The Christian Divide: How Old Theologies of Self-Reliance Became Modern Economic Dogma

---

I sometimes think about my great-grandparents, proud and devout. They were the first generation eligible to draw Social Security. They refused. To them, accepting government help—even something they had paid into—felt morally wrong, a kind of “handout” that violated their sense of dignity and independence. They weren’t wrong to value hard work or independence; those instincts built communities and held families together through scarcity. But they had also been shaped by a story that cast collective support as a moral failure. That same story still echoes today—in the slogans that equate taxation with tyranny, or in the suspicion that social support programs breed dependence.

What gets lost in that worldview is not just compassion, but realism. No one is fully self-reliant. We depend on one another far more than we realize—through family, neighborhood, church, and, yes, government. The moral challenge isn’t just whether we will help one another, but whether we will acknowledge that we are not meant to stand alone.

People often long for the mid-century years when a single income could support a family, jobs were plentiful, and the middle class thrived. That era is frequently credited to religious devotion and traditional gender roles. But the truth is more complicated. The stability people remember was built far more on public investment than private virtue: New Deal programs that stabilized banks and expanded home ownership, the G.I. Bill that sent millions of veterans to college, strong unions that raised wages, and progressive taxes that funded roads, schools, and safety nets. Those shared investments created the conditions that allowed families to flourish. What’s often remembered as a triumph of moral order was, in reality, a triumph of collective commitment.

The Works Progress Administration (WPA) alone employed more than eight million people building roads, bridges, libraries, parks, airports, and post offices. It wasn’t charity; it was paid public work designed to restore both income and dignity. I remember my dad often saying that the WPA jobs and income helped them survive and hold on to a sense of hope during incredibly hard years. The WPA helped lift the economy, stabilize families, and built much of the infrastructure Americans still rely on today. Ironically, the very programs that made that era “great” are now dismissed as socialism or government overreach. America was strongest when it paired self-reliance with shared investment—when collective care made individual success possible.

This moral tension isn’t new. In the early twentieth century, Social Gospel leaders like Walter Rauschenbusch and Washington Gladden read the Sermon on the Mount as a mandate for social compassion—faith expressed through justice, equality, and care for “the least of these.” In contrast, Christian fundamentalists like Carl McIntire, a pastor and radio preacher, argued that social welfare programs threatened not just the economy but the soul of the nation. He insisted that government welfare was a counterfeit of Christian charity, arguing in his 1945 book “The Rise of the Tyrant: Controlled Economy vs. Private Enterprise,” that government aid replaced divine providence with human control [1]. To him, every expansion of public welfare weakened faith, charity, and freedom. Many Americans—religious and secular alike—absorbed this story: that moral strength and market freedom were inseparable, and that dependency, even temporary, was a spiritual danger.

These ideas found fertile ground in post-war America. The Cold War cast government programs as the first step toward communism, and “free enterprise” became a kind of civil religion. In later decades, that same fear was reframed as a warning against “socialism.” Politicians, economists, and clergy began to speak a common moral language: hard work equals virtue, private ownership equals liberty, and public aid equals moral decline. Over time, this theology of self-reliance merged with the language of capitalism and patriotism. To question the free market became, for many, to question both faith and moral order.

Even within communities that valued mutual care—like the one my great-grandparents came from—this shift subtly changed the emotional landscape. What began as a sacred commitment to self-sufficiency and stewardship evolved into a suspicion of shared responsibility. Accepting help felt shameful. Helping others was righteous; needing help was not. And so a spiritual principle that once bound people together began, paradoxically, to drive them apart.

Thomas S. Monson once offered a very different vision of faith: “We cannot truly love God if we do not love our fellow travelers on this mortal journey” [2]. In a single sentence, he named what had been lost. Jesus didn’t sanctify self-sufficiency, but called us into a life of mutual care.

A century later, that divide still shapes the American conscience. On one side are Christians who see faith as a call to stewardship and shared responsibility, rooted in Jesus’s teachings about caring for the poor, welcoming the stranger, healing the sick, and lifting those pushed to the margins. They hear in the Sermon on the Mount and in Jesus’s words about “the least of these” a call to confront poverty, racism, and inequality, not only through personal charity but through the way we organize our common life together. This is what has often been called the Social Gospel—not a replacement for faith, but an effort to live it out in the structures and policies that shape everyday life. On the other are those who view government efforts in those arenas as morally suspect, grounded in a belief that treats social problems as private responsibilities. In this framework, hardships produced by economic systems, labor markets, housing and healthcare policy, and long-standing racial and gender inequalities are reframed as individual failings. Society keeps the benefits of these systems while systematically shifting their costs onto households, especially onto women and the poor. Donald Trump didn’t create that divide; he exposed it [3]. His rhetoric of strength and grievance resonated with McIntire’s lineage, where collective compassion is often mistrusted and moral worth is tied to independence.

At its heart, this is a question about what kind of moral world we believe we live in. One side hears in Jesus’s words a call to structural mercy—“Blessed are the poor,” “Whatever you do for the least of these.” The other hears a call to a faith that sanctifies self-reliance over shared stewardship. The tension between those readings runs through every modern debate over taxes, healthcare, and welfare. When conservatives resist social programs, they are often drawing on—perhaps unknowingly—the old anti–Social Gospel conviction that compassionate social programs undermine personal responsibility.

Ulisses Soares offered this vision: “We are all fellow travelers as God’s children, equal in our imperfect state and in our ability to grow. We are invited to walk together, peaceably, with our hearts filled with love toward God and all men” [4].

My great-grandparents believed they were doing the right thing. And in many ways, they were. But holding fast to self-reliance does not mean turning away from shared stewardship. True strength is born not of individualism, but of covenant and care. It lives in our willingness to bear one another’s burdens.

References

[1] McIntire, C. (1945). The Rise of the Tyrant; Controlled Economy Vs. Private Enterprise. Christian beacon Press, pp. 12-29.

[2] Monson, T. (2014). Love—the Essence of the Gospel. General Conference. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

[3] Skeel, D. (2019). Divided by the Sermon on the Mount. Pepperdine Law Review, p. 1.

[4] Soares, U. (2023). Brothers and Sisters in Christ. General Conference. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Other Sources:

Griffith, B. (2009). “Carl McIntire: Fundamentalism, civil rights, and the reenergized Right, 1960–1964.”

Matzko, P. (2010). No uncertain trumpet: Carl McIntire and the politicization of fundamentalism. Temple University.