The Poor, Made Into a Category

Words to Know

Deserving poor — an old legal distinction between poor people considered worthy of help and those who are not.

Parish — a local church district, which in English law was responsible for its own poor.

Less eligibility — the rule that relief must be made worse than the worst-paid honest work, so that nobody prefers it.

Means test — checking a person’s income and property to decide whether they qualify.

Here is a word that got invented.

English law from the 1500s onward, as more people lost their land or their work and turned up begging in the towns, draws a line between the deserving poor and the sturdy beggar. The deserving poor are the old, the crippled, the orphaned and the widowed, and they may be helped. The others are held to be idle by choice, and they may be whipped, branded, set to forced labor, or sent back to the parish they came from. ¹

Most books stop there, so here is the actual chain.

It runs from an English statute to the form on the desk in your church office, and each link has a date.

• 1601: England’s Poor Law makes the parish responsible for its own poor, pays for it with a local property tax, and appoints an overseer of the poor to sort people into bins. ²
• 1662: The Settlement Act lets a parish ship a newcomer back where he came from, and the American colonies copy the whole system, which New England calls warning out. ^{3 4}
• 1834: A new English Poor Law adopts less eligibility, meaning relief must be made worse than the worst-paid job, and enforces it with the workhouse. ⁵
• 1877: An Episcopal clergyman, S. Humphreys Gurteen, brings London’s Charity Organization Society to Buffalo, New York, where it investigates every applicant before anyone gives. ⁶
• 1935 and 1996: The Social Security Act splits help into “earned” insurance and means-tested welfare, and a 1996 law whose title begins Personal Responsibility adds work requirements and a five-year limit. ^{7 8}
• Today: Your church’s benevolence fund most likely wants an application, receipts, a pastor’s signature and a referral-list check, and sees each person once.

Go deeperThe 1601 Poor Law, the Settlement Act and the colonies

Parliament passed the Act for the Relief of the Poor, which everyone calls the Elizabethan Poor Law. It gathered up fifty years of scattered legislation into one system that lasted, in its bones, for two hundred and thirty years.

The property tax that paid for it had its own name, the poor rate, and the sorting itself had three bins: the impotent poor, who got relief; the able-bodied, who got put to work; and the idle who refused work, who went to a house of correction.

In 1662 the Settlement Act went further. It made every person legally attached to one parish, and let that parish remove a newcomer who looked likely to need relief and ship him back to the parish he had left. Poverty now had a jurisdiction. You were not just poor. You were somebody else's poor.

The English colonies in America copied the system into their own statutes almost wholesale, the parish or town as the unit, the local rate, the overseers, the sorting, and they copied the power to remove newcomers too. In New England the practice got a blunt name: warning out. A town would formally warn a newcomer that it accepted no responsibility for him, preserving its right to remove him later if he became a cost, and town records are full of it.

So the distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor is in America before the United States is.

Go deeperSocial Security in 1935 and the 1996 law

On one side, contributory programs like old-age benefits and unemployment insurance: you and your employer paid in, and you drew out. Nobody investigated your household, and nobody called it welfare. It was described as something you earned.

On the other side, means-tested public assistance, run by the states, for people who had nothing to pay in with, including aid to dependent children. You had to prove you had nothing. Your income was examined, your household was examined, and being on assistance was a mark against you.

Same law, same year, two completely different moral stories, separated by whether the money was framed as returned or as given.

One more detail from that act belongs in this book. As originally passed, the contributory side excluded agricultural and domestic workers, the two categories that covered the majority of Black workers in the South. The better-regarded half of the system was, at its founding, largely closed to them.⁹

The deserving and the undeserving, with a payroll number attached.

The 1996 law came in that August, and it did more than add requirements: it replaced the main cash assistance program for poor families with a block grant to the states, which then set their own conditions on top of the federal ones.

Four hundred and thirty-five years after the parish overseer, the same distinction turned up in a modern statute, in a law whose very title assigns the blame.

Look at 1601 again. Relief was now administered by the church, with tax money, by a named official, whose job was to decide which bin you were in. Everything after that is the machine being improved.

