A ‘Christian nation’ doesn’t treat its children this cruelly

Donald Trump’s signature legislative achievement – the purported One Big Beautiful Bill – lavished massive tax cuts on the wealthiest one percent of Americans (over $50,000 annually in reductions) and cut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program by $186 billion over ten years. The 20% cut in the SNAP program was the largest in history. Sen. Josh Hawley described the Trump statute as “reverse class warfare, taxing the poor to give to the rich.” Yeah, that Josh Hawley.

The food stamp cuts occur, of course, in the richest nation on earth. Also, in the advanced major nation with the greatest income inequality and among the highest child poverty and hunger rates to be found. The statute will make these outrages worse.

Roughly a year into the law’s implementation, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reports that 4.3 million fewer low-income people received SNAP benefits nationwide than in 2025. Early studies by ProPublica and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimate that between 750,000 and 1.5 million of those being turned away are children. In North Carolina, more than 1.2 million poor Tar Heels depend on SNAP benefits to put food on the table.

The nonpartisan US Conference of Mayors recently sent a letter to the Senate signed by over 200 mayors calling for the SNAP cuts to be restored, given the country’s “deepening food security crisis.”

The mayors said: “SNAP remains the nation’s most effective and efficient anti-hunger program. It reduces poverty, supports local economies, and provides an automatic stabilizer during economic downturns. Hunger is not a partisan issue and efforts to address food insecurity should rise above political divisions.”

The senators were apparently unmoved.

I know we live in an escalating and continuous landscape of outrages in the United States. It is too deflating to even list them. But shall it go unsaid how deeply immoral this centerpiece of our domestic policy is? Cutting food stamps to put even more money into the pockets of the richest of the world’s richest? Or, even if said, how easily we ignore or forget the decision made boldly, horrifyingly, in our names? Is this, truly, the kind of people we are?

I understand some will say, and have, that this wounding of our too modest social safety net is merely in pursuit of fraud, waste and abuse, but, when they say that, they know that they lie.

I assume some will say such cuts are needed to assure that poor folks will have increased incentive to work harder, save more, and demonstrate a more steely self-sufficiency. But that ignores the economic realities of life for impoverished and low-income families in North Carolina and the nation. And why should it be that poor children are treated more cruelly in the United States than in other countries? Really, why?

And I know that many — a great, great many — applaud such harshness as they proclaim, with unyielding enthusiasm, that America is a “Christian nation.” But, then, what part of Matthew 25:45 do we fail to understand? (“Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me.”)

It is remarkable to inflict the greatest ruthlessness on poor children in a nation committed, governmentally, to “justice for all” and, spiritually, according to so many, to the Sermon on the Mount. We try to justify much inconsistency in this life. But we can’t manage that one. Nobody can.

 Contributing columnist Gene Nichol is a professor of law at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.