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The Conservative Caucus Podcast #11- Ryan Reeves

Published: August 20, 2025
Network: The Conservative Caucus
Analysis: Conservative Caucus President Jim Pfaff

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The debate over Christian charity government funding has reached a fever pitch as the Trump administration reduces USAID spending, with progressive Christians claiming it’s morally indefensible while conservatives argue the church never needed government money to fulfill its biblical mandate. Dr. Ryan Reeves, Cambridge-trained theologian and church historian, joins Jim Pfaff to examine what the early church actually practiced—and why the separation of charitable works from state funding might be precisely what Christianity needs to reclaim its authentic mission.

Topics Covered

• The USAID Funding Debate and Christian Response
• How the Early Church Practiced Charity Without Government
• The Proximity Principle: Loving Your Actual Neighbor
• Theological Foundations: Old Testament vs. New Testament Context
• The Faith-Based Initiative Trap
• Government Charity as a Monopoly on Compassion
• Bonus Discussion: AI and Christian Thinking
• Key Takeaways

The USAID Funding Debate and Christian Response

When the Trump administration announced cuts to USAID funding, a predictable chorus of progressive Christian voices erupted in condemnation. But Dr. Ryan Reeves, who taught theology at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary for a decade before becoming senior editor at Man in the Mirror, sees something troubling in the reflexive outrage: Christians have forgotten how to practice charity without government intermediaries.

“I’ve not heard enough folks saying maybe we shouldn’t be just seeing that the government is the only way to effectively take care of the poor,” Reeves observes. “The call to take care of the poor is universal in the Bible. No one gets away from that. The problem is that the Old Testament is a theocracy and the New Testament is a persecuted church under Rome.”

“I maintain that there’s no reason at all for us to be doing massive charity out of the federal government. It’s wasteful. Frankly, most of the money doesn’t get to the people it’s intended to help.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

The theological confusion stems from Christians cherry-picking verses about helping the poor without processing who should be helping, how effective current policies are, and whether the money is even reaching intended recipients. Reeves notes that when churches could finally receive government money during the Bush administration, it opened a Pandora’s box that the education sector had already experienced decades earlier.

How the Early Church Practiced Charity Without Government

The early Christian church operated under what amounted to a complete separation of church and state—not by legal design, but by persecution and exclusion. Yet this period produced some of the most effective charitable work in human history, as documented by church fathers like Justin Martyr in his apology to Emperor Antoninus Pius.

Justin Martyr pointed to Christians saving babies abandoned in the woods (an early form of abortion), caring for widows and orphans, maintaining strong marriages, and following Roman law while refusing to worship the emperor. All of this happened without a single denarius of government funding.

Reeves emphasizes that the early church’s approach was “far more holistic. It was far more actual inner life together.” When persecution came, Christians didn’t riot or cause rebellion—they simply continued loving their neighbors in tangible, personal ways that made the faith “infectious.”

The Proximity Principle: Loving Your Actual Neighbor

One of Reeves’ most pointed critiques addresses a modern distortion: “It’s only in the modern world where we conceive of helping our neighbor as helping someone that lives thousands of miles away from us.”

He illustrates this with a practical example from a church that got tired of writing checks to distant causes. Instead, they surveyed their own five-to-ten-mile radius, discovered a significant first-generation Hispanic population, and started offering free ESL courses with meals. “What they did is they found their people around them and they loved them,” Reeves explains. “That is far more what the early church was doing.”

The biblical model consistently points to geographic and relational proximity. The book of Acts describes the early church appointing deacons specifically to manage food distribution among believers—people they knew personally, worshiped with, and could disciple. When 8,000 people joined the church after Peter’s first major sermons, the logistical challenge was immediate and local, not abstract and global.

“Stop calling your neighbor somebody you never met. It’s the actual person down the road that’s hard to love that’s in a hard situation. The homeless guy you’re passing that needs help. It’s the actual neighbors.”
— Dr. Ryan Reeves

This proximity principle also created natural accountability. The early church’s charitable giving followed an “inverse funnel”—the more people allowed themselves to hear the gospel and come into the church, the more care they received. Within the church body, believers continued caring for one another as brothers and sisters, addressing not just material poverty but spiritual formation.

Theological Foundations: Old Testament vs. New Testament Context

Much of the confusion around Christian charity government funding stems from misapplying Old Testament commands given to Israel’s theocratic kingdom to modern democratic republics. Reeves walks through this carefully, noting that Psalm 82—which declares “you are gods” to Israel’s judges and kings—refers to them standing in God’s place to execute justice and care for the poor, widow, and orphan.

“To use modern political language, it’s a bit of divine right kingship, but with checks and balances,” Reeves explains. The Old Testament judges and kings were called “Elohim” (little gods) because they represented God’s hands doing His work on earth. But this was specific to Israel’s covenant structure.

When Christians quote verses like Psalm 82 or other Old Testament passages about kings oppressing the poor, they’re citing commands to a theocratic kingdom. “You can’t just go this policy gets trumped by a verse that’s dealing with the theocratic kingdom of Israel—unless you want a theocracy and then we have a different conversation on our hands,” Reeves notes.

Jesus himself said “the poor you will always have with you”—not as an excuse for inaction, but as recognition that poverty is an unsolvable systemic problem in a fallen world. The goal isn’t eradicating all poverty globally through government programs, but faithfully loving those God places in our path.

The Faith-Based Initiative Trap

The conversation takes a critical turn when addressing the Bush administration’s faith-based initiatives—a program progressive Christians now cite as proof that Christians supported government funding for charity. Both Pfaff and Reeves push back hard on this revisionism.

