Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

What We Did Anyway

Part one laid out what the Gospels say enraged Jesus. The harder fact is the one part two has to sit with: that exact cruelty has marched under his name for two centuries, and in New Hampshire and Washington in 2026 it is a budget line, scored by the Congressional Budget Office and signed into law.

Part one of this argument made a narrow claim: the Gospels are specific about what made Jesus angry, and the specifics do not flatter the people who quote him most. The objection came back fast, and it was fair. Anyone can wave scripture at their enemies. True. So here is the harder point, the one that does not depend on whose side you take. The precise cruelty the Gospels say enraged him has been carried, for two hundred years, by people holding his name. Not by his enemies. By his own church, with money and presses and votes. And in the summer of 2026 it is not a misunderstanding to be cleared up. It is written into federal law, scored by the Congressional Budget Office, and signed.

His name was the cover

Start with a physical object. In 1807, in London, a missionary society printed a Bible for enslaved people in the British West Indies and titled it “Parts of the Holy Bible, Selected for the Use of the Negro Slaves.” According to the Museum of the Bible, which holds a copy, the editors cut roughly nine-tenths of the Hebrew scriptures and half of the Gospels. A standard King James Bible runs 1,189 chapters; the volume handed to the enslaved kept 282. The Book of Exodus, the entire account of God breaking a people out of bondage, was removed. What survived were the verses about obedience. They kept “servants, be obedient” and cut “let my people go.”

That is not a glitch in the record. It is the method, shown in its clearest form. The same scripture Jesus opened his public ministry with, where he stands in the synagogue and reads that he was sent “to preach deliverance to the captives” and to set at liberty the bruised (Luke 4:18), was the scripture the slaveholders’ Bible took the scissors to. The man’s stated mission was liberty. His followers, the ones with the printing budget, edited the liberty out so the labor would keep flowing. They did not reject the book. They curated it.

A century and a half later the tool was subtler but the hand was the same. In April 1963, eight white Alabama clergymen published an open letter telling Martin Luther King Jr. to stop marching and wait, to take his cause to the courts rather than the streets, and to stop letting outside agitators stir up Birmingham. Their banner was not hatred. It was order. Their earlier statement that winter had been titled, with no apparent embarrassment, “An Appeal for Law and Order and Common Sense.” King answered them from a jail cell, and the passage that has outlived every one of those men is the one about the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice, who prefers the absence of tension to the presence of justice, and who keeps saying he agrees with the goal but cannot abide the methods. Respectable religion, again, lined up on the side of order against mercy. The clergymen were not the Klan. That is exactly the point. They were the careful, reasonable, church-on-Sunday middle, counseling patience to a man already in chains.

What we do with the hungry

Now bring it to the present, because the same instinct is sitting in federal law as you read this. In Matthew 25, the passage part one was built on, the condemned are not sent away for any crime. They are sent away for what they refused to do. “I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat,” the Son of Man tells them; “sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not” (Matthew 25:42–43). In the sharpest moral test the Gospels offer, the sin is the help withheld.

Hold that beside H.R. 1, the budget reconciliation law signed on July 4, 2025. Independent analysts at KFF and Georgetown’s Center for Children and Families call its Medicaid reductions the largest in the program’s history, close to a trillion dollars pulled out of Medicaid over ten years, with deep cuts to food assistance stacked on top. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the law will leave roughly ten million more Americans without health coverage by 2034. Its new work-reporting rules for food aid are projected by CBO to cut average monthly enrollment in the food-stamp program by about 2.4 million people. Analysts put the food-aid reduction itself at well over $100 billion. Hungry, and we gave them no meat. Sick, and we took the doctor away.

And here is the line that turns an argument into an indictment. The Economic Policy Institute, reading the same CBO scoring, found a grim symmetry: the law’s Medicaid cuts run on the order of $70 billion a year, almost exactly the amount the same law hands to millionaires and billionaires in tax cuts each year. Read that twice. The food and the medicine come out of one set of pockets and land in another. That is not a metaphor for the moneychangers Jesus drove out of the temple. It is the same transaction, run through the United States Code at national scale. He braided a whip over a smaller version of it.