Now look at 1834. Relief must be worse than work, or people will choose relief. You have heard that sentence this year. It is the reasoning behind every work requirement, every waiting period, every rule designed to make a benefit unpleasant to collect, and it has never once been retired.

Go deeperLess eligibility and the workhouse test

England overhauled the system with the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, built on a principle the commissioners stated in writing and called less eligibility.

They had an instrument for enforcing it: the workhouse test. If you wanted help, you had to enter the workhouse to get it. Inside, the work was hard, the food was poor, the rules were harsh, and families were separated, husbands from wives, parents from children.

The point was not to help you. The point was that the offer should be bad enough that only the truly desperate would take it.

It was a royal commission in England that wrote that principle down in 1834.

The 1877 link is the one that reached the church.

The Charity Organization Society was against what it called indiscriminate almsgiving, which meant handing a man a coin because he asked. It kept a central registry of everyone who applied for help in the city. It sent a friendly visitor, usually a respectable woman from a church, to the applicant’s home to ask about drink and work and habits, and to report whether this family should be helped.

Go deeperScientific charity, and why the registry existed

The whole movement called itself scientific charity, and its instrument, the Charity Organization Society, had been founded in London in 1869 before Gurteen brought it to Buffalo. Within twenty years it had spread to more than a hundred American cities.

The registry existed for a specific reason: so that the same family could not be assisted twice by two different agencies. It was, in effect, the first case file.

This was not a government office. It was a charitable society founded by a clergyman, staffed out of the churches, in the 1870s and 1880s, in American cities, teaching a whole generation of church people that the loving thing to do with a hungry person was to assess him first.

I want to be fair to them. They were not cruel people. They held, sincerely, that giving without inquiry made people into paupers, and the casework method they invented became professional social work, which has done an enormous amount of good.

But the habit they taught the churches is the habit you still have. Investigate before you give. It is a hundred and fifty years old and it came in through a church door.

Now look at the last line of the list.

The application and the case file are the Charity Organization Society, 1877. The household inquiry is the friendly visitor. The referral check is the central registry, built to stop duplicate giving. The once-only rule is less eligibility. The pastor’s signature is the overseer of the poor, 1601.

Go deeperWhat your church's form actually asks

Some of what your church's form asks goes beyond a name and an address. The receipts must be in the person's own name. The once-only rule comes with an explicit bar on coming back. And the referral-list check exists so that nobody can get help from two churches in the same month.

I will be straight with you about what I can and cannot show. I cannot hand you a memo in which a church adopted these forms. There was no such memo. Churches took up the ordinary practices of the charitable world around them, one office at a time, over a century. And a church that hands out money has to be able to show its books, so some paperwork exists for honest reasons.

But the shape of it did not come from me, and it did not come from the Bible, and it is not neutral. It came out of 1601, 1834 and 1877.

Here is what the question does.

A hungry person in front of you is a simple situation. You have food, he does not, you give him some. The moment you ask whether he deserves it, you have given yourself a job, assessment, and that job can be done forever, and while it is being done nobody eats.

It also feels righteous. That is what makes it dangerous.

Now go and look at what I actually did about this.

I never once asked.

Five thousand people on a hillside were fed. Nobody was interviewed. Nobody was sorted. There is no line in it where anybody establishes need (Mark 6:34–44).

A blind beggar named Bartimaeus shouted by the road at Jericho, and the crowd told him to be quiet. That was the crowd doing the screening, and I overruled them. I asked him one question, and it was not what have you done to help yourself. It was what do you want me to do for you (Mark 10:46–52).

Ten men with a skin disease were healed. One came back to say thank you, and he was a Samaritan, the wrong kind. The other nine did not bother (Luke 17:11–19). Nothing happened to the nine. They stayed healed. I did not take it back from the ungrateful.

Go deeperThe three stories as first told

The crowd of five thousand was fed because, the text says, what moved me was that they had no one leading them.

With Bartimaeus, I called him over myself before I asked him anything.

And the ten with a skin disease had been standing at a distance the whole time, because the law required it of them.

If you want one story to put next to your application form, use the ten.

