brought up. Our kids haven’t paid us 10% of their earnings for life, and members (often) have before requiring assistance. Even if they didn’t personally do so, the concept of tithing as it exists today was set up to replace the united order, the law of consecration. In theory, we are supposed to as a church take care of any member who is in financial need–or so the principle says. And obviously the church has the funds. Which we gave it. The church was super happy to take the donations I made and pay Kirton-McConkie to fight to strip away the rights of my LGBTQ kid. But when an LDS person I know fell on hard times, she was told the RS would bring in meals (at the expense of the other members, mind you) for ONE week only, and that she should not expect anything beyond that. Along with members who joked that paying tithing was fire insurance, there are many who have said that they view it as their investment should things go wrong–a lost job, a divorce, unexpected medical debt–but it’s quite clear that they would have been much much better off putting that money in a 401(k) or some other investment. The church is like the roach motel–tithing donations check in, but they don’t check out. Given that the source of the funds used to help members originated in member donations, it would be more seemly for the church to not act like they are doing you a favor when they bail you out.
Let me suggest that the “That’s a drug that’s hard to quit” comment isn’t targeted to the receiver, but the giver. Once you start giving it to one person, when do you stop giving it?
Dave, you said above, “The LDS assistance program was and is designed as short-term relief, until people can “get back on their feet,” so to speak. For those who can’t ever get back on their feet, there are government programs.”
The strange thing about that statement is that just a few months ago I sat in a meeting where we discussed the financial needs of a ward family. The plan was to provide short-term help while the Relief Society and Elders Quorum presidents worked with them to file the forms and navigate the process for long-term government housing assistance.
All of that is completely appropriate—but it highlights the catch-22: the same conservatives who regularly help members apply for these government programs also tend to vote against creating a stronger, more reliable social safety net. It’s hard to reconcile actively using these programs in practice while opposing them in principle.
The Church is shaped by conservative values, including the ideal of limited government and a preference for charity handled at the local level. But when it comes to preserving its own funds, it naturally becomes invested in members accessing government assistance. It’s an interesting tension: the rhetoric leans one way, while the practical incentives often lean the other.