It’s Thursday, April 27th, 2023.
I’m Albert Mohler, and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.
Part I
Commercial Opportunity Meets Temptation in Sport: Professional and Collegiate Sports Reckon with Corruption of Sports Betting
One of the things Christians always need to keep in mind is that the bigger the system, the more likelihood that there is some kind of sinful confusion in that system. That’s just a matter of the pervasiveness of sin. And Christians of all people can’t be surprised by sin showing up where human beings are.
As a matter of fact, if you look at our entire system of law, you look at policies, you look at even the rules of Little League Baseball, they are basically designed to try to limit the damage of sin. You don’t want to reward cheating, you want to reward what is right and true. You want to reward keeping the rules, not breaking the rules. But then there are some entire endeavors in human experience that seem to be contradictory to that.
For example, just take gambling. When you look at gambling, it is actually a disincentive towards doing that which is moral, which would be, for instance, being a good steward of that with which you have been entrusted. The Bible’s very clear about this, demonstrating two different lines of argument. One is that gambling is something like acting as a fool in which you would carry your money in a bag with holes. In other words, a really bad idea. Anyone ought to be able to see that. The other dimension of this is the very clear biblical teaching that reward and labor should be very closely linked. The worker is worthy of his hire.
So we’re looking at a composite picture in which work is considered a virtue. Saving and investment are considered virtues. Being a good steward is a matter of biblical commandment and thus wasting money and putting false incentives in an economy. Well, that’s something the Bible to say the very least would frown upon, and you would think the common sense would also come into play here. But this is where things get really interesting in recent headline news.
For example, just a few days ago, the Wall Street Journal ran a front page story. Here’s the headline: NFL Bans Five Players Over Sports Gambling. The National Football League as reporter Andrew Beaton tells us, has suspended five players, “including four on the Detroit Lions, for violating the league’s gambling policy in the league’s biggest crackdown since the widespread proliferation of legal sports betting across the United States.” So let’s just back up and remind ourselves, we are talking about a big new industry in the United States in recent times and expanding right now, even beyond a lot of projections. We’re talking about legalized sports gambling.
Now what’s new about that? Sports aren’t new. Gambling’s not new. Why would legalized sports betting be all of a sudden new? It is because throughout almost all of American history, you have had the United States and you’ve had the states and the sports leagues adamantly argue that mixing sports and gambling is a very, very bad idea, particularly when it comes to those who are playing, managing sports, those who are the owners of sporting teams. If you put in the moral complexity and the inherent temptation to do wrong that is involved in gambling and you add that to sports, well, let’s just ask yourselves the hypothetical question, what could go wrong? And you know the answer. Just about everything.
But we’re living in a time in which morality is up for grabs and some of the things that just made perfect sense in times past, by the way, not only because of very clear Christian convictions, but because of other kinds of convictions called legal convictions in which you had very clear evidence earlier in the 20th century that sports and gambling simply don’t mix.
Now, the opportunity for all kinds of things to go wrong here should be apparent to anyone all the way at every level of sports, from Little League to the highest professional leagues. What is the particular kind of opportunity for corruption? It is this: In gambling, just recall, in gambling the big issue is the establishment of the odds. And thus the incentive that comes by betting either for or against a team based upon certain kinds of odds.
Now, the only way to win really, really big is to beat the odds. That is to say if nine out of 10 people believe that team A is going to win the game and team A wins, by definition you’re in a very big pool and thus no opportunity for just fantastic gain through putting in a bet. On the other hand, if you bet for the underdog and the underdog actually wins, the likelihood is you might have some rather remarkable gain. But there is no fun in this if you can’t work the entire process.
And evidently the temptation for corruption is just nearly overwhelming, and the temptation for corruption comes down most clearly to this. Back in the 20th century, particularly in Major League Baseball, the big scandal over the intersection of sports and gambling was what was known as thrown games. That is to say you had players on teams who were actively betting against their own team and arranging miraculously enough for their own team to lose, which meant that financially, they won.
