Health-care reform is an economic, political and medical issue. But former Beliefnet blogger and political activist and evangelical leader Jim Wallis says it’s also a “deeply theological issue, a Biblical issue and a moral issue.” To the extent that he is correct, both he and we should proceed with extreme caution.
The debate about health care is already contentious enough without bringing God into it, at least the way we usually do so. I mean, we have people calling each other Nazis and Brown Shirts because they happen to disagree with each other about this issue. Do we really need to invoke God, whose name when invoked in public policy debate, generally adds more heat than light to any issue?
It’s not that I disagree about the deeply theological, Biblical or moral underpinnings of the issue of health care. In fact, one need go no further than Deuteronomy 4:15 which commands us to take good care of ourselves – to do so as a community, to begin making a religious case for the kind of universal health care which Rev. Wallis desires. What a surprise! Mr. Wallis can find Biblical support for the politics in which he believes.
It’s not that I am cynical about his sincerity, but I know just as many Righties who find verses to defend their vision of what health care should look in America. So rather than simply hurling proof texts at one another, I wonder, how our various faiths could raise the level of this important debate. How might our understanding of what God wants shed some new light on an argument which is serving very few people but the fiercest ideologues on each side of this issue?
As a Jew, rooted in a system which is far more concerned with obligations than it is with rights, but always aware of both, I want to see a real conversation about the balance between health care as a human right and the obligations that should be born by all people who get that care. In Judaism, even those things which we consider God-given rights are accompanied by real obligations.

So, for example, should the same kind universal health care coverage be extended to those who smoke as would be to those who don’t? How about to those who are overweight, like me? Are we entitled by God, as invoked by Mr. Wallis, to the same care as those who manage their weights more successfully? Or have we abrogated our own rights by failing to live up to other equally Biblical obligations about care of our bodies?
What about the fact that no matter how much we choose to universalize health care, we must admit that ours is no less a rationing of a limited commodity than is the current process, we just like our version better. But who says that it is necessarily more ethical?
For example, the Talmud teaches that if two men are stuck in a boat and only one of them has a flask of water, and it is clear that it will not sustain them both, the owner of the flask is not obligated to share his water. The ensuing debate about that claim is complex, but the basic assumption remains throughout — what we contribute is a factor in determining that which we are entitled to receive when a limited resource must be rationed.
Using religious ideas to ask these kinds of questions, questions which admit the complexity of the issue and guide us through it, rather than flogging our faiths for political-theological points, would be a worthy use of faith in this debate. Anything less nuanced, and we should keep our ideas about God and health care to ourselves.