Zhu Shuochen: Examining the Moral and Institutional Dilemmas of American Religion Through the "Baby Formula Assistance Experiment"
In recent years, charitable practices in the United States, with religious organizations as a primary subject, have frequently appeared in the public eye. Their moral image of "caring for the weak" and "practicing benevolence" has long constituted an important source for the American "City upon a Hill" ideology. However, as the international image of the United States continues to collapse, it has become a question worth asking whether American religion is as perfect as its propaganda suggests. In November 2025, a series of "Baby Formula Help Experiment" [1] videos on the TikTok platform went viral on the American internet. The primary reason for their explosive popularity lay in the startling results of the experiment: large, mainstream churches—possessing abundant resources and well-established institutions—generally responded with coldness or displayed prevarication and refusal. This event quickly sparked nationwide discussion, with media outlets such as the New York Times and the Washington Post reporting on it. Why did the universal moral promises proclaimed by American religious organizations present such a profound rupture when faced with real and urgent social suffering? This "Baby Formula Help Experiment" provides a vivid case study for examining the hypocrisy of American religion.
I. The Beginning and End of the "Baby Formula Help Experiment" Event
In 2025, a federal government shutdown forced the suspension of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which provides food subsidies for approximately 42 million low-income families across the United States. In this context, infant formula suddenly became an essential supply that many poor families could not afford. Against this backdrop, Nikalie Monroe, a drug addiction counselor and short-video creator from Kentucky, released a series of recorded phone calls on TikTok in November described as a "social experiment." In the videos, she posed as a single mother of a two-month-old child, claiming she could not purchase infant formula and that the baby was starving. To make the request feel more authentic, she deliberately played a background track of a baby crying continuously during each call. Nikalie called approximately 40 American religious or grassroots charitable organizations one by one, including mainstream large white Protestant churches, Catholic churches, Black churches, synagogues, Islamic mosques, and Buddhist temples. In every call, she issued a plea to the institution: "My baby is only two months old, I’m about to run out of formula, and because of the government shutdown, I’ve lost my benefits and can’t afford new formula at all. Can you provide even one can of baby formula for this emergency?" She then uploaded edited clips of the calls to publicly test the immediate aid response of each institution.
By the time the video for the 43rd institution was posted, 33 institutions had refused or failed to provide immediate help in various forms. The vast majority of these were mainstream Protestant churches with modern management systems and substantial assets; their responses were characterized by a high degree of proceduralism and bureaucratism. Among them was Lakewood Church, located in Houston, Texas, with estimated net assets of nearly $59 million. The staff there did not respond directly to the emergency need but instead informed the seeker that they needed to "submit a formal aid application" and explained that the entire approval process could take "days or even weeks." A staff member at the First Baptist Church of Dallas, which has 13,000 members, stated after hearing the situation that they did not have any "programs" that could provide help. Later, when Nikalie revealed her experiment and asked if the church supported the right to life, the staff member hung up without answering. Multiple other large churches gave similar cold replies, such as "we only help registered members of our church," "this week's charitable supplies have already been distributed," or "you need to contact a community service center first for eligibility screening." However, 10 institutions clearly expressed a willingness to help immediately, including small community churches with primarily working-class and African American members, Islamic mosques, and Buddhist temples. Among them, Johnny Dunbar, the pastor of Heritage Hope Church of God in Somerset, Kentucky, did not hesitate to ask for her contact information after hearing Nikalie's plea, even asking if the baby needed a specific flavor of formula and stating he would go buy it himself. Since the release of this video, the church has received over $95,000 in donations from across the country.