Well, you might look at that and say, “Well, that’s a problem that should be pretty easy to fix,” because you’d see a pattern, and maybe you should just respond to this by saying, “Well, you can’t bet against your own team.” But the fact is that the corruption, of course, just given the way sin works is far more pervasive and complicated than that because human beings are social creatures. And by the way, all of the moral disincentives to do right and the incentives to do wrong, they become pervasive throughout these systems.
And so if you have leagues and you have different people on different teams, you can have all kinds of different incentives or people not so much just to bet against, say their own team, but to be actively involved in throwing games, arranging games, cheating in one way or another when the actual relationship might be indirect. That is why the NFL doesn’t just say the NFL players, given this new world of legalized sports gambling, can’t bet against their own team. They’re not supposed to be actively involved in gambling in their own sport.
As Andrew Beaton reported in this front page article for the Wall Street Journal, “The bans coming down at once from the NFL reflects the growing challenge the sports world faces as betting becomes increasingly prevalent. Like anyone else these days, professional athletes can now place legal wagers with a few taps on a smartphone. Leagues such as the NFL face the thorny task of both preventing their own personnel from engaging in the practice while also embracing the new revenue streams it offers.”
Now, just from a Christian worldview perspective, this is an absolutely opportune moment to consider how the world actually has worked by sin. So here we have the sports leagues, they will lose their own business in totality if Americans come to the conclusion that their players are gambling in such a way as to distort the sport. On the other hand, they want the money that comes from legalized gambling. They want the massive millions and eventually billions of dollars that will come from this revenue.
And so you have these teams, the owners of these teams, the management of these teams, they want both things at once. They want to maintain rules to protect the sport, then they want to have the money that comes from gambling on their own sport. They want that money in their own coffers and they’re working hard for it.
In 2018, the United States Supreme Court struck down what was called the 1992 Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act. It was often referred to as PASPA, and the Supreme Court said that Congress had acted illegally in privileging just a couple of states for legalized sports betting. Now, this decision didn’t mean that the Supreme Court was giving a go ahead to legalized sports betting because Congress has every legal right to restrict this under the Interstate Commerce Act, but it did say that the Congress can’t pick a couple states as winners and the rest of the state as losers. And so as you’re looking at the situation now, just to understand that it is politically improbable that Congress could summon enough courage to legislate on this at all. So Congress basically is taking a pass.
Sports at just about every level seems to be coming to terms with gambling, and this includes collegiate sports as we shall see. But when it comes to the professional leagues, just understand that for most of the history of these professional leagues, Las Vegas was simply territory you could not enter. But now we’re going to have an NFL team in Las Vegas, the center of legalized gambling in the United States. Again, you just asked yourself the question, what could go wrong? And you know the answer. Just about everything.
Just about the same time, shifting to collegiate sports, there are some really huge issues that are involved in collegiate teams and the administration of America’s colleges and universities, particularly at the highest and biggest level of collegiate sport, also wanting to have a revenue stream from legalized sports betting. But in many cases, their own players are not just restricted from betting by moral rules, but they’re not even legally old enough to place bets.
And so you have major universities that have signed agreements with these betting companies and now they’re in the position of saying that they’re having to withdraw from at least some of them because there is evidence that these companies have been going on the campuses and enticing college students to bet for and against their own team, by the way, and they’re doing so when they’re not even legally able to bet.
So you talk about the distortion that comes in. Just understand there’s a deep biblical principle here, which is that it is the responsibility of someone in authority to try to prevent distorted motives from being able to corrupt legitimate human activities. So let’s just take the obvious. Sport is a legitimate human activity, but it’s a human activity that also quintessentially demonstrates the necessity of rules and the necessity of integrity in the endeavor. No one really wants to be involved in sports either as a fan or as a participant if everything is cooked in advance and corrupt.
Now, sadly enough, Christians also know that there is plenty of evidence of the fact that where you have the greatest cultural interest, you have a lot of popular activity, you have a great deal of commercial opportunity, well, that’s where things go wrong and often go wrong very fast. Just think about all the periodic scandals having to do with the Olympics, which after all isn’t even at least supposedly about professional sports.
