Radical Charity

How Generosity Can Save the World (And the Church)

Christopher Marlin-Warfield

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781532665844
  9781532665851
• eBook ISBN:
  9781532665868
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Teología cristiana

Right now, there is a movement in churches and nonprofits arguing that charity is toxic, that helping hurts, and that the entire nonprofit sector needs to be reformed to truly lift people out of poverty. These charity skeptics are telling Christians that traditional charity deepens dependency, fosters a sense of entitlement, and erodes the work ethic of people who receive it. Charity skepticism is increasingly popular; and it is almost certainly wrong. Radical Charity weaves together research and scholarship on topics as diverse as biblical scholarship, Christian history, economics, and behavioral psychology to tell a different story. In this story, charity is the heart of Christianity and one of the most effective ways that we can help people who are living in poverty. Charity--giving to people experiencing poverty without any expectation of return or reformation--can save the world and help make God's vision for the church a reality.

1

The Scandal

Hamid and Khadeja are a married couple living in Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh. Hamid is uneducated and unskilled, with a history of being unemployed and occasionally working as a pedicab driver and a construction worker. More recently, he has taken a job as a reserve driver for a motorized rickshaw. However, as a reserve driver, he never knows for sure whether he will have work or how long he’ll have work. Khadeja stays at home, raises their young son, and makes a small amount of money taking in sewing. Altogether, they live on the equivalent of about $70 a month, or about $0.78 per person per day.1

Martha lives in a town in the Mississippi Delta with her two daughters and her granddaughter. She has a small rented home that is paid for, in part, by the assistance she receives from Section 8. She receives $150 each month in child support from one of her daughters’ fathers and, like Hamid and Khadeja, runs an informal shop out of her living room. A fair amount of her SNAP benefits goes to buy supplies for this shop, and she is able to sell the ingredients that she buys for roughly twice the price. The store usually nets about $400 each month. While she receives benefits like Section 8 and SNAP, her family probably doesn’t live on much more than $7 per person per day.2

Jennifer works at a slightly-above-minimum-wage job cleaning condos, office suites, and foreclosed homes in Chicago. The work is difficult and occasionally dangerous, with long hours. It also pays $8.75 an hour (at the time of this writing, $0.50 more per hour than the Illinois minimum wage). When she works full time, she might make about $1,575 before taxes each month—about $1,290 after taxes—which she uses to support herself and her two school-age children. That’s about $17.50 per person per day ($14.33 after taxes). She also receives SNAP benefits and a housing subsidy.3

Three families; three very different situations. Hamid’s, Martha’s, and Jennifer’s families live in different places, have different histories, and face different financial circumstances. What they have in common, though, is that they live in poverty. Poverty may look different in Dhaka, Mississippi, and Chicago, but each of these families has the same basic problem: they don’t have enough money to meet their basic needs. And they’re not alone. According to the World Bank, in 2013—the last year when comprehensive data is available—an estimated 767 million people lived in poverty worldwide, meaning that they lived on $1.90 per day or less. That’s a pretty arbitrary amount, and raising the threshold even a little bit would throw more people who already live in the social reality of poverty into official poverty. Closer to home, the United States Census Bureau estimates that about forty-three million Americans lived in poverty in 2016. For a family of four with two children under eighteen, that means they live on a maximum of $24,000 per year or about $16 per person per day. Again, that’s an arbitrary amount. When she was working full time for the cleaning company, Jennifer made more than that. But looking at her life, no one would doubt that she was experiencing poverty. Raising the poverty line just slightly would push many more people into official poverty.4

Poverty—and related social issues like inadequate housing, food insecurity, lack of access to clean water, and lack of healthcare—is a huge problem. It often looks like an unsolvable one. The Comparative Research Program on Poverty (CROP), for example, describes poverty as a “wicked issue.” A wicked issue is an issue that is “complex, multidimensional, unclear and changeable.” Describing poverty this way makes it sound like there isn’t a single, clear-cut solution. Instead, it implies that addressing poverty and related problems means coming at them from a variety of angles. That’s fine as far as it goes, but it’s also possible to think of poverty as a very simple problem: not having enough money. From that perspective, it also has a simple solution: instead of trying to address a long list of causes, we could just give people enough money.5