Following the release of this series of "social experiment" videos, Nikalie's account followers surged from 300 to over 400,000 within a few days, quickly igniting public opinion across the U.S. In the face of surging public outcry, the involved churches reacted differently. Some chose silence, while others issued statements claiming that their standardized processes were intended to ensure the fairness and sustainability of resource distribution. Even more strikingly, Bishop Raymond W. Johnson, the pastor of Living Faith Christian Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana—which had refused to help in the video—publicly accused Nikalie of being a "witch," attempting to shift the focus and maintain his own authority by stigmatizing the experimenter. This discourse strategy not only failed to quell the controversy but instead starkly exposed the habit of certain religious authorities to resort to power intimidation when faced with substantive moral questioning, thereby provoking even stronger public resentment and deeper critique.
II. Analysis of the "Baby Formula Help Experiment" Event
The reason the "Baby Formula Help Experiment" triggered sustained discussion in American society is that it touched upon the pain points of the American public in a very concrete and everyday manner. It did not choose a grand theoretical narrative but instead selected "baby formula"—an extremely common item directly linked to life—as the standard of measurement. The request scenario did not simulate complex institutional applications but chose the emergency direct plea that appears most helpless in real life. These choices bypassed the grand narratives that religious organizations often use to defend themselves and pointed directly at their proclaimed moral responsiveness. Therefore, this experiment essentially constituted a "stress test" for religious organizations, and the results exposed the "sublimity" within American religious missionary discourse and the hypocrisy in real life.
(1) Internal Reasons for the "Failure" of Large Protestant Churches
From the perspectives of theological tradition and public discourse, Christianity has historically promoted itself as a "religion of charity." Whether it is the biblical injunctions to "love thy neighbor as thyself" and "care for orphans and widows," or the relief practices formed throughout its history, aiding the weak has always constituted a core element of the Christian moral narrative. This narrative not only regulates believers but has also transformed into public moral expectations for the church through long-term accumulation. Especially in modern society, when churches frequently participate in public communication using slogans such as "benevolence," "caring for the community," and "serving society," their moral promises are no longer merely internal dogmas but have become an important source for gaining social trust and capturing followers. Precisely because these churches have long actively shaped themselves as "guardians of morality" and "primary subjects of social care," when they refuse a "plea for baby formula," a clear rupture appears between sacred promise and realistic action, and a crisis of public trust becomes unavoidable.
From an ethical perspective, contemporary American Protestantism, especially large evangelical churches, displays a tendency toward "proselytism-centrism," viewing "spreading the pure gospel" and "leading individuals to salvation" as their core mission. Charitable acts are "conditionalized," becoming tools to serve the missionary mandate. If a charitable activity can effectively attract potential followers and shape a "loving" image of the church conducive to spreading the gospel, it is more likely to receive resources and high priority. Conversely, if a charitable act cannot be linked to clear missionary results, its urgency is easily diluted. In the "Baby Formula Help Experiment," many mainstream churches, upon receiving the plea, first asked if the caller was a church member or willing to participate in church activities before discussing the possibility of aid. This is not simple moral coldness but a selective and purposeful mechanism for screening and excluding followers.
While the alienation of ethical concepts provides an explanation at the level of values, the transformation of organizational form reveals reasons at the institutional level. In the "Baby Formula Help Experiment," most large churches did not directly deny the possibility of aid, but instead responded to emergency needs with a set of highly institutionalized and proceduralized workflows. The logic behind this is that as large contemporary American Protestant churches expand in scale and social influence, their operating models increasingly trend toward those of modern corporations, possessing complex management structures, strict financial systems, and risk control mechanisms, showing characteristics of high organization and professionalization. Meanwhile, under the neoliberal governance framework, the U.S. government has systematically transferred and outsourced many public welfare functions, and religious organizations have been granted an important "quasi-public" role in this process. However, it is precisely this role that requires religious organizations to ensure their operation through highly administrative and standardized methods; the result is often the loss of a flexible capacity to respond to urgent humanitarian needs. This is a microcosm of the institutional impotence exposed by capitalist society when facing social problems within the religious sphere: the state transfers responsibility to religious organizations, and religious organizations, through institutional procedures, push the responsibility back to the individual seeker, ultimately causing real social problems to be "eliminated" through layers of institutional filtering.