Now, when it comes to this kind of involvement at any level, you actually might not be able to prevent a couple of guys from betting for or against their grandkids on a Little League team. But it’s a far cry from that, which after all may be just outside any kind of legal view to deciding that Little League is all of a sudden going to benefit by a new revenue stream of legalized sports betting.
And you say that’s ridiculous when it comes to Little League. Just imagine all of the corruption that could come in. Just imagine how that distorts something pristine and good and fair. But if it’s wrong for Little League, why is it right for the NBA or the NFL or for collegiate sports?
One of the things Christians always need to keep in mind is that the bigger the system, the more likelihood that there is some kind of sinful confusion in that system. That’s just a matter of the pervasiveness of sin. And Christians of all people can’t be surprised by sin showing up where human beings are.
As a matter of fact, if you look at our entire system of law, you look at policies, you look at even the rules of Little League Baseball, they are basically designed to try to limit the damage of sin. You don’t want to reward cheating, you want to reward what is right and true. You want to reward keeping the rules, not breaking the rules. But then there are some entire endeavors in human experience that seem to be contradictory to that.
For example, just take gambling. When you look at gambling, it is actually a disincentive towards doing that which is moral, which would be, for instance, being a good steward of that with which you have been entrusted. The Bible’s very clear about this, demonstrating two different lines of argument. One is that gambling is something like acting as a fool in which you would carry your money in a bag with holes. In other words, a really bad idea. Anyone ought to be able to see that. The other dimension of this is the very clear biblical teaching that reward and labor should be very closely linked. The worker is worthy of his hire.
So we’re looking at a composite picture in which work is considered a virtue. Saving and investment are considered virtues. Being a good steward is a matter of biblical commandment and thus wasting money and putting false incentives in an economy. Well, that’s something the Bible to say the very least would frown upon, and you would think the common sense would also come into play here. But this is where things get really interesting in recent headline news.
For example, just a few days ago, the Wall Street Journal ran a front page story. Here’s the headline: NFL Bans Five Players Over Sports Gambling. The National Football League as reporter Andrew Beaton tells us, has suspended five players, “including four on the Detroit Lions, for violating the league’s gambling policy in the league’s biggest crackdown since the widespread proliferation of legal sports betting across the United States.” So let’s just back up and remind ourselves, we are talking about a big new industry in the United States in recent times and expanding right now, even beyond a lot of projections. We’re talking about legalized sports gambling.
Now what’s new about that? Sports aren’t new. Gambling’s not new. Why would legalized sports betting be all of a sudden new? It is because throughout almost all of American history, you have had the United States and you’ve had the states and the sports leagues adamantly argue that mixing sports and gambling is a very, very bad idea, particularly when it comes to those who are playing, managing sports, those who are the owners of sporting teams. If you put in the moral complexity and the inherent temptation to do wrong that is involved in gambling and you add that to sports, well, let’s just ask yourselves the hypothetical question, what could go wrong? And you know the answer. Just about everything.
But we’re living in a time in which morality is up for grabs and some of the things that just made perfect sense in times past, by the way, not only because of very clear Christian convictions, but because of other kinds of convictions called legal convictions in which you had very clear evidence earlier in the 20th century that sports and gambling simply don’t mix.
Now, the opportunity for all kinds of things to go wrong here should be apparent to anyone all the way at every level of sports, from Little League to the highest professional leagues. What is the particular kind of opportunity for corruption? It is this: In gambling, just recall, in gambling the big issue is the establishment of the odds. And thus the incentive that comes by betting either for or against a team based upon certain kinds of odds.
Now, the only way to win really, really big is to beat the odds. That is to say if nine out of 10 people believe that team A is going to win the game and team A wins, by definition you’re in a very big pool and thus no opportunity for just fantastic gain through putting in a bet. On the other hand, if you bet for the underdog and the underdog actually wins, the likelihood is you might have some rather remarkable gain. But there is no fun in this if you can’t work the entire process.
