In the dingy gray mornings of the old Soviet Union, the peasants learned a terrible national dogma. They queued for hours outside concrete shops that smelled of dust and vinegar, ration cards in hand, waiting for the chance to buy a loaf of bread or a few bruised potatoes.

Just the line itself was a life lesson in social policy. You learned to keep your head down, to say little, to nod politely at the clerk who decided when “enough” was enough. In that long, cold wait, obedience became a survival skill. When the State controls the grain, dissent is a luxury few can afford.

In this state religious system, the queue was the creed and obedience was the sacrament. The bread you received was not a gift but a leash. When a nation’s hunger is met only through government approval, gratitude turns to dependence and dependence to quiet fear.

The people no longer prayed for their daily bread — they petitioned bureaucrats for it.

Rome discovered the same dark magic two millennia earlier. Free grain and endless games pacified citizens far better than legions ever could. “Bread and circuses,” Juvenal mocked, the cheap bribes of an empire in decline.

The Romans learned that a populace fat and entertained is easier to rule than a populace free and responsible. The method has never lost its charm. From Soviet ration cards to Roman grain doles, rulers have always known that the quickest way to dull a spine is to fill a stomach.

And now here we are, America, standing in the shadow of both empire and experiment. The United States Department of Agriculture just announced it will not tap its emergency funds for the coming month’s food aid. And the American peasantry is up in arms about it.

Absent new appropriations, roughly forty-one million people—twelve percent of the nation—may find their government-issued cards silent on November 1. One memo, one bureaucratic decision, and millions of meals hang in the balance. This is what it looks like when politics stops being persuasion and becomes provisioning.

If food becomes a federal on/off switch, freedom becomes conditional. Once survival depends on the State’s discretion, obedience follows naturally. A nation that looks to Washington for its daily bread will soon look there for its marching orders.

We’ve been told for generations that welfare is institutionalized compassion—that government aid lifts up the poor and levels the field. But history says otherwise. Dependency replaces dignity. When a person’s livelihood is bound to bureaucracy, the safest political choice is the one that keeps the checks coming. When your dinner depends on a political party, your vote stops being a conviction and becomes a receipt.

Incentives invert rational thinking. When we subsidize idleness, we will cultivate it. And when we penalize good work ethic, we will extinguish it. Work becomes optional, thrift becomes irrelevant, and ambition becomes foolish.

Over time, the producer base shrinks while the entitlement base expands. The economy groans, but the political machine purrs—fed by the gratitude of those it has quietly enslaved.

The culture then follows economics. Generations arise catechized to believe the State is father, provider, and judge—God. Family structure dissolves under the acid of dependency while the church’s role in mercy wanes and local institutions decay. What remains is a population that fears reform because reform threatens the ration.

Millions come to believe that their next meal depends on a ballot—not on their own labor, not even on the generosity of their neighbor, but on the continuity of the very system that impoverishes them. That isn’t compassion, it’s leverage.

And while liberty erodes, the same hand that feeds will silence, disarm, and sort. Material control becomes moral control. The Soviet mother in the bread line, the Roman citizen at the circus, the modern voter scanning the EBT card—each stands on a continuum of dependence that leads toward quiet servitude.

Scripture offers a different order. God commanded individuals and the covenant community to open their hands, not magistrates to seize the purse. Deuteronomy 15 calls you—the individual, not Caesar—to generosity.

Proverbs 19 calls charity a loan to the Lord, not a tax credit.

In Matthew 25, the King commends mercy given to “the least of these,” not bureaucracies that manage the poor by spreadsheet.

Acts 2 records believers sharing voluntarily, not apostles dispatching temple guards to collect property.

Romans 13 grants the magistrate the sword to punish evil, not the ladle to manage breadlines.

Even Jeremiah 29 urges God’s people to seek the welfare of the city through faithfulness, not by outsourcing virtue to the empire.

Don’t try to argue this with the Tim Keller-ites and the “third way” class of social justice Christianity, but these commands given to God’s covenant people so often cited as “biblical welfare” were personal obligations laid upon landowners. No state officer measured the corners of a field. Mercy was proximate and personal.

The Year of Jubilee released debts and restored land to families under God’s covenant economy, not as a bureaucratic reset of class resentment. And the believers who “had all things in common” did so because their hearts were transformed, not because their government enforced equality.

True charity does what bureaucracy never can. It knows names, stories, motives. It distinguishes hunger from sloth, tragedy from vice. It can restore dignity because it connects mercy to accountability. The church can disciple the fallen into strength but the State can only register them as dependents. Private compassion measures success by households restored, not case files closed.

Yet with a single memo, forty million lives now hinge on a lever in Washington. That is power no free society should tolerate. If the provision of food becomes contingent on political continuity, then freedom of speech, conscience, and self-defense—even life—will not be far behind, because leverage always seeks more leverage.

Some will still protest: But the poor will starve without federal welfare.

Compassion demands better than that. The answer isn’t indifference. It’s competence—church-led, local, restorative compassion that demands engagement and responsibility. But not only that. The law is a teacher. And when the law teaches you don’t eat without working, people learn to work.

Others will cite gleaning passages in Scripture as proof of state welfare. But gleaning preserved the poor’s agency—they still labored for what they gathered.

Romans 13, often invoked to sanctify any policy, defines the magistrate’s vocation as justice, not forced charity. And statistics showing “reduced poverty” seldom measure the moral cost…fractured families, generational idleness, and civic apathy.

The reality is that Christians should reject the counterfeit mercy of statism not because they despise the poor, but because they honor both charity and freedom too much to see them corrupted. When the State steals the ministry of mercy, it empties the virtue of both giver and receiver.

The church must reclaim the work, whether it be diaconal ministries that feed bodies and train hands, benevolence funds that require repentance and reform, or partnerships that rebuild families instead of subsidizing their collapse. Any aid should be local, temporary, and tied to work—for God himself ties sustenance to stewardship.

Politically, we must resist every policy that entrenches dependency and punishes productivity. Compassion detached from truth becomes cruelty. The more the State centralizes charity, the weaker the citizen and the stronger the tyrant.

I think about those Soviet mornings, about Rome’s crowded coliseums, about the digital breadlines of modern America where benefits arrive not as loaves but as numbers on a screen. Different empires, same leash. A government that claims the power to feed you will claim, sooner or later, the power to silence you.

And a church that outsources mercy to Caesar will soon need Caesar’s permission to preach it, and all we’ll get is bread without freedom and circuses without joy.