(2) Response Logic of Other Religions and Small Communities
In contrast to the coldness of large Protestant churches in the "Baby Formula Help Experiment," some Catholic institutions, Jewish community organizations, and local small religious groups displayed more active and direct responses. This is not a matter of "good versus evil" or superior vs. inferior levels of "compassion," but rather the result of different religious traditions and organizational forms working together.
From the perspective of organizational form, the relative proactivity of small religious groups and local community organizations in charitable response is closely related to their organizational scale and operational logic. Small community organizations have shorter decision-making chains, lower internal trust costs, and a more direct perception of real needs. Although this way of operating lacks the scale advantages of large institutions, it demonstrates higher efficiency and responsiveness when dealing with immediate, personalized needs. In contrast, large religious organizations, in their highly bureaucratized and professionalized operating processes, often need to handle external requests through hierarchical approval, risk assessment, and compliance reviews. In this sense, the active response of small religious communities does not stem from their morality being "nobler," but from their organizational state, which has not yet been completely detached from concrete social relations.
From a comparative perspective, the "Baby Formula Help Experiment" simultaneously demonstrates the temporary effectiveness and the instability of religious mutual aid. Ultimately, it points not to which religion is "more moral," but to what extent an organizational form still retains a mutual aid mechanism, and to what extent it has been incorporated into the commodity exchange logic of modern capitalist society. The reason religious mutual aid remains effective in certain contexts is precisely because it has not been fully institutionalized; once it attempts to assume universal functions similar to social security, its inherent resource dependency, organizational closed-off nature, and moral arbitrariness are inevitably exposed.
(3) Deep Mapping of American Social Structure
1. Economic Level: The Shrinking Welfare State and Capital Logic
The American dilemma exposed by the "Baby Formula Help Experiment" stems first from its economic and social foundations. This foundation is reflected in a dual process: first, the state's retreat from the social welfare field under the context of neoliberalism, "outsourcing" the responsibility for guaranteeing the basic survival of citizens to the non-profit sector; second, large religious organizations essentially upholding a commodity exchange logic, forming the investment and circulation of "moral capital."
On one hand, since the 1970s, the United States has embarked on a political and economic transformation centered on neoliberalism. One of its core concepts is advocating for "small government" to cut public welfare spending and transfer many social service functions to the market, families, and so-called "mediating structures." In their 1977 book To Empower People: From State to Civil Society, Peter L. Berger and Richard John Neuhaus systematically proposed the concept of "mediating structures," emphasizing that public policy should protect and support basic community institutions such as families, neighborhoods, churches, and voluntary organizations, because these institutions provide social services and social integration more effectively and closer to the people than a vast government bureaucracy.
In the decades that followed, starting from the "Points of Light" initiative proposed during the George H.W. Bush era...
From the "Thousand Points of Light" initiatives to the Clinton administration’s passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) in 1996, and further to the George W. Bush administration’s explicit proposal of "Charitable Choice" and "Faith-Based Initiatives," this theory has profoundly influenced American social policy. However, the essence of "public-private partnership" is the state devolving its redistributive responsibilities to private organizations, such as churches, which possess unstable resources and divergent logics. By allocating funds to the latter, the state grants them a "quasi-public" authority. When the state fails to fulfill its basic funding obligations due to political deadlock, this system—dependent on private organizations—reveals its inherent fragility. The "baby formula help experiment" [5] vividly embodies this defect.