And evidently the temptation for corruption is just nearly overwhelming, and the temptation for corruption comes down most clearly to this. Back in the 20th century, particularly in Major League Baseball, the big scandal over the intersection of sports and gambling was what was known as thrown games. That is to say you had players on teams who were actively betting against their own team and arranging miraculously enough for their own team to lose, which meant that financially, they won.
Well, you might look at that and say, “Well, that’s a problem that should be pretty easy to fix,” because you’d see a pattern, and maybe you should just respond to this by saying, “Well, you can’t bet against your own team.” But the fact is that the corruption, of course, just given the way sin works is far more pervasive and complicated than that because human beings are social creatures. And by the way, all of the moral disincentives to do right and the incentives to do wrong, they become pervasive throughout these systems.
And so if you have leagues and you have different people on different teams, you can have all kinds of different incentives or people not so much just to bet against, say their own team, but to be actively involved in throwing games, arranging games, cheating in one way or another when the actual relationship might be indirect. That is why the NFL doesn’t just say the NFL players, given this new world of legalized sports gambling, can’t bet against their own team. They’re not supposed to be actively involved in gambling in their own sport.
As Andrew Beaton reported in this front page article for the Wall Street Journal, “The bans coming down at once from the NFL reflects the growing challenge the sports world faces as betting becomes increasingly prevalent. Like anyone else these days, professional athletes can now place legal wagers with a few taps on a smartphone. Leagues such as the NFL face the thorny task of both preventing their own personnel from engaging in the practice while also embracing the new revenue streams it offers.”
Now, just from a Christian worldview perspective, this is an absolutely opportune moment to consider how the world actually has worked by sin. So here we have the sports leagues, they will lose their own business in totality if Americans come to the conclusion that their players are gambling in such a way as to distort the sport. On the other hand, they want the money that comes from legalized gambling. They want the massive millions and eventually billions of dollars that will come from this revenue.
And so you have these teams, the owners of these teams, the management of these teams, they want both things at once. They want to maintain rules to protect the sport, then they want to have the money that comes from gambling on their own sport. They want that money in their own coffers and they’re working hard for it.
In 2018, the United States Supreme Court struck down what was called the 1992 Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act. It was often referred to as PASPA, and the Supreme Court said that Congress had acted illegally in privileging just a couple of states for legalized sports betting. Now, this decision didn’t mean that the Supreme Court was giving a go ahead to legalized sports betting because Congress has every legal right to restrict this under the Interstate Commerce Act, but it did say that the Congress can’t pick a couple states as winners and the rest of the state as losers. And so as you’re looking at the situation now, just to understand that it is politically improbable that Congress could summon enough courage to legislate on this at all. So Congress basically is taking a pass.
Sports at just about every level seems to be coming to terms with gambling, and this includes collegiate sports as we shall see. But when it comes to the professional leagues, just understand that for most of the history of these professional leagues, Las Vegas was simply territory you could not enter. But now we’re going to have an NFL team in Las Vegas, the center of legalized gambling in the United States. Again, you just asked yourself the question, what could go wrong? And you know the answer. Just about everything.
Just about the same time, shifting to collegiate sports, there are some really huge issues that are involved in collegiate teams and the administration of America’s colleges and universities, particularly at the highest and biggest level of collegiate sport, also wanting to have a revenue stream from legalized sports betting. But in many cases, their own players are not just restricted from betting by moral rules, but they’re not even legally old enough to place bets.
And so you have major universities that have signed agreements with these betting companies and now they’re in the position of saying that they’re having to withdraw from at least some of them because there is evidence that these companies have been going on the campuses and enticing college students to bet for and against their own team, by the way, and they’re doing so when they’re not even legally able to bet.
So you talk about the distortion that comes in. Just understand there’s a deep biblical principle here, which is that it is the responsibility of someone in authority to try to prevent distorted motives from being able to corrupt legitimate human activities. So let’s just take the obvious. Sport is a legitimate human activity, but it’s a human activity that also quintessentially demonstrates the necessity of rules and the necessity of integrity in the endeavor. No one really wants to be involved in sports either as a fan or as a participant if everything is cooked in advance and corrupt.
