America was birthed by people seeking liberty, i.e., “Let me alone,” but does it seem to you that today citizens more often seek security, i.e., “Take care of me”?
Hi, I’m Rex Rogers and this is episode #244 of Discerning What Is Best, a podcast applying unchanging biblical principles in a rapidly changing world, and a Christian worldview to current issues and everyday life.
Governments often try to respond to problems that are real and harmful, but whose root causes lie largely in individual choices, moral formation, habits, family structure, or culture rather than in policy design.
Here are some examples of prominent personal and social problems government ultimately cannot “solve”—
- Substance Abuse & Addiction
Government gives us regulation, criminalization, treatment funding. But government falls short because addiction involves personal decisions, trauma, habits, and moral agency.
- Family Breakdown (Divorce, Absent Fathers, Instability)
Government social “solutions” include welfare programs, child support enforcement, marriage incentives. But government programs fall short because stable families depend on commitment, fidelity, and self-sacrifice.
- Crime
Government attempts to stop crime include policing, sentencing reform, criminal justice system, rehabilitation programs. But these programs typically fall short because, while laws and police restrain behavior, they cannot make people virtuous or law-abiding at heart.
- Poverty
Government attempts to improve people’s economic lives include income transfers, unemployment and housing programs, food assistance. But such programs fall short due to people’s repeated choices—dropping out, chronic dependency, refusing work. Government might temporarily relieve immediate need, but it cannot instill work ethic, personal responsibility, discipline, initiative, or long-term planning.
- Educational Failure
Government attempts include massive funding increases, standardized testing, curriculum reform, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. But government has fallen short because learning requires effort, parental involvement, and self-control, none of which government can create or even teach.
- Mental Health
Government attempts to improve mental health by expanded counseling, medication access, awareness campaigns. But such programs typically fall short because despair often involves worldview and moral direction. Government cannot give meaning, purpose, or hope.
- Sexual Behavior Consequences
Government is all over this one with innumerable programs, especially via public education, in which societal sex challenges are addressed through sex education, contraception access, abortion policy. But government always fails in this because policy cannot remove moral causality or eliminate responsibility and consequences.
- Obesity & Lifestyle
From time to time, government via both political parties works hard on national fitness by offering dietary guidelines, bans, public health campaigns. But government cannot make people eat well or exercise.
- Debt and Finances
Government attempts include regulation, bailouts, financial education. But government even falls short on finances because overspending and risk-taking are personal habits. Government can help to prevent fraud but cannot enforce self-control or wisdom.
10. Moral and Civic Decline
Finally, government makes a few attempts to address moral decline via civics education, public messaging, regulation of speech or behavior. But government falls short because virtue cannot be legislated.
Government can restrain evil, relieve suffering, protect the vulnerable like children, and set conditions for flourishing, but it cannot replace personal responsibility, moral formation and virtue, family, faith, or culture. Or to put it more sharply: the state is good at managing systems; it is bad at changing hearts.
Government under FDR began expanding to meet personal and social needs in response to the Great Depression, followed by the demands of WWII. After the war, there was some reduction in central government, but not much, and then another wave of expansion began under LBJ’s “Great Society” in the 1960s.
Despite President Bill Clinton’s 1996 State of the Union comment, “the era of big government is over,” big government never really ended. No matter the political party in power, all levels of American government have continued to expand, and another wave of expansive government overreach took place in response to COVID-19 during the Biden Administration.
This trend toward ever bigger government responded to a huge cultural shift wherein Americans expressed a desire for government intervention. Government, not the family, not the church nor pastor, not the local community, emerged as the source of hope and progress.
And this trend toward trusting government to solve our problems followed another powerful cultural shift in which issues once understood as matters of character, morality, or choice were “medicalized” and morphed into mental-health categories. Behaviors once understood in moral terms (virtue vs. vice, self-control vs. indulgence, responsibility vs. irresponsibility) began to be described as diagnosable conditions or disorders. Moral agency was gradually replaced with therapeutic explanation, reducing accountability, leaving us with “if everything is a condition, nothing is a choice.”
Medicalization of attitudes and behaviors reframes culpability as pathology rather than decision. Bad choices become symptoms, not actions requiring repentance, discipline, or reform. Consequences are softened or removed, weakening incentive to change. “Experts” replace moral authorities, i.e., pastors, parents, elders. Government and institutions intervene through counseling mandates or pharmaceutical treatment.
Moral language: sin, vice, temptation, repentance, discipline, has given way to therapeutic language: condition, disorder, coping, management, triggers.
Therapeutic language is value-neutral, avoiding judgment. Explanation becomes justification. Trauma, upbringing, or neurochemistry are treated as determinative, not influential. Agency is minimized in favor of external causes. Therapeutic language explains behavior without evaluating it, and it often redefines wrongdoing as identity, i.e., “to explain everything is to excuse everything.”
Behavior is regulated indirectly through diagnosis rather than law. These trends have enlarged bureaucratic power, encouraged dependence on professionals, and undermined family and community correction.
My problems or your problems, my poor choices or your poor choices are not my fault or responsibility or your fault or responsibility but a nebulous “our” fault and thus no one’s responsibility. No longer is it “the devil made me do it” but “society made me do it.”
Modern culture increasingly treats sin as sickness, vice as diagnosis, and responsibility as pathology. We trade moral clarity and personal agency for therapeutic explanation and bureaucratic control, which is to say, “Big government will save us.” This is one source of American young people’s current infatuation with so-called democratic socialism.
In his influential 1976 book, How Should We Then Live?, Dr. Francis A. Schaeffer said of American culture: “As the more Christian-dominated consensus weakened, the majority of people adopted two impoverished values: personal peace and affluence. Personal peace means just to be left alone…wanting to have my personal life pattern undisturbed in my lifetime, regardless of what the result will be in the lifetimes of my children and grandchildren. Affluence means an overwhelming and ever-increasing prosperity…a success judged by an ever-higher level of material abundance.”
A Christian worldview reminds us, humans are free, rational, morally responsible agents. Scripture says, “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits,
who forgives all your iniquity, who heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit, who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy, who satisfies you with good so that your youth is renewed like the eagle's” (Ps. 103:2-5).
Government cannot do any of this.
Well, we’ll see you again soon. This podcast is about Discerning What Is Best.
If you find this thought-provoking and helpful, follow us on your favorite podcast platform. For more Christian commentary, see my website, r-e-x-m as in Martin, that’s rexmrogers.com, or check my YouTube channel @DrRexRogers.
And remember, it is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm.
© Rex M. Rogers – All Rights Reserved, 2026
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