“I’ve been working in public policy for 30 years and I was screaming about it,” Pfaff states. Reeves confirms it was “controversial even in the seminary world” because the immediate question was: “What does this mean? Does this mean that we have like what if they come in and say you can’t teach that, preach that?”

The education sector learned this lesson in the 1970s and 80s. When schools accepted student loans, the government gained leverage over campus policies and curriculum. Churches are now discovering the same dynamic. “When you do things politically, you have a lot of the political ups and downs that happen,” Reeves observes.

Prior to the Bush-era changes, Reeves recalls it was “a badge of honor to have a successful funded poor relief” that came entirely from church resources. “The people of means see this. They see how we’re doing all this. And that was considered to be good.” Many of those privately-funded programs have since evaporated as churches adopted a “we pay our taxes, the money’s gone” mentality.

“I don’t think the Bible gives you a pass that says, ‘Well, you paid your taxes. Well, you’ve done your part.’ There are still people in your church, in your community that have needs.”
— Dr. Ryan Reeves

Government Charity as a Monopoly on Compassion

Pfaff frames the core issue succinctly: government charity functions as a monopoly over private charity, producing all the inefficiencies monopolies create. When the federal government takes in trillions of dollars for charitable purposes, that money becomes unavailable for private sector efforts that could deploy it more effectively.

The Trump administration’s DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) initiative exemplifies this. Pfaff references Trump’s brilliant demonstration showing Jerome Powell’s plan to renovate a building for $3.2 billion—the kind of waste that pervades government operations but would never survive private sector accountability.

“Wealthy Christians always hold people accountable” when giving one-on-one, Reeves notes. “If you go to a wealthy businessman or woman and you’re raising money for a ministry or a vision, they are absolutely going to ask you where that money is going and they’re going to want to see reports and receipts and they’re going to fire you and not give you any more money if you play around with your money.”

But when money funnels through government policies? “Good luck with accountability.”

The constitutional argument reinforces this. “From a law perspective, there’s no authority for any of the charitable stuff that we do through the federal government,” Pfaff argues. “We’re just politically dealing with the fact that we gave into it.” The Constitution operates as a charter of negative rights—limiting government to specified powers—not a mandate for government to solve every social problem.

Bonus Discussion: AI and Christian Thinking

In a fascinating tangent, Reeves and Pfaff explore artificial intelligence’s theological implications. As senior editor and digital strategy lead at Man in the Mirror, Reeves has been deeply involved in understanding how AI can serve—or hinder—Christian discipleship.

Reeves frames AI theologically: “A tool has no moral center within it. It’s the tool user always.” Just as Microsoft Word can write the Bible or Mein Kampf, and a hammer can build or destroy, AI will reveal human morality rather than create it. “It’s not what goes into us or what tools we use. It’s what comes out of us,” echoing Jesus’ teaching.

The practical application for Christians? Reeves suggests using AI like Perplexity for theological research: “Pull up Perplexity and when you’re looking through something and you’re reading something, just do a prompt that says, ‘What do theologians say about this passage?’ And it’s amazing the historical and theological context you can get.”

However, both men caution against using AI as a final research tool. Large language models often reflect recent internet data with progressive or “woke” biases. Pfaff sets his AI prompts to “always reference conservative theologians excluding radical leftist theologians of the 19th century” and give preference to Augustine and early church fathers—a way to bias the tool toward historically orthodox sources.

Reeves compares the AI revolution to the internet’s emergence: initial breathless predictions of unlimited growth (the dot-com bubble), followed by necessary corrections and guardrails. “We don’t need to be breathlessly thinking we’re suddenly going to create the Terminator,” but neither should Christians fear it. The key is learning to use it wisely, much as previous generations learned to use Google effectively.

Key Takeaways

1. Christian charity government funding creates dependency, not discipleship – The early church thrived in caring for the poor without any government partnership, integrating charity with evangelism and community formation in ways government programs cannot replicate.
2. Biblical commands apply to individuals and churches, not government policy – Old Testament verses about kings caring for the poor addressed Israel’s theocratic structure. The New Testament church operated under persecution, fulfilling charitable mandates through direct personal action, not policy advocacy.
3. The proximity principle matters – Modern Christians have distorted “love your neighbor” to mean supporting distant causes while ignoring actual neighbors in their geographic vicinity who need tangible help and gospel witness.
4. Faith-based initiatives compromised church independence – The Bush-era program that progressive Christians now cite as precedent was controversial among conservative Christians from the start, creating the same government leverage over churches that education experienced with student loans.
5. Government charity functions as an inefficient monopoly – When trillions of tax dollars fund government programs, that money becomes unavailable for private charitable efforts that operate with greater accountability, lower overhead, and spiritual integration.
6. Constitutional authority doesn’t exist for federal charity – The Constitution grants limited, enumerated powers to the federal government. Charitable works fall outside that authority, making current programs a political accommodation rather than a legal mandate.
7. Cutting government funding creates opportunity for church renewal – Rather than mourning USAID cuts, churches should reclaim their biblical mandate to care for the poor through direct, local, accountable action that reflects Christ’s love in tangible ways.
8. AI can enhance Christian learning when used wisely – Artificial intelligence tools like Perplexity can provide theological and historical context for Scripture study, but require careful prompting to avoid progressive biases in training data and should never replace primary sources or pastoral guidance.

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About The Conservative Caucus:
The Conservative Caucus is a grassroots public policy action organization, formed in 1974. Headed by President Jim Pfaff, the Caucus is committed to advancing free enterprise, limited government, and traditional values.

Originally broadcast August 20, 2025 on The Conservative Caucus.