Now, sadly enough, Christians also know that there is plenty of evidence of the fact that where you have the greatest cultural interest, you have a lot of popular activity, you have a great deal of commercial opportunity, well, that’s where things go wrong and often go wrong very fast. Just think about all the periodic scandals having to do with the Olympics, which after all isn’t even at least supposedly about professional sports.
Now, when it comes to this kind of involvement at any level, you actually might not be able to prevent a couple of guys from betting for or against their grandkids on a Little League team. But it’s a far cry from that, which after all may be just outside any kind of legal view to deciding that Little League is all of a sudden going to benefit by a new revenue stream of legalized sports betting.
And you say that’s ridiculous when it comes to Little League. Just imagine all of the corruption that could come in. Just imagine how that distorts something pristine and good and fair. But if it’s wrong for Little League, why is it right for the NBA or the NFL or for collegiate sports?
Part II
A Sticky Standard Over ‘Sticky Stuff’: MLB’s Recent Rosin Controversy Highlights the Pervasiveness of Sin and Both the Necessity and Limitation of Rules in a Fallen World
But finally, as we’re thinking about this entire arena of human activity, there’s another big headline news story when it has to do with sports, and in this case the sport of Major League Baseball, and when it comes to integrity and rules, and this one has to do with what is actually called in headlines: The controversy over sticky stuff. Now at the center of this controversy is Mets pitcher Max Scherzer, who by the way is on a suspension for having been found guilty of putting some kind of sticky stuff on his hand, presumably to be transferred to a baseball, presumably to make that sticky stuff make the pitch faster and thus harder to hit. And there is now a rule against sticky stuff.
Bob Nightengale writing for USA Today writes a front page of the sports section story with the headline, “MLB, Major League Baseball must solve subjective sticky problem.” Nightingale writes, “It’s time for a renewed urgency by Major League Baseball to develop a baseball with an enhanced grip to avoid the drama that surfaced this past week. It’s a terrible look,” he says, “for everyone when future Hall of Famer Max Scherzer is suspended 10 days for either using too much rosin or having an illegal foreign substance on his hand.” The story continues, “Scherzer insists it was only rosin, but the umpiring crew, led by crew chief Dan Bellino, says it was clear there was an illegal substance, causing his ejection and automatic 10-game suspension.”
Now, another major report in the Wall Street Journal makes clear that there’s a little bit more to the story because the umpire had three times checked this pitcher’s hands and glove and determined that he was in violation of league policy. Scherzer, by the way, is a three-time Cy Young Award winner. He is considered in all likelihood a future Hall of Famer, but right now his name is associated not so much with his pitching skill, but with the sticky stuff that was found on his hand.
Okay, so you might think it’s odd that you have Major League Baseball that’s been at this, by the way for a very long time and has already undergone, as we mentioned, so many controversies over similar kinds of cheating or accusations of cheating. The league actually has a new policy against the use of sticky stuff. And then you ask the question, “What exactly is sticky stuff?” Well, that’s the point of these controversies. At present, there is no adequate definition of sticky stuff. As the journal reports, “The incident points to the semantics of the league’s rule and the use of subjective assessments to determine objective punishments for ballplayers. In the MLB rulebook, rosin is a permissible substance for pitchers to use to get a better grip on the ball, until it isn’t.”
And this is a serious news report, folks. Scherzer, in the journal, “asserts that he had only used the Major League Baseball provided rosin bag on his hand. Umpire Dan Bellino said Scherzer’s hand ‘was the stickiest that it has been since I’ve been inspecting hands.'” Did you know that that’s what adult umpires did? Checking sticky hands of pitchers to find out if they’re legitimately sticky or suspiciously sticky.
Later, the journal story tells us, “The league badly wants to crack down on the use of sticky stuff by pitchers, as evidence has shown it can give pitchers a competitive advantage at a time when Major League Baseball is trying to rejuvenate the offensive side of baseball. MLB went as far as to issue a memo to clubs this spring training, reminding them of the intricacies of the sticky stuff policy.”