Not the crowds I fed. Not the sick. Not the beggar shouting by the road. Nobody in the entire record is asked what they did with their last money, whether they have been drinking, whether they tried, or whose fault it is.

And in the one scene I described where people are actually sorted, the sheep and the goats, read the criteria (Matthew 25:31–46). I was hungry and you fed me. I was thirsty and you gave me a drink. I was a stranger and you took me in, naked and you clothed me, sick and you looked after me, in prison and you came to me.

Every one of those six is a physical act done to a body. There is no doctrine on the list, no prayer, and no assessment of the recipient.

Now the verse behind every “but some people just don’t want to work.”

They are quoting this: if anyone will not work, let him not eat (2 Thessalonians 3:10).

First, it is not mine. It is a line in a letter written to one congregation, and it is one of the letters whose authorship is argued over. It is not in red in anybody’s Bible.

Second, read the next verse. The letter says who it is aimed at: certain people in that congregation who had stopped working and were going about as busybodies (2 Thessalonians 3:11). The whole letter is written to people worked up about the end of the world arriving immediately (2 Thessalonians 2:1–2). The letter tells those people to go back to work.

Third, it is a rule for members of a household, about each other. It is not a rule for the stranger at the door, and there is no hungry outsider anywhere in the passage.

Somebody took a house rule about freeloading brothers and turned it into a national doctrine about strangers. Ask yourself who benefited from that move.

Go deeperThe Thessalonians verse, handled at length

The letter whose authorship is argued over, incidentally, is the same one you had in Lesson 15.

Some members of a small community had decided the world was ending, quit their jobs, moved in on their neighbors' food, and spent their free time telling everybody else what to do.

The distance between church members who quit their jobs waiting for the apocalypse and a woman with two children and no rent is not small. It is the whole width of the question.

That verse has been used against the poor more often than all six items of Matthew 25 have been used for them.

Here is the other half, which is harder.

Charity is the easy half, and I will not let you stop there. A food pantry treats hunger, and the prophets I learned from were not talking about pantries. They were shouting about the people who made the hunger. Charity feeds a man this week. It also lets everybody feel finished.

Go deeperCharity and the other half

Unit One, Lesson 5, names those prophets directly, and their complaint had specifics. Courts ruled for whoever paid. Men added field to field until the poor had nowhere left to go. Scales were rigged.

Charity is preached constantly and the other half almost never is, because charity costs a check. The other half costs you your standing with your own dinner companions.

And somebody will tell you I said the poor will always be with you (Mark 14:7), meaning poverty is permanent, so relax. Go and read the sentence I was echoing: the poor will never cease out of the land, therefore I command you to open your hand (Deuteronomy 15:11). The whole chapter is about cancelling debts every seven years. That verse is not a shrug. It is a command with a mechanism attached.

Go deeperThe poor you will always have

Go back one step further than the line you know. A few lines earlier in that same law it says: there will be no poor among you (Deuteronomy 15:4).

My listeners knew the chapter. Every one of them heard the second half.

It is the single most reliably misused sentence I ever said, and it takes ninety seconds to check.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Matthew 25:31–46 and list the six things.

You will find: six physical acts, no doctrines, and nothing about whether the person deserved it.

Then look up: Luke 17:11–19. Count how many were healed, and how many came back. Then notice that nothing was taken away from the nine.

Then look up: 2 Thessalonians 3:10, and keep reading to verse 11 to find out who it is talking about.

The Short Version

• The deserving poor is a legal category from English law, not a teaching of mine.
• Its chain runs from the 1601 Poor Law through 1834 and the 1877 Charity Organization Society to your church’s benevolence form.
• I never screened anybody, and nine of the ten I healed never said thank you and kept their healing.
• 2 Thessalonians 3:10 is aimed at church members who quit work expecting the end, not at a hungry stranger.
• My one description of a final sorting lists six physical acts and no assessment.

Think About It

1. Why does assessing someone feel more responsible than feeding them?
2. Go and get your church’s benevolence application. Read each question on it and ask what the answer is for. Which of them would have stopped me?