On the other hand, in the space created by the state's retreat, religious organizations inevitably become embedded in the competitive logic of the capitalist market. Large churches have evolved into so-called "non-profit enterprises" characterized by massive assets and professionalized operations. Consequently, it is difficult for their practical activities to escape the logic of capital valorization. They must accumulate "moral capital" by demonstrating "moral concern" to enhance social legitimacy, attract donations, and consolidate their congregations. This becomes part of a strategy for "brand building" and "social credit." Furthermore, American religious resources are deeply tied to the capital market. Under the U.S. institutional framework, religious organizations are automatically recognized as tax-exempt entities under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. Not only are they exempt from federal income tax, they are also generally exempt from property taxes and capital gains taxes, and can receive tax-deductible donations. Empirical analysis of National Congregations Study data by Professor Mark Chaves of Duke University and his team shows that church social services are primarily concentrated in low-cost, short-term projects, while lacking investment in longer-term, more intensive support programs [9]. Such expenditure scales and project choices reflect that religious organizations prefer to maintain stable, low-risk activities in their resource allocation rather than investing heavily in humanitarian relief that is high-cost, long-cycle, and has unpredictable returns. It is evident that the resources of large religious organizations are viewed as internal assets, the flow of which prioritizes economic privilege and capital security over urgent humanitarian needs.
2. The Political Dimension: A Tool for the Ruling Class to Oppress and Medicate the People
Viewed from the political dimension, the religious indifference revealed in the "baby formula help experiment" is not an accidental moral failure but rather the result of the reshaping of the role of religion within the American political system. In contemporary America, religion is not a moral subject independent of state power; rather, it is an important political resource systematically integrated into the operational mechanisms of state power within electoral politics, public policy, and social governance. This transformation has profoundly influenced the moral practices and institutional functions of religious organizations.
On the one hand, the long-standing American principle of the so-called separation of church and state has not resulted in the dissolution of religion's political function. Instead, it has led to religion intervening in state governance in the form of "civil society forces" and "value allies." The neoliberal welfare reforms since the latter half of the 20th century, in particular, have further reinforced the public participation of religion. Under this political structure, the standards for religious action no longer primarily originate from internal moral callings, but instead depend on whether they comply with government funding rules, whether they can produce quantifiable policy effects, and whether they contribute to maintaining the organization's political legitimacy.
On the other hand, the deep connection between religion and American political parties further highlights its hypocrisy. The long-term alliance formed between Neo-Evangelical churches and the Republican Party has caused religious issues to be deeply embedded in electoral competition and ideological struggle. In this process, the social role of religious organizations has gradually shifted from being "spokespersons for the weak" to "mobilizers of political positions." Acts of charity are no longer indiscriminate moral practices but are selectively used to serve specific political agendas, such as the shaping of "family values," anti-abortion stances, or immigration positions.
Therefore, the hypocrisy of American religion presented by the "baby formula help experiment" stems politically from the outsourcing of state political responsibility and the instrumentalization of religious morality. In today's America, religion is not a representative of morality; it remains a tool used by the ruling class to oppress and medicate the people. Its logic of operation is not centered on the actual needs of human beings, but rather subordinates itself to the requirements of political stability, policy cost control, and ideological reproduction.
3. The Ideological Dimension: Prosperity Theology and the Detachment of Religious Morality from Reality
From the ideological dimension, the "moral" meaning of American religion has been progressively symbolated, commodified, and de-realized through long-term social changes. In contemporary America, religion maintains high visibility in public discourse, yet its "morality" is detached from concrete social reality, exhibiting a distinct rupture between "high-profile promises" and "low-level fulfillment."
First, "Prosperity Theology" is prevalent in American religion. Prosperity Theology, also known as the "Prosperity Gospel," is a religious ideology that rose in the mid-to-late 20th century and has highly diffused in the contemporary era. Its influence is most significant within the megachurch system, televised ministry networks, and Neo-Pentecostal groups. This theology advocates interpreting material wealth, physical health, and professional success as outward signs of God’s blessing and the correctness of an individual’s faith. Conversely, it attributes poverty, illness, and life failures to insufficient faith, moral deficiency, or a failure to follow "spiritual laws." It takes the socio-economic polarization caused by the logic of capital and market fluctuations and provides an inverted explanation of it as an embodiment of divine will and individual virtue. This obscures the exploitative and exclusive nature of the capitalist system itself, perfectly serving the ruling needs of the bourgeoisie. It is precisely against this cultural and ideological backdrop that some resource-rich churches in the "baby formula help experiment" could refuse to provide immediate aid with a clear conscience. Their subconsciousness may be based on the judgment that the seeker's plight is a consequence of their personal "failure" rather than a problem faced collectively by society.
