On “Janet Mefferd Today” on July 14, right-wing pastor Jim Garlow suggested the government should stop assuming responsibility for providing “health and welfare” services so that churches can take over the social safety net and eliminate “freeloaders.”

“This is going to sound pretty radical to the ears of most listeners,” Garlow admitted. “We’re so out of tune with Scripture. For several hundred years, we’re, for the first part of the history of this country, we did a good job at the health and welfare of people because it was in the role of the church, and the church has the DNA to do that. The family’s the number one institution, number two and the church steps in, and then the community at large, and then finally the role of the government. That’s kind of a pecking order.”

Garlow stressed that “health and welfare is 51 percent of the national budget. The government wasn’t designed to do that. It does a terrible job because it can’t isolate out freeloaders, for example. Waste, corruption, fraud. Everybody knows about it, but it never gets corrected.” (The 51 percent figure he cites consists primarily of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.)

Garlow claimed that if the 100,000 “Bible-believing churches” in America “were the epicenter of the health and welfare for people, the freeloaders would be gone, so that would take an enormous load off, the taxation off of people from overregulation of government would be gone, so people would be giving more to their local church.”

“If we followed what ancient theocracy in Israel did, they had a tax, 10 percent every three years, for the poor,” Garlow said. “That’s three and a third percent every year. Let’s suppose that somehow that went to the local worship centers across America, it was administrated to the people by hundreds of volunteers from every church who could make a difference. People might say, ‘Well, that just can’t possibly work.’ Well, let me ask you, how is it working right now? Pretty terrible. Pathetic, quite frankly.”

Garlow acknowledged that “the theocracy of ancient Israel is not the same as the constitutional republic in America” but claimed “there are principles that can come across the centuries, that can come to a different form of government and make sense and would work if we would just allow government to be what it’s supposed to be, biblically and constitutionally, church, be what you’re supposed to be, we could step back up to the plate and do what we did so well. There’s plenty of evidence that the church, for a couple thousand years, did a phenomenal job at meeting the health and welfare needs.”