Among the sticky stuff that is not allowed is a substance known as Spider Tack, but it has also been discovered in the ingenuity of sticky stuff that if you mix the legally approved rosin with sunscreen, you end up with an increasingly and evidently threateningly sticky, sticky stuff. Phil Cuzzi, who’s the crew chief of the umpires in this particular game, said that the pitcher had been warned that his hand “might be too sticky in an early check in the game.”
It’s just important also to say that this is very much a debatable controversy because the pitcher himself has insist that he was following the rules. And furthermore, it’s just obvious to anyone whether you know anything about baseball or not, and I actually know very little. I do know that when you have a standard such as stickiness, that is not a very objective standard.
And furthermore, you have a situation here in which the league acknowledges that some sticky stuff is legal, but it can’t be overly sticky. What in the world does that mean? I’m raising this whole issue today because it simply points to something Christian should understand where the stakes are the highest, and in this case, given legalized gambling, that’s often literally a matter of stakes. Where the stakes are highest, where the interest is greatest, where you have a lot of money and a lot of power and a lot of cultural energy invested, the opportunities for things to go wrong just grow, the rule list grows longer, and all of this is simply explainable by the biblical doctrine of sin.
At the same time, there’s something noble going on here, there’s something noble in sport, there’s something noble in athletic achievement. There’s something really, really good about little kids running around on a field, chasing a ball, hitting a ball, and just being involved in team sports. There’s really something important about all of this. There are moral lessons to be learned, but the problem is, in a fallen world, some of those moral lessons come in through the back door rather than the front door.
I also want to say in conclusion that I think from a Christian perspective, the biggest angle here is the eventual corruption of all sport by what is defined as legalized gambling. You can legalize gambling, but you can’t make it morally safe. I think that’s just something Christians need to understand.
Legalizing something is not tantamount to making it morally right or to making it safe. Sometimes as we have full evidence here, it’s just about making money, and sometimes that big money for politicians as well as for athletes and for team owners and for those who organize sports at every level, it is just too much to resist.
And that tells us something.
Part III
The De-Incentivization of Work: Work is not a ‘Wacko’ Idea, Mr. President
But talking about reward and labor work and money, all this also raises an issue that just emerged in recent days, and it’s really a very telling issue, and it’s one that didn’t get a great deal of headline attention precisely because so many other things are going on, including President Joe Biden announcing that he is going to be running for a second term. But I want to refer to something the president made as a comment in recent days about a Republican proposal for the reform of welfare. The proposal coming from Republicans is that able-bodied persons ought to work and that if they do not work in a reasonable amount of time, then they should lose their welfare benefits.
And you look at that and you’d say, “Well, I think that makes sense. I mean, again, a biblical principle is at work here, a workman is worthy of his hire, and if he will not work, then he should not eat.” Now, the social safety net, it was sold to the American people on a moral argument that there are persons who simply cannot earn their own money, they cannot support themselves when it comes to food. And then there are dependents, especially programs like Aid for Dependent Children. Here you have children, and if their parents are not working, if there is no income, then… And by the way, it’s often parent, not parents in this context. If that is the case, then society wants to have a social safety net that those children would receive, those dependents would receive food and support and be taken care of.
But what we have seen lately, of course, is inevitable and it’s the expansion of the welfare state to cover all kinds of people who actually could and should be working. And what happened in recent days is that the Republicans made a proposal that the rules for some of these federal programs should be rewritten so that able-bodied persons should be required to work. And by the way, this is not a radical proposal. This is the kind of proposal that at least at times has been federal policy. It also has been included in legislation considered over the last several decades in American policy.
The President of the United States, Joe Biden, when he was asked about this particular Republican proposal, described it as wacko. That was the president’s word that was supposedly a serious political and moral argument. He said the Republican proposal was wacko. Well, there are a number of problems with that, and it’s not just the language, it is the fact that evidently, President Biden, when he was Senator Biden was also a supporter of what he now calls wacko.