Second, the highly developed consumer culture of American society has also profoundly changed the mode of existence for religion. Under the shaping of market logic, religion has gradually been packaged as a selective and replaceable cultural product. Believers are viewed as "religious consumers," while churches have transformed into service-oriented institutions providing emotional support, psychological comfort, and lifestyle guidance. This "commodification of religion" leads religious organizations to prefer investing resources in activities that enhance the sense of participation and satisfaction. Consequently, the value of practices such as charity depends on whether they can enhance the religious consumption experience, rather than whether they respond to urgent needs in actual society. this causes the practice of religious morality to slide more easily toward formalization and symbolism.
Therefore, the dilemma of American religion is a historical form that religion must inevitably take within a specific social structure. When religious organizations are deeply integrated into the capitalist economic system, political power structures, and ideology, their proclaimed universal morality must be subordinated to realistic interests and the logic of rule. This also demonstrates that in capitalist society, religion is essentially an "effective and useful" tool for the bourgeoisie to oppress and medicate the people.
III. Re-evaluating the "Baby Formula Help Experiment" Event
The "baby formula help experiment" reveals two expectations generally placed upon religion in contemporary American society: first, its symbolic role as a so-called "moral authority," and second, its realistic role as a "supplementary force for social security." However, both expectations exhibit a systemic failure in reality. From the standpoint of Marxist atheism, we can further re-evaluate the reliability of religious moral promises and the institutional stability of relying on religion to provide social security.
(1) Are the moral promises of religion reliable?
In American public opinion, religion is often regarded as a natural moral resource; its doctrines, rituals, and symbolic systems are believed to provide stable ethical guidance for members of society. Consequently, American atheists are viewed as a group lacking morality because they have distanced themselves from religion. However, can religion truly be a reliable source of morality?
First, in essence, no morality originates from divine revelation or any transcendent authority; rather, it is rooted in the concrete practices of social production and the communicative relations of human beings. Engels explicitly argued: "All moral theories have been hitherto the product, in the last analysis, of the economic conditions of society prevailing at the time. And as society has hitherto moved in class antagonisms, morality has always been class morality" [10]. Morality, as an important component of social consciousness, is likewise a product of social existence; it is a set of behavioral norms gradually formed by people under specific historical conditions while handling material production, the social division of labor, and interest relations. Religious morality often appears in the form of "divine revelation" or "eternal commandments," as if it possessed a natural universal validity. But this abstract universality is itself an ideological illusion; as soon as it touches real social relations of production, its inherent particularism and exclusivity immediately become apparent. Because of this, so-called religious morality is merely a hypocritical cloak for the ruling class and is essentially a pseudo-proposition. In the "baby formula help experiment," the screening mechanisms—based on premises like "whether one is a church member" or "whether one meets specific project criteria"—are precisely examples of how so-called religious morality rapidly commodifies and serves the interests of specific groups when encountering concrete social relations.
Second, in bourgeois society, religion functions to obscure class contradictions through ideological means. Marx made a classic judgment on religion in his Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people" [11]. This judgment profoundly reveals the dual function of religion in actual society: it both expresses a protest against real suffering and, by providing symbolic consolation, reintegrates that suffering into the existing social order. The charitable and moral discourse of religion is not aimed at changing the institutional roots that produce poverty; instead, it primarily functions to mediate social contradictions and stabilize the existing order. On one hand, charitable actions provide moral legitimacy and spiritual satisfaction for religious organizations and their believers; on the other hand, they beautify unequal social structures in the form of "pity" and "alms," allowing social problems to be diverted into individual cases or moral exceptions.