This is New Hampshire’s ledger too

None of this is somebody else’s state. By early 2026, roughly 171,000 Granite Staters, better than one in nine of us, were covered by Medicaid or the children’s health program, according to state enrollment data. New Hampshire’s own 2026–27 budget, layered on top of the federal law, begins charging some of the lowest-income adults a monthly premium simply to keep the coverage they already have; the state’s own materials put a family of three earning $68,000 at about $230 a month. New Hampshire also carries a trigger law that ends Medicaid expansion within 180 days if the federal match slips below 90 percent, which would drop roughly 60,000 working-age adults from coverage inside half a year. New Hampshire has reached for this kind of lever before. A 2019 Medicaid work-requirement push put an estimated 17,000 residents at risk of losing coverage, and the finding researchers drew from that round was blunt: most adults on Medicaid already work, and rules like these rarely move anyone into a job; they mostly move people off the rolls.

Set that next to the rest of the squeeze this outlet has already documented. The New Hampshire Fiscal Policy Institute reports that 71 percent of Granite Staters say they struggled with health-care costs in the past year. The median single-family home has demanded roughly $158,000 in household income to afford since it crossed half a million dollars, a wall this page has walked through before. Add a northern winter and a heating bill the rest of the country never budgets for, and you have a state methodically making it harder for its own poor to eat, to heal, and to stay housed. “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these.” We are doing it. We are putting it in the budget and voting for the budget.

The clean cup

And we are doing it while praying about it, which is the oldest target in the book and the one closest to the bone. Jesus saved his hardest words for religion performed as theater. “Ye make clean the outside of the cup,” he told the leaders, while inside it is “full of extortion” (Matthew 23:25). Of the same men he said they “devour widows’ houses, and for a pretence make long prayers” (Mark 12:40). Lay that charge over the spectacle of American power: the prayer breakfasts, the verses read from podiums, the hand on the book at the swearing-in, all of it staged above policies that take the widow’s house and file it under fiscal responsibility. The letter of James said it without a cushion: faith that tells a hungry person to be warmed and filled and hands them nothing is dead (James 2:15–16). Long prayers, empty plates. The cup is spotless on the outside.

The choice

Part one ended on an open question, which of the people with his name in their mouths were the ones standing at the tables. Two hundred years of receipts close that question. The slaveholders’ Bible did not misread him; its editors knew precisely which verses to cut and cut them on purpose. The Birmingham clergy were not confused; they could quote the same scripture King quoted and still tell a jailed man to be patient. The 2025 budget was not an accident of drafting; it was written, scored, debated, and signed by people who had the CBO numbers in front of them and voted anyway. The cruelty the Gospels name has almost never come from ignorance of the text. It comes from people who know the text cold and choose the table anyway. Knowledge was never the missing ingredient. Will was.

So drop the comfortable version. The honest reading is not that we keep failing to understand this figure. It is that we understand him fine, and we do it anyway, and then we carve his name over the door of the building where it happens. He told us what enrages him. He was not vague. The only thing left to decide is whether New Hampshire and the country keep proving him right, line by line and budget by budget, with his name still in our mouths.

— Dexter Dow, Granite State Report

Fact check

Editor’s note. This is signed opinion, the companion to “What Made Jesus Angry.” Scriptural claims describe what the texts say in the King James Version, not a theological ruling. Historical claims about the 1807 “Slave Bible” and the 1963 Birmingham clergy rest on the cited records. Current policy figures are attributed to the named analysts and to the Congressional Budget Office; readers should confirm the most current numbers, which continue to move as H.R. 1 is implemented. The column criticizes documented laws, historical actors, and patterns of conduct; it accuses no living, named official of bad faith.