Given the centrality of parents and community rather than the state in the upbringing of children, one can also question the common emphasis in recent years on specifically child poverty. This derives from a questionable focus on equality of opportunity, which the state is supposed to try to secure.
The main problem with this objective is that it's not radical enough. It suggests that what we mainly need is the same fair chances in the game of life. That's fine, but what if you fail?
The Christian attitude stands against this by holding that all people matter equally in the community. This entails that all matter equally in the economy too. We just as much need people to sweep the floors and man the tills as we do to be professors and business managers. All these people need to be treated in terms of dignity of labour. The Christian priority cannot therefore be equality of opportunity.
It is not even equality of outcome, except in terms of equality of human flourishing.
There is never going to be absolute equality: even Marx denounced such a goal as a liberal delusion. Instead, we should all be flourishing and contributing and receiving rewards in terms of our ability, capacity and virtue.
The weight of Christian tradition over centuries supports that kind of view. It sounds somewhat conservative, but in reality it is radical, because when you have no notion of justifiable inequality then you get unjustifiable inequality. That leads to the rule of the talentless, the virtue-less, the shallow, the ruthless, the swaggeringly rich and ultimately the criminal. And if one thing characterises the world today, it is the effective criminalisation of both business and politics.
Focusing on child poverty might just about rescue a few individuals from desperate circumstances, but it won't stop those circumstances arising for future children. Doing that requires a holistic approach in which we both challenge and assist whole families and whole communities. It's a matter of Christian care for all children, along with their often unfortunate parents, not plucking a few out of poverty.
The current fashion for correcting an overall dire situation through public education and child-targeted policies is unlikely to get very far. At the moment we have the wrong form of paternalism; it's all top-down, impersonal economic and technical tinkering. We need instead the right kind of patrician legacy, which promotes the growth of virtue and encourages a debate about what the good life is. Poverty alone isn't the problem. Simply giving more money to the poor – even if this is indeed often required – won't resolve the issues facing our communities. For we need to face the fact that people's capacity to endure and survive poverty has declined as part of a general "crisis of agency" which ensures that people are unable to organise in the face of distress in the way they did in the past. This is because – as the great Catholic social thinker Ivan Illich argued – people increasingly see themselves as objective units in a system and no longer genuinely as "subjects" at all.
We can't deal with the children without dealing with the parents. The connections between child and parent, family and the community are integral to any serious approach to tackling poverty. The Christian view of society holds these relationships central to our vision, and our solutions.
If you realise that the church itself provides a way for the social dimension to subsume and transcend politics and economics, that implies a much more collaborative approach to the whole issue of poverty. Above all it means, as far as the church is concerned, a shift in direction away from the temple legacy of long reports telling the government what to do and being admired by the liberal press while the laity is secretly and wisely sceptical. We need a move instead to a much greater and more genuine radicalism in which the church gets involved in all kinds of processes of welfare, medicine, banking, education, business, and more. The social dimension needs again to be the defining consideration of our common life.