And the reason is that the American people have a very simple moral formula in mind. They want to take care of people who can’t take care of themselves. They do not want people who they see as legitimate recipients of these kinds of programs to lose that access to those programs, but they do not want those programs to disincentivize persons from doing what they should be doing if they’re capable of doing it. And most importantly, that is work.
The editorial board of the Wall Street Journal gets right to the point when they say, “Voters may think food stamps and Medicaid are temporary backstops for Americans who fall on tough times, but that is no longer true. Both programs have become large and permanent entitlements reminiscent of the European dole.” That means European guaranteed social income. That means basically a giant welfare state. And what Americans were assured would not happen in this country is increasingly the status quo.
And furthermore, COVID became an opportunity for the federal government to extend so many of these programs to lower the requirements to get in these programs. And now you have people complaining when again, people who could work and should work don’t work. And the argument is you can’t have a constriction of these federal programs. We’re told that some 40 million Americans are enrolled in one program known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP. Now get this, that’s more than 10% of the US population. More than 10% of the US population currently qualifies for this singular program that costs more than $100 billion a year.
Here’s another fact that tells you a moral reality about the United States. “More than four million Americans ages 18 to 59 who aren’t disabled and don’t have children at home are on food stamps, according to the Congressional Research Service. Only one in four of them are employed.” So again, you’re talking about three of four of them not being employed, receiving this assistance from the federal government at taxpayer expense, and they could work. They are neither disabled nor are they taking care of children, but they don’t work.
The editorial board concluded, “Mr. Biden once understood this, which is why he voted for welfare reform that included a work requirement in 1996 when Bill Clinton was President. We realize Mr. Biden is now in thrall to the left-wing of his party,” said the editors, “but that shouldn’t keep Republicans from pressing a reform that would help the country.”
Now, I put these two together, these two issues, these two headline news stories together because I think it’s really important that Christians from time to time come back to a biblical theology of work. It is actually the case that biblical theology of work begins with Genesis 1, where we are told that we are made in God’s image as men and as women, and we are told to take dominion, to exercise dominion, and that means work. Labor shows up.
By the way, labor is increased in its difficulty because of sin. That’s a part of God’s judgment in Genesis 3, but ongoingly all the way to the end of Scripture, we are to be showing the glory of God and God’s design and creation by the appropriate involvement in work. And the link between the work and the reward, the worker and the income, that is very, very important even in biblical terms. Justice is people working and receiving a just reward or salary or income for their work.
The biblical theology tells us that you can’t have a society in which most people don’t work, by definition that society won’t work. And when you’re looking at the government, the government is supposed to create the incentives for right action, not to continually create incentives for the wrong action. And in this case, simply not working as a lifestyle is a very wrong action.
And by the way, Christians know this isn’t just punitive. It is not good for human beings not to be involved in doing the things that God has called us to do. And when you’re talking about able-bodied adults who could work and are receiving federal assistance and they just won’t work, I think most Americans would say that policy doesn’t work. But that policy is increasingly a divisive issue on partisan lines in the United States.
And what you also have is another perverse economic and political incentive. And that is this. When you create these massive welfare state programs, you not only disincentivize work and investment and all the good things that make economic prosperity and human flourishing possible, you also create an army of salaried workers who work in these programs and who have massive political investment in these programs.
And thus, the preservation and expansion of these programs becomes their main political ambition. And that takes us back to something we discussed just in recent days having to do with the mayoral election in Chicago. In the city of Chicago, one of the political distortion fields currently at work is that an incredible percentage of the voters and the residents in that city are recipients of this kind of welfare assistance. Thus, they have absolutely no incentive to elect a political leader who would reform the system.
The biblical worldview is true because God has revealed it, but it is also true in the sense that it is what truly leads to human flourishing. Violating the pattern that is revealed in Scripture leads to the opposite.
And I guess in conclusion today, I can simply say that if you had placed a bet against today’s edition of The Briefing being on sports and sticky stuff and the welfare state, you just lost.
Thanks for listening to The Briefing.
For more information go to my website at albertmohler.com. You can follow me on Twitter by going to twitter.com/albertmohler. For information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College, just go to boycecollege.com.
I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.
