Whenever government food assistance programs enter the news cycle, the conversation tends to focus on whether recipients are deserving. For example, Republican members of Congress have accused SNAP recipients of not having jobs and wrongly claimed the program benefits undocumented immigrants. Louisiana Rep. Clay Higgins said on X that any SNAP recipients who didn’t “have at least 1 month of groceries stocked” in advance should be ineligible to continue receiving benefits and “stop smoking crack.”
It’s ugly sentiments like this that underlie the Trump administration’s cruel use of hunger as leverage to pressure Democratic senators into signing the Republicans’ continuing resolution, all while Trump himself drags its feet on a court order to make full SNAP payments despite the shutdown. Meanwhile, food pantries are being stretched beyond capacity, with families, children and the elderly going hungry just weeks before Thanksgiving. Given this, the question of whether or not these people are truly deserving is not just political negligence. It is deeply immoral.
For one thing, many of these complaints are caricatures about SNAP recipients just aren’t true: In 2024, roughly 1 in 8 Americans were enrolled in SNAP; 39% of the beneficiaries are children and about 30% are seniors or adults with disabilities. Most SNAP recipients who are working age and non-disabled are either employed or are actively seeking work.
But more importantly, I don’t think “Who deserves help?” is the right question for Christians to ask. At least, I’m glad that’s not the question Jesus asks.
When a law expert once asked Jesus “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus replied with the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10: 25-37). You probably know the story: A man is left for dead on the side of the road after having been robbed; two different religious leaders see him in his dire condition, but they refuse to help, walking past on the other side of the road. Then a Samaritan—an ethnoreligious group that was despised and distrusted by many of Jesus’ listeners—sees the injured man and not only bandages his wounds, but carries him to an inn, pays for a room, and gives two silver coins while offering to reimburse the innkeeper any other costs associated with the man’s recovery. In other words, the Samaritan goes above and beyond what typical standards of compassion would normally entail—both in the first century and today.
It is easy to overlook that Jesus uses this parable to challenge questions about who deserves our unreserved compassion. Some Jews viewed Samaritans as being religious heretics or ethnically impure because of their intermarriage with non-Israelites after the conquest by Assyria; in other words, some people in Jesus’ day would not have considered Samaritans to deserve generous care. Jesus upends expectations of deservedness even further by making this despised “other” the bestower, not the receiver, of compassion; it’s a dramatic power reversal.
For us as readers today, the parable prompts us to ask who we despise, distrust, and don’t see as deserving—whether that be people in blue or red states, of another race, political party, religion, or sexual orientation—and then imagine a world in which our fortunes were reversed and those people extend care to us. For Jesus, that is what being a neighbor means: sacrifice, generosity, and abundant compassion flowing in a direction that defies all our norms and biases.
Trump has done the opposite: Over the course of his second term, he has escalated “us versus them” rhetoric that demonizes his opponents, admitting at Charlie Kirk’s funeral he hates his opponents and doesn’t want what’s best for them. After the shutdown began, he specifically stalled funding for projects in blue states and claimed that he will target “democrat” programs in order exact retribution. And while the need for food assistance isn’t a red or blue issue—hunger impacts voters of all political parties—he’s withholding food assistance to gain political leverage. Applying Trump’s action to the parable of Good Samaritan, he seems to be cheering on the robbers as they hurt those he despises, refusing to offer any kind of aid until it is politically expedient.
If we took Jesus’s words in the parable seriously, people of all political persuasions would be working to provide relief for hunger now—without regard for whether those who need SNAP benefits vote like us or what political benefit we might secure for our preferred party by waiting. Following the extravagant generosity of the Samaritan, we’d recognize that while SNAP benefits are essential to those who receive it, they are often insufficient to meet the fullness of what folks need; we’d look for ways to offer even more access to food support, not less.
And as we went above and beyond to help the millions of people who are hungry, I would hope we’d ask a deeper question: Why are so many people in need of food assistance in the first place?
It’s both a question wrapped up in both politics and our sense of morality—and many of the choices we’ve made collectively as a country.
Politically, we have created systems that allow poverty and extreme inequality to thrive. In recent years, income concentration and wealth inequality in the U.S. has rivaled or exceeded that of the 1920s (which makes Trump’s decadent “Roaring ’20s” party this past weekend especially tone deaf amid a protracted government shutdown). In Poverty, by America, sociologist Matthew Desmond shows how people in or near poverty are forced to overpay for housing and access to cash and credit—exploitative policies we could choose to change but haven’t. As a result, opportunity is often stratified due “to zones of concentrated riches alongside those of concentrated despair,” writes Desmond.
Amid such growing inequality, it’s not surprising that 5 million more people receive SNAP benefits today than before the COVID pandemic. Many on the political Right have sought to impose more stringent work requirements and onerous paperwork on SNAP benefits, despite the fact that the majority of its recipients are already working, are seeking work, or are disabled or elderly. So, in the simplest terms, many adults and families need food assistance because they are being paid poverty or near poverty wages; housing and rental costs keep rising; the cost of life essentials have increased; and unemployment is creeping upward.
Morally, we’ve shown little appetite as a country for helping those who are most harmed by this inequality. The government programs that make up our social safety net remain some of the weakest in the world compared to other wealthy nations. For example, the U.S. ranks in the bottom third of wealthy nations for child poverty reduction. In 2021, Congress allowed a major expansion of the Child Tax Credit to expire, despite the fact that it helped cut child poverty rates in half. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimated that due to the recently passed reconciliation bill, “about 4 million people, including children, seniors, veterans, and individuals with disabilities, will see the food assistance they need to afford groceries terminated or cut substantially.”
While we can have healthy disagreements around the best policy prescriptions to care for vulnerable people in our communities, we have to first decide that we see a moral obligation to make bold changes—especially when we consider that so many people are on SNAP because of our previous choices.
The pressing question remains: Will we individually and collectively go the way of the religious leaders who passed by, or will we follow Jesus and go the way the way of the Good Samaritan? As individuals, being a good neighbor right now means more sacrificially offering our time, money, and mutual aid to food banks, churches, and other groups who are offering help to those being hurt by this painful pause in food assistance. We can do this even as we know that these individual efforts cannot fully replace a government program like SNAP: Feeding America, the largest hunger relief organization in the U.S., estimates that for every one meal their network of 200 food pantries provides, SNAP provides nine.
Collectively being the Good Samarian involves applying maximum political pressure on Congress to negotiate an end to this government shutdown and to bring greater urgency to address the root causes of growing hunger. We can generate pressure by calling our representatives, or, better yet, visiting them; almost all members of the House of Representatives have been in their home districts since Speaker Mike Johnson has imposed a recess during the shutdown. We can write op-eds, join in vigils and protests, and raise awareness about the urgent need to restore SNAP and end the shutdown.
The parable of the Good Samaritan prompts us to expand our circle of concern and extend abundant compassion. In our current political situation, that means replacing a politics of exclusion and cruelty with a politics of neighborly compassion that prioritizes the common good.
Rev. Adam Russell Taylor is president of Sojourners and author of A More Perfect Union: A New Vision for Building the Beloved Community. Follow him on Bluesky @revadamtaylor.
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