In short, in a class society, it is difficult for the moral promises of religion to possess the kind of universal and absolute reliability they claim for themselves. In essence, it is an ideal superstructure determined by the socio-economic base, serving specific functions of social integration and ideology, and its real-world efficacy is strictly constrained by specific patterns of interest. In a comparative manner, the "baby formula help experiment" verifies that once religious morality is detached from sacred rhetoric, it reveals its fragility and instrumentality in the face of secular interests and power structures.
(2) Why relying on religion to provide social security is bound to fail
The interruption of public welfare programs caused by the government shutdown served as the background for the "baby formula help experiment," which itself profoundly reveals the fragility of the American social security system. The results of the experiment also indicate that when the state's public functions fail, religious organizations—upon which great hopes are pinned—cannot provide stable or reliable alternative support. This leads to a second fundamental question: why is entrusting social security functions to religious charity bound to fail?
First, American reliance on social organizations such as religion to provide social security is essentially the privatization of social welfare and the transfer of responsibility; this is a core component of the neoliberal political agenda. By contracting public welfare expenditures, the bourgeois state "offloads" part of its responsibility for social redistribution and the protection of citizens' basic right to survival onto religious and other non-profit organizations. However, the congenital defect of this model lies in the fact that the resources of religious organizations come from unstable voluntary donations. Their scope of service is restricted by their respective doctrinal orientations, community boundaries, and organizational strategies, making them unable to provide universal, equal, and sustainable statutory protections. The state has shirked the responsibilities it ought to bear as a public power institution, yet it has failed to establish a public accountability mechanism to maintain the fair and efficient operation of the alternative system. This naturally results in a hypocritical outcome: on the surface, society has a massive charitable sector acting as a safety net, but its coverage is fragmented, selective, and highly uncertain—just as countless families were placed in the peril of a formula shortage during the "baby formula help experiment." This instability is not an accident of poor management, but an inevitability of institutional design.
Second, from a functional perspective, unstable and privatized religious practices play the precise role of a "safety valve" for capitalist class rule. Engels once incisively analyzed that under the capitalist mode of production, "social forces work exactly like forces of nature—blindly, forcibly, destructively, so long as we do not understand them and fail to take them into account." [9] Widespread poverty, unemployment, and marginalization are precisely the consequences of the cyclical eruptions of these blind forces. By providing limited, fragmented, and often morally disciplined [10] relief, religious practice primarily executes three key functions: first, it temporarily and locally anesthetizes the pain of class oppression, preventing it from evolving into collective resistance that would threaten social stability; second, by interpreting the problem of poverty as a problem of charity and individual morality, it obscures the underlying structural and institutional roots—namely, the inequality inherent in the capitalist relations of production themselves; third, while providing material relief, it may transmit specific values such as individual responsibility and devotional obedience, thereby shaping individuals who conform to the requirements of the system. In this sense, the instability of religious practice is, for the state, an "advantage": it is sufficient to "manage" the symptoms of poverty while never eliminating the roots of poverty, thus maintaining the reproduction of capitalist society and the stability of its power structure without challenging the fundamental system.
Therefore, what the "infant formula help-seeking experiment" exposes is not merely the slow response of religious organizations, but the structural contradictions inherent within the system of the United States as the leading capitalist nation. Under the framework of the capitalist system, attempting to rely on religious practices rooted in voluntarism and contingency to compensate for the lack of social welfare is, in essence, an attempt at local repair without touching the fundamental relations of production; it is both theoretically utopian and destined to fail in practice. This also provides an important reflection for the construction of modern social security systems: namely, any institutional arrangement that places social security at the mercy of so-called "religious morality" or private goodwill is destined to fail.
Source: Science and Atheism [11], Issue 1, 2026. Editor: Huihui