Charity is under attack from all sides. Scrooge and his successors seek to replace charity in the form of voluntary or faith-based giving with public welfare or rights-based claims on the state.
Whether out of embarrassment at the religious roots of their secular profession or out of a belief that justice supersedes charity, social workers are all too willing to give short shrift to the non-professional charitable efforts of faithful Christians.
Others attack the wastefulness of charitable organizations, the excessive bureaucracy, the high proportion of income spent on raising more income and on the salaries of top executives, and the relatively small proportion that many believe—notwithstanding assurances to the contrary—goes to the intended beneficiaries.
Faith-based charitable organizations like Catholic Charities also come under fire for losing their religious identity and becoming arms of a secular government from which it receives a large majority of its funds and to whose programs, terms, and priorities it is bound.
Charity, however, has a special importance for Christians, as Pope Benedict teaches in his first encyclical, Deus caritas est–God is love. Not only is charity (caritas, love) the very definition of God. Charity, the selfless self-giving for God’s sake and for the true benefit of the other, was from the Church’s beginnings both a duty of every individual Christian (stated in no uncertain terms in the parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25) and also an organized, corporate activity of the Church.
There can then be no retreat from the Church’s commitment to charity. Rather, there is a particular obligation to ensure that charitable effort is well directed and actually benefits those it is intended to help. The proper response to charity’s problems cannot be personal stinginess or random, unorganized handouts. In this regard, the problem is not so much that donations get directed to non-charitable persons or siphoned off at excessive rates for administrative costs, as it is that resources that do go to the poor and downtrodden often fail actually to help.
Now Robert D. Lupton, a pastor and urban community development leader in Atlanta, has written a book, Toxic Charity, that challenges us to examine the harm done by charity that is casual, thoughtless, and aimed primarily to make the giver feel good. Its title notwithstanding, this book is not against charity or for stinginess in personal giving. Its author has four decades’ experience of faith-based charitable work to his credit and draws on this experience as well as a host of anecdotes and research.
There is no suggestion that governmental forms of social welfare are less toxic than faith-based, voluntary programs. They are simply not the subject of this book. Rather, with multiple and compelling examples, from weeklong ‘missions’ of church youth groups to poor countries through inner-city charitable initiatives to the enormous Kroc grant to the Salvation Army, Lupton argues that this work needs to be rethought and reoriented.
As Brooks (2007) has shown, giving by religious Americans, both to church-based charities and secular agencies like the Red Cross, is extraordinarily generous by any measure, in time, treasure, and talent, compared with that of secular Americans and citizens of other affluent countries. Lupton does not disparage these efforts or their (mostly) good intentions, but argues that most of this activity does more harm than good. Given the author’s own commitment and credentials in the field, anyone engaged in this work will want to pay attention to his critique.
In some ways, Lupton echoes those 19th-century critics of ‘sentimental charity,’ who sought to replace random handouts with organized charity based on a relationship between giver and recipient that offered ‘not alms, but a friend’ (the motto of the Charity Organization Societies). Those charity reform efforts, which gave rise to the profession of social work, are widely disparaged today, not least by professional social workers. But the problem of how to help those who need help, whether through government programs or private charity, in ways that do not shame, demoralize, sap initiative, and create dependency remains, as Lupton shows, as big a challenge today as ever.
Lupton’s approach, that of asset-based community development, aims to empower and partner with those helped, recognizing and engaging their capacity to contribute to their community with their own resources, knowledge, and wisdom. Instead of flying in with a team of eager young missioners to build a well for a poor village whose women have to carry water long distances on their heads—and coming back every year to fix ‘their’ well—Lupton argues for an approach that facilitates engaging the skills and energy of the local people to fund, build, and manage their own well.
It is not a matter of being stingy rather than generous, but of helping in ways that truly help, without the enervating, dependency-creating disempowerment of much current charity (public and private) in practice. Lupton’s argument is not against charity as such, but for charity in its true Christian sense of willing the good of the other as other. This implies, Lupton shows, a consistent focus on results rather than intentions, on the good of those helped rather than the supposed benefits to the giver (e.g., the ‘life-changing experience’ of young participants in expensive mission junkets or the warm feelings of congregations that want to help by donating to a food pantry). In this view, the virtue of charity cannot stand alone. It requires the exercise of other virtues like justice and prudence, and full engagement of the head as well as the heart.
