Biblically speaking, why do taxes exist? The Apostle Paul wrote:

This is also why you pay taxes, for the authorities are God's servants, who give their full time to governing. Give everyone what you owe him: If you owe taxes, pay taxes... (Romans 13:7)

So taxes exist to pay the salaries of those who govern.

Yet among us, there are many who feel that the purpose of taxes is primarly to redistribute wealth -- to make the poor richer and make the rich poorer, to level things out. Does the bible support such an idea?

In the Hebrew Bible, the "Old Testament", God institutes a theocracy -- and it's a virtually tax-free society. Instead of taxes, he asks for tithes -- and again, the purpose is not to redistribute wealth, but to (a) support worship, and (b) demonstrate that everything belongs to God by giving him the first and best of everything.

Note that these tithes were "flat." God demanded a tenth. It didn't matter if you were rich or poor, God wanted the exact same proportion. His idea of "fair" apparently rather different than the redistributionists.

Later, when the Israelites want a larger, more powerful and centralized government (they want a king -- more here), God tells them several things: (1) Their desire for a powerful government comes from a rejection of God. (2) Their government will levy taxes, and God explicitly warns them that this is a bad, not a good thing.

Currently, we have a progressive tax system: the rich pay a far larger percentage than the poor. Under George W. Bush, that "progressive" nature only increased. Yet his critics on the left screamed as though he had made the tax less "progressive" -- not more. The political 'left' claims that having a flat tax system -- where everyone pays the same percentage (after reasonable cost of living deductions) -- would be "unjust" -- it is "just", apparently, to treat the poor more favorably than the rich.

Yet the bible is against this kind of thinking. Neither the poor nor the rich should be favored; instead, everyone should be treated the same.

Do not follow the crowd in doing wrong. When you give testimony in a lawsuit, do not pervert justice by siding with the crowd, and do not show favoritism to a poor man in his lawsuit. (Ex 23:2)

Do not pervert justice; do not show partiality to the poor or favoritism to the great, but judge your neighbor fairly. (Lev 19:15)

The bible teaches us it is wrong to reflexively side with "the little guy"; we must have a higher standard of justice than that. Reflexively favoring the poor, the bible teaches, is perverting justice, not administering it.

In the New Testament (John 6) Jesus feeds a group of hungry, poor peasants. Yet the next day, they desire more bread -- they are after all, phenomenonally poor by our standards -- and what does Jesus do?

He refuses to feed them.

Instead, he rebukes them because want they want is a socialist system which guarantees free bread for the poor. In fact, they make his support for such socialism a spiritual test: he is not "prophetic" if they he doesn't feed them and endless supply of manna, as (they claim) Moses did.

Instead, Jesus attempts to get them to stop thinking of the kingdom of God in materialistic terms, and points these people -- these poor, poor peasants -- to a truth he considered much more important:

I am the bread of life. Your forefathers ate the manna in the desert, yet they died. But here is the bread that comes down from heaven, which a man may eat and not die... he will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.

So Jesus was apparently not interested in setting up a system which guaranteed free bread to the poor, even though he'd demonstrated he was more than capable of doing so. That kind of materialistic analysis denied the true point of the miracle: Eternal life had come.

In summary, I'd like to point out several things.

First, the biblical purpose of taxes is to pay the wages of those who govern -- not redistribute wealth. If someone wants to argue this is a good idea for secular, practical reasons, go right ahead, but let's be done with this nonsense where so many on the left degrade any conservative Christian as a traitor or perverter of the faith for failing to support socialism and coercive, confiscatory policies targeted at the wealthy.

Second the 'progressive' idea of justice -- that is, reflexively favoring the poor, and looking at a person's wealth or social status before deciding which standard to apply -- is what scripture plainly calls a "perversion" of justice. God abhors "differing weights and measures."

Third, the bible tells us that our desire to look to a strong, centralized government to solve our problems is rooted in a rejection of God's rule and kingdom, not an embrace of it. Certainly, government has a legitimate role to play -- but it is not the giver of our daily bread, nor the solution to every single problem that confronts us. When we think that way, we've made an idol.

I'm not saying everyone who disagrees or supports these policies has ill will. We all make mistakes for the best of reasons. I'm simply and sincerely asking my 'progressive' Christian political opponents to please, please re-think some of their cherished assumptions, and either correct me or reconsider accordingly.

God bless you.