Either way, the fact is that the world doesn’t have to be this way. Poverty is intertwined with many other social issues, and one of the biggest—one that is almost synonymous with poverty—is wealth inequality. According to Oxfam, the eight wealthiest men in the world control roughly as much wealth as the poorest 3.5 billion people. As of this writing, that means that Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Carlos Slim, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Amancio Ortega, Larry Ellison, and Michael Bloomberg control as much wealth as the poorest half of the global population. And, according to the Credit Suisse Research Institute, if all of that wealth—all of the wealth in the world—were equally distributed to every adult in the world, then every adult would have about $53,000. Obviously, no one wants to liquidate and redistribute all of the world’s wealth, and no one is seriously demanding absolute economic equality. But these figures point to a simple reality: poverty is not inevitable. It is the result of the systems that we have created to produce and distribute wealth.6

There are many stories about poverty and how we can address it. Is inequality a problem, or is it healthy? How much of it is healthy? Is poverty a wicked issue or a simple one? Do people living in poverty just need more money or do they need to have broader social issues addressed? In this chapter, I’m going to give you a bird’s eye view of two stories about poverty; stories that I’ll be looking at in more detail throughout this book. The first story is a popular one with a long pedigree. According to this story, poverty is a wicked issue that can’t be solved by giving people money. It tells us that instead of giving our money, we should address deeper problems and help people adjust to the modern economy. It also tells us that we might need to make big changes to the nonprofit sector in order to do that. The second story is based on emerging research but is rooted in the ancient wisdom of Judaism and Christianity. According to this story, poverty is a simple problem and has a simple solution: giving people money. It tells us that charity is good for the people who receive it and good for the people to give it, and that we can create a more just and merciful world by sharing freely with each other.

The First Story: Addressing Poverty through Compassionate Capitalism

On Christmas Eve in 1981, Robert Lupton sat in an urban apartment, sipping coffee with his new neighbors. The room had that smell that tells you it’s been cleaned recently, and the children were giddy with anticipation. Eventually, the knock came, and the door opened to reveal a well-dressed family with young children. The mother in Lupton’s neighbor-family invited them in and accepted armfuls of gifts, which were distributed to the children. No one noticed that the father in the neighbor-family had quietly gone out through the back door. And when one of the children did notice, no one questioned the mother’s insistence that he had run to the store. Except for Lupton. He saw a man emasculated and embarrassed by his inability to provide for his own family. He saw a woman forced to shield her children from that side of their father. He saw children who were learning that good things come, for free, from rich people out there. He saw that charity was toxic and vowed that it had to stop.7

A few years later, in his 1986 State of the Union Speech, Ronald Reagan echoed Franklin Roosevelt by calling welfare “a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit” and insisting that welfare should be judged by how many of its recipients become independent of it. That theme would be a staple of State of the Union Speeches until, ten years later, Bill Clinton would sign the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act. Welfare reform did many things. Most importantly, it ended cash welfare and replaced it with a new program that required work, imposed lifetime limits, and gave states more latitude in how they used money. The Act was deeply divisive within the Clinton administration, and a handful of advisors resigned, but it was also nationally popular. Welfare was dead, and people were okay with that.8

Much later, in 2012 or so, my parents sent me a copy of Lupton’s book, which they were reading in their book group at church. It was my introduction to a movement—let’s call them “charity skeptics”—that wants to do for private charity what Bill Clinton did for government welfare. As Lupton describes it, when welfare reform passed, America rejected the idea of doing for others what they can (or should be able to) do for themselves; but, through private charity, we continue to perpetuate a welfare system that creates dependency, erodes the work ethic, and cannot all...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1: The Scandal
• Chapter 2: Poverty
• Chapter 3: Charity
• Chapter 4: The Heart of Christianity
• Chapter 5: Charity Works
• Chapter 6: The Generosity Dividend
• Chapter 7: A Charitable Community
• Chapter 8: The Kingdom of God
• Bibliography