Alabama is an agriculturally rich and deeply religious state. So, why are nearly a fifth of its citizens dependent on the government for their food needs?
According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 15% of Alabama’s population received Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits in fiscal year 2024. That’s 1 in 7 Alabamians.
Sixty-seven percent of these benefits go to families with children, 39% to those with senior citizens or the disabled. With the government shutdown dragging on and SNAP benefits in the crosshairs, these families and seniors are feeling the pinch, living in fear of food scarcity.
The solutions to this crisis are in front of our face, but only if we confront the fact that reliance on government should never be a permanent solution. Our societal goal should be to reduce dependence, not encourage it.
We have a network of food banks serving all Alabama counties, many of which are religious or spearheaded by private individuals and grants. They should be the go-to in times of crisis. They are community focused and can often better address their recipients’ needs, unlike a faceless bureaucracy far removed from those it helps.
SNAP is 100% federally funded, and when the government decides to shut down, that government “help” is no longer available to 15% of Alabama’s population. Yet even before SNAP benefits were curtailed, food banks struggled to keep up with the demand, so on Tuesday, Gov. Kay Ivey released $2 million of the state’s emergency funds to eight of the food banks that serve our state.
“There are real Alabama families who rely on SNAP to put food on their tables, and that includes more than 300,000 children, more than 102,000 seniors and those who are disabled,” Ivey said. “Hear me loud and clear when I say Alabama cannot be both the state and federal government. And like states all across the country, Alabama is stepping up to help, but this is not sustainable by any means.” [Emphasis added.]
So why do we pretend government welfare is sustainable when this shutdown proves otherwise? We demand government fix itself so we can go back to the status quo. How does that make sense?
As 1819 News reported, Sens. Tommy Tuberville (R-Auburn) and Katie Britt (R-Montgomery) decried the election of New York’s first Democratic socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani. However, spoon-fed socialism is embedded throughout the very government our senators represent. Ultimately programs like SNAP treat citizen dependence on these benefits as a cul de sac rather than a bridge.
And it’s not just recipients who get caught in the endless benefit cycle. Christians, also, have this mindset that “the government should take care of it,” letting us brush off a requirement of our faith: feed the poor. We are further disconnected from our neighbors and communities when we assume that if we pay our taxes, Montgomery and D.C. will take care of things, and we can wash our hands of these problems. No one’s hands are clean in this scenario, and this shutdown is clearly exposing the holes in this premise.
This mindset also blocks recipients from seeking ways to become self-sufficient.
When we embed the concept that the government must supply basic needs, but the government fails, chaos and anarchy results. We’ll likely see this play out in New York and other places which demand the government meet basic needs it should not be tasked to do. These programs have always been a house of cards waiting to collapse; consider this the beginning of the fallout.
“It's not the taxpayers' job to support you and your family,” my friend and political analyst Kira Davis recently said on Facebook. “It's your job, it should be your husband's job. It's not the job of the taxpayer. It's the church's job, it's every Christian's job. It should not be the job of the taxpayer. It is your job as a neighbor. It is your job as a decent human being. But it is not the taxpayer's job.”
Where are the churches? Yes, churches are always feeding the poor, and many have ramped up in this crisis, but where are the leaders who can speak to this as Davis has? Bureaucratic solutions are faulty and temporal – who will reinforce that Christians and the local community should be watching out for their own?
This is one reason why being chronically online feeds into dependence on a system. That disconnect produces further isolation. The cycle of perpetual government handouts is a Band-Aid over a gaping wound; it solves nothing, only exacerbates deeper issues.
While any support should always include food and sometimes monetary assistance, there is so much more that the faith and other local communities can provide, including prayer, counsel, and outside perspectives and resources that have little or no connection to government. One route lights the path to freedom and self-reliance, the other is a slippery slope into socialism.
Davis expressed similar sentiments:
When you give your money to a faceless bureaucracy with the intention of that money being used to help everybody who claims they need that help, you've effectively divorced yourself from the intimacy of that process and you don't have to see what those people spend their money on. You don't have to see how they live their lives and if they're actually taking advantage of the help offered.
Tough medicine and even tougher choices are required to bring our communities back into alignment. Because if we do not work to see that 15% of Alabama SNAP recipients reduced, working to help people become as self-sufficient as possible, all we are doing is fostering dependence on government and enabling the socialist mindset.
Jennifer Oliver O'Connell, As the Girl Turns, is an investigative journalist, author, opinion analyst, and contributor to 1819 News, Redstate, and other publications. Jennifer writes on Politics and Pop Culture, with occasional detours into Reinvention, Yoga, and Food. You can read more about Jennifer's world at her As the Girl Turns website. You can also follow her on Facebook, Twitter, and Telegram.
The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of 1819 News. To comment, please send an email with your name and contact information to [email protected].
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