Worth a gander at Mr. Evans article.
I really respect you Bedell, so I hesitate in typing this, but: I ultimately feel that the article by Evans – despite making some solid points here and there – is, along with essential argument, pretty damn laughable.
First, I think there's a fairly clear case of mistaking symptom for cause:
Government action can displace local community ties. Take the example of childbearing. Social Security (government support for the elderly) has displaced children as the primary support for many elderly people. According to Jonathan Last, in his recent book What to Expect When No One’s Expecting, Social Security has driven fertility down on average by about half a child. And this is to say nothing of frayed parent-child relationships that government policy enables, with elderly living in nursing homes with little support from or interaction with their children.
We also see this tendency in illegitimate births, where support for single mothers actually facilitates single-motherhood. The destruction of the two-parent household in the African-American community, where about 74 percent of children today are born to unmarried mothers, is devastating. It is no stretch to attribute this breakdown of the family to, at least in part, America’s welfare policies that make the support of fathers less necessary.
That final sentence is key: it is indeed a stretch, and a pretty large and silly one to my mind, to "to attribute this breakdown of the family to [...] America’s welfare policies that make the support of fathers less necessary." Fathers have been stepping out on their wives and children as long as there have been fathers, mothers, and children; to suggest that social safety-net policies of the past half-century are responsible for this fact is a ridiculous (albeit convenient) fiction. The need for a safety-net is symptomatic of this pre-existing fact; the implementation of the safety-net is a societal recognition of said fact and an attempt at treatment.
Likewise: social security benefits are really a pittance, and a drop-in-the-bucket compared to what it usually costs to send the elderly to a "home" instead of accepting them into the family home, so this "governmental enabling" schtick doesn't really hold water. If social values and priorities have changed – for instance, pushing children out and away from the home sooner, more readily, and with stronger seeming necessity than in the past – it's not because of the spectre or social security; social security was designed to attend to this reality.
---
Furthermore, while Evans touches some good notes in his invocation of Aristotle's opening gambit in
Politics and his citation of Tocqueville's cautionary description of mass-tyranny writ institutional (and what he misses or occludes from both those texts—primarily regarding the potential solutions each author presents to the problems they outlay—is another conversation), his principal argument in the end reads like little more than market-apologetics couched in Christian concern:
Obamacare’s vast regulation of the health insurance market begins to subvert both individual responsibility and community engagement with individual needs. What Wright and Bird and many liberal democrats really want is government-run universal healthcare, which is an even greater step toward the exclusion of responsibility and community ties. As Christians, we must oppose this system, not because of what it provides, but because of what it excludes.
To quote Evans back at himself:
This approach is not novel.
Finally—and this likely results from the simple but essential fact that I am not a Christian—is that I'm not really concerned, beyond a literary level, with "what the Bible envisions for the true flourishing of humanity," in no small part because I think
this life is all-too-likely the
only life. As such, I'm of the opinion that society should be conjugating itself with respect to the the immediate physical and psychological tense, not the potential spiritual future tense; and I don't think this presents mutual exclusivity to the Christian, who must likewise live in the City of Man.
Indeed, I think that a society engaged in universally "provid[ing] the basic necessities of life" is commensurate with, or at least a key step towards, "the true flourishing of humanity"—if for no other reason than my belief that the provision of necessities frees our minds to probe and ponder the essential that lies beyond the mere necessary.
