Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

Forgive Us Our Debts

The third in a series. The prayer Christians recite more than any sentence Jesus spoke asks God to wipe out debts. The country that prays it most built the most unforgiving ledger in human history, and a long stretch of that ledger runs straight through New Hampshire.

Say the Lord’s Prayer out loud and listen to the line nobody flinches at. “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors” (Matthew 6:12). Not trespasses, not sins. In the text Jesus gave, the word is a money word: debts. The one prayer he taught his followers to repeat, said more times than any sentence in human speech, asks God to cancel what we owe on a single condition, that we cancel what we are owed. The two parts before this one (on what made him angry and on what we did anyway) traced the gap between the figure and his fan club. This one is narrower and, if anything, worse. We recite the debt-forgiveness prayer on Sunday and spend the rest of the week running a collections operation he would not recognize as anything but the thing he condemned.

The servant he could not stand

He told exactly one parable built entirely around debt and mercy, and it ends in torment. A servant owes the king a sum he could never repay; the king, moved, forgives the whole impossible amount on the spot. The same servant walks straight out, finds a man who owes him pocket change, takes him by the throat, and has him thrown in prison until he can pay. The king hears, and his verdict is the hinge of the whole story: “Shouldest not thou also have had compassion on thy fellowservant?” (Matthew 18:33). He hands the unforgiving man over to the tormentors. The point is not buried. Mercy you are glad to take but refuse to extend is the one posture the story will not absolve. And lest anyone miss it, the prayer itself carries the warning two verses on: forgive others and you are forgiven; refuse, and you are not (Matthew 6:14–15). This is the prayer said at the altar, the graveside, and the school assembly, week after week, by tens of millions of people. Now look at the ledger we keep.

What we charge the sick

Jesus healed for free. There is no scene in the Gospels where he runs a tab. The blind, the leprous, the bleeding, the man let down through a roof, he restored them and sent them home, and the only thing that ever changed hands was faith. He opened his public ministry reading a promise of “the acceptable year of the Lord” (Luke 4:19), the old Jubilee, the appointed year when debts were forgiven and the captive walked free. Set that beside what healing costs here. Roughly 100 million Americans carry medical debt, a debt almost nobody chooses, the kind that arrives with the ambulance rather than from any night of overspending. The Census found years ago that nearly one in five households had medical bills they could not pay off in a year. The federal consumer bureau’s own research concluded medical debt barely predicts whether a person repays anything else, because it is not a sign of recklessness; it is a sign of getting sick.

So in early 2025 a federal rule was finalized to pull that debt off people’s credit reports, where it had been quietly blocking them from renting an apartment, getting a loan, or passing a background check. About $49 billion in medical debt on the records of some 15 million people was set to come off. Then the government switched sides in its own case. Under new management, the consumer bureau joined the credit-reporting industry in asking a federal court to throw the rule out, and in July 2025 a Texas court did. The debt stayed on. More than half of all the debt in collections on American credit reports is medical, not the product of luxury or carelessness but of illness and injury. Read that plainly: the people running the system went into court to make sure that being sick keeps costing you your credit. The Jubilee ran the other direction.

What we pay the worker

On wages he was just as direct. “The labourer is worthy of his hire,” he told the seventy he sent out (Luke 10:7). The letter of James went further and named withheld pay as a sin that cries to heaven: the wages “kept back by fraud” from the men who reaped the fields cry out against the ones who kept them (James 5:4). New Hampshire pays its lowest workers $7.25 an hour. That is the federal floor, the lowest wage permitted anywhere in New England, and it has not moved since 2009: sixteen years of a frozen number while rent, groceries, and the oil bill climbed straight past it. A tipped worker here is guaranteed a cash wage of $3.27 an hour and told to make up the rest in the goodwill of strangers. Work full time at the minimum and you gross about $15,080 a year, below the poverty line for a household of two. Walk across the river into Massachusetts or Maine and the identical work pays more than double. The Legislature has had bill after bill to lift it and has killed each one. Adjusted for inflation, $7.25 buys roughly a third less today than it did the last time the wage moved, and New Hampshire is one of the only states in the region that never set a wage floor of its own.

What we bill the child

And then the children, where his language goes hardest of anywhere in the Gospels. He told the disciples to let the little ones come to him and not hinder them (Matthew 19:14). Of anyone who would harm one of them, he said it would be better to have a millstone hung around the neck and be drowned in the sea (Matthew 18:6). Now open New Hampshire’s books. This state funds its public schools last in the nation. By the New Hampshire Fiscal Policy Institute’s count, only about 29 percent of the cost of public education comes from the state, dead last in America, with the rest shoved down onto local property taxpayers. The state pays roughly $4,100 per student for what it calls base adequacy. In 2025 the New Hampshire Supreme Court ruled that figure facially unconstitutional and affirmed a floor no lower than $7,356 per pupil, a number the state is still not paying. Closing that gap would run on the order of half a billion dollars a year, money a roughly $16 billion state budget has the room to find and has chosen not to.

The bill for that gap lands on the town, which means a child’s schooling rises or falls on the assessed value of the houses around them. In one recent year a property-poor community taxed itself at roughly $14.98 per $1,000 of value to fund its schools while a wealthy coastal town charged about $0.19, a gap of nearly eighty to one for the same constitutional duty. The courts have been telling the state to fix this since the Claremont rulings of the 1990s, which first established the duty to fund an adequate education and to do it with a uniform tax. This is the machinery I called generational malpractice in the book of that name: the steady transfer of cost and risk onto the people with the least say in it, the young and the not-yet-born, dressed up as fiscal prudence. In January 2026, holding a court ruling that the system is unconstitutional, the New Hampshire House voted the fix down anyway.

As we forgive our debtors

So go back to the prayer, because it is a conditional sentence and it is still running. It asks God to treat us exactly the way we treat the people who owe us, and then it waits. We keep the sick in debt for the crime of getting sick and go to court to keep the mark on their record. We freeze a worker’s wage below the poverty line for sixteen years and call it the market. We bill a child for an education the state constitution already promised, and let the size of the bill depend on the zip code. Each of these is a choice, renewed every budget cycle, by people who can recite the prayer from memory. The unforgiving servant did less than any of this, and the parable handed him to the tormentors. The Lord’s Prayer is no comfort if you mean the words. It is a measure. And by the measure of the one sentence Jesus told us to repeat, the country that says it loudest is running the precise operation the parable damns. He set the terms. We pray them every week. Then we go back and keep the ledger.

— Dexter Dow, Granite State Report

Fact check

Editor’s note. This is signed opinion, the third part of a series. Scriptural claims describe what the texts say in the King James Version, not a theological ruling. Current figures are attributed to the named sources and courts; readers should confirm the most current numbers, which continue to move as the medical-debt litigation, wage law, and school-funding cases proceed. The column criticizes documented laws, court records, and patterns of public policy; it accuses no living, named individual of bad faith.