This book is a highly readable appeal to all those who, out of Christian charity, seek to help those who are poor and downtrodden, an appeal first and at least to do no harm. It challenges us to ask what truly helps and to look critically and charitably both at what we do—are we reinforcing dependence and sapping initiative in the name of helping?—and at what we fail to do to build the capacity of individuals, families, and communities. Since its origins in the Charity Organization Societies, social work has learned much and has much to teach about empowerment-, partnership-, or asset-based policy and practice. These approaches look to engaging people who have typically been passive recipients of helping efforts, instead to engage them in resolving problems and meeting needs, to see them as active contributors rather than passive recipients. It is the difference between seeing youth in poor communities as problems and seeing them as assets and contributors to their community; between organizing a food pantry in which all the active roles are played by outside donors and helping those in need to organize, fund, and operate their own food co-op.
This book calls us, not to despise organized charity, but to bring our best knowledge and wisdom to bear in correcting its toxic tendencies and making it fruitful for all those involved, not least those it is meant to help.
Brooks, A.C. (2007). Who really cares: The surprising truth about compassionate conservatism. New York: Basic Books.
Lupton, R.D. (2011). Toxic Charity: How Churches and Charities Hurt Those They Help (and How to Reverse It). New York: Harper One.
I think I can understand easily how professional social workers might be interested in theories about how to re-organize organized charity. I didn’t know that it was nineteenth-century critics of “sentimental charity” that “gave rise to the profession of social work”. That’s very interesting, and it explains a lot.
But I’ve never agreed with the notion that we should hesitate to be charitable because of how our charity might be received and used by its beneficiary. And I still vote for the Samaritan’s methods, though it would be called “toxic” by the professionals. They would have us resist the impulse to give a ten-dollar bill to the homeless man with the crudely painted sign because “he’ll just spend it on drugs” or “it will make him dependent.” That is arrogance based on a presumption of superiority, the more-or-less unacknowledged belief that the giver is somehow better than the receiver. It’s the “whig mentality” that is truly toxic: it deprives the homeless man, but worse, it damages the soul of the would-be giver.
I do write checks to organized charities–but only to those whose books are open for all to see, who do not have high-salaried executives or large budgets for “operating costs,” namely, the Church. And it’s partly because of that teaching Church that I know how I should respond to the road kill–as the Samaritan did, anonymously, spontaneously, and without worrying about social theories or what the professionals might think is the best “way”.
In charity as in social policy, the road to hell is often paved with good intentions. Lupton gives many examples of how well-meaning aid and charitable efforts drive local enterprise out of business, reduce whole nations and communities to dependency, foster dishonest relationships, erode recipients’ work ethic, and shame and humiliate those they are meant to help. These are criticisms often made of government programs and Lupton shows they are no less a concern with the organized charity of the churches. If we truly will the good of the other as other (the core meaning of charity), we will be concerned first and above all to do no harm.
Individual works of mercy, as in spontaneous helping of a person in trouble, is not the subject of Lupton’s book. Sadly, as I read recently in the musings of a Baptist minister who rejected charity at more than individual level, the Good Samaritan story is sometimes used to argue against all organized attempts to help the poor and downtrodden. My point was that such immediate and spontaneous helping is not–and from the beginnings of the Church was never understood to be–a substitute for the intelligently organized charitable activity of the corporate Church itself. And if the Church is to be involved in organized charity, let it be in ways that actually do good.
You credit me with more thought or authority on this subject than I am due. I am concerned neither with efficiency, as you kindly suggest I am, nor with effectiveness, as you say you are. I’m just an ordinary person, not a professional social worker, still less a professional social theorist. And so I give whatever I can to whoever asks for it. I don’t worry about whether it makes them dependent, or how they’ll spend it. That’s not my responsibility, but theirs.
@Dena. As I think about this (which I do often), it strikes me that we are addressing different concerns–I didn’t mean my piece as a direct response to yours, though it was stimulated by it, for which much thanks.
Your concern, as I see it, is with efficiency, mine with effectiveness. Both are needed, but the most efficiently run, administratively lean, transparent charity with the lowest salaries and highest percent of income going directly to programs may still do more harm than good–and more harm than an inefficient charity. As Lenin put it from his anti-religious perspective, the one thing worse than a dishonest priest is an honest priest, i.e., from his perspective, one who does bad things well. Or as Dalrymple says, the Italian state is better than the British and leaves society in better cultural shape, precisely because it is corrupt and inefficient and no-one relies on it.
On the vexing question of whether to give to street people, I have no settled view. Christianity Today had an interesting discussion earlier in the year, with three different views, all well argued, at http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2011/january/19.60.html and related articles and links.