The Church and Charity
Henry Ware Allen
[Reprinted from Land and Freedom,
January-February 1937]
THE motivating principle in church work today is that of charity. The
halls of learning where the minister was prepared for his work were
largely endowed by and dependent upon charitable bequests, while the
church itself is frequently indebted to charity for its endowment and
sustenance. Gratitude is a commendable virtue, and our civilization is
so greatly indebted to philanthropists for our libraries, colleges,
universities, hospitals, foundations, and churches that the reaction
of society is quite naturally expressed in the exaltation of charity
as a virtue. Charity has, indeed, been given great honor in the
church.
This undue emphasis is based upon the assumption that it is always
more blessed to give than to receive. This supposition will, however,
scarcely bear the test of careful analysis when one reflects that the
recipient of charity is necessarily humiliated, up to the time when
his pride is broken, by receiving alms for which he can give nothing
in return. Of course, no one disputes the virtue of relieving
distress. But if, by the introduction of a just social order, all need
for charity were destroyed, this would provide the double advantage of
cancelling the self-esteem of the giver and the humiliation of the
recipient, which are involved in the modern enterprise of charity.
Under normal conditions, when charity together with poverty shall
have been abolished, it will be recognized that an equal exchange of
values should be the rule in every transaction and the present day
ceremony of taking up collections for church expenses will then no
longer be celebrated as a religious rite. Charity, which in perverted
form has been given the honor of a shrine in the church, must be cast
out to make room for a new shrine dedicated to the higher virtue of
Justice. Charity is a satellite of poverty, and poverty is a disease
of modern society caused by social injustice. The increase of this
injustice is accompanied by a corresponding growth of institutional
charity. Under normal conditions, where justice prevails, both in
primitive and civilized society, there is no need of charity. There is
no charity; excepting, of course, that of neighborly friendliness.
Today we have charity in a greater degree than ever before. Possible
three-quarters of all governmental expenditures at Washington are for
charity. And this has promoted the fiction that the government owes
everyone a living. Under extraordinary conditions of fire, famine, or
flood, the Red Cross must take care of the emergency. But this
involves no charity. Of course the victims of unjust social conditions
must not be allowed to perish. But it is the plain duty of society to
anticipate and to prevent the disgrace of poverty by the simple method
of just legislation instead of leaving treatment of the problem to
charity. Poverty is the substance of things dreaded, the evidence of
unjust laws. Alms degrade the recipient. And when these recipients are
to be reckoned by the tens of millions, as today, disintegration of
self-respect and moral fibre is certain to follow.
Charity has a direct influence in keeping wages down and in
destroying the motive for self-support. If society is just, it need
not be generous. Said Tolstoy, "If you can afford to do so much
for your poor, you must have robbed them pretty thoroughly first."
Should the church extend its province so as to include responsibility
for legislation directly affecting general welfare of the community?
Can the church properly limit its responsibility to the four walls of
the meeting house and be indifferent to those laws which affect the
prosperity of all the people? All men will agree that the church
cannot properly take part in partisan politics or lend itself to the
promotion of any doubtful social reform or fad. But those who assert
that the church should confine itself strictly to the spiritual
welfare of its members will find themselves already answered by the
changed character of the modern church, and the attention to man's
physical welfare which this involves.
The science of political economy founded on justice, given to the
world by Adam Smith, Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, and Henry George, has
generally been eliminated from the curriculum of colleges and
universities. The science of political economy bears the same relation
to the behavior of government as does the moral code to the behavior
of the individual citizen, and the church must be as responsible for
one as it is for the other.
The church itself cannot survive if our civilization is destroyed.
And it requires only a slight knowledge of history to realize that
countless civilizations, many of them highly advanced, have gone down
to destruction for having violated considerations of justice in the
treatment of its citizens. Gibbon shows conclusively that this was the
case with the fall of the Roman Empire, and there is evidence on every
hand that we at this time are repeating those fatal mistakes. The
moral law is equally inexorable with nations as 'with individuals. The
punishment is made to fit the crime in either case.
When the church goes to the root of the matter by determining the
cause of poverty instead of dwelling upon its manifestations, it will
then, for example, instead of inveighing against the horrors of war,
be guided by the mandates of political economy which invariably
promote international good will, peace, and prosperity.
Other distinct causes are responsible for the elevation of charity
into the place of justice in the church. Charity, linked with Faith
and Hope, has been extolled as a superlative virtue in one of the most
beautiful passages of scripture. But we have been honoring a perverted
charity because of mistranslation of the Scriptural meaning of the
word, which was love, not alms-giving. This confusion of terms has
been responsible for a long train of evils. A powerful influence in
holy writ for charity at the expense of justice is the parable of the
laborers in the vineyard, justifying the same payment of wages to
those who had worked only one hour as was paid to those who had worked
twelve hours. The employer had a perfect right, of course, to give
what he pleased to the laborers who had worked only one hour, but
payment to them for the eleven hours during which they did not work
was not wages earned; it was a gift. In this case, it is clear that
charity profited at the expense of justice.
The generally misunderstood words, "The poor ye have with you
always," were an observation and not a prophecy. The poor are not
necessarily poverty-stricken. The church has, at the behest of
charity, been so busy bailing the boat that it has not been interested
in stopping the leak. Eternal vigilance is quite as much the price of
justice as it is the price of liberty.
A Christian minister recently exclaimed, "Would that a Moses
would arise to deliver us out of this depression!" Had "Progress
and Poverty" been used as a textbook in his college, he would
have known that a Moses had already arisen in our own times and had
shown a scientifically perfect method of treating the enigma of the
century, that of undeserved poverty with progress.
To those who assert that the church should confine itself strictly to
the spiritual needs of its members, still another answer has already
been given by the oldest and most conservative of all Christian
churches, the Roman Catholic. More than fifty years ago, Bishop Nulty
of County Meath, Ireland, in an address to the priests of his Diocese,
clearly demonstrated in classic language the right of the common
people of Ireland to the use of the land given them by the Creator and
without having to pay tribute to alien landlords. Then in 1888, his
Holiness, Pope Leo XIII, issued an encyclical upon the condition of
labor, and his successor, Pope Pius XI, has recently issued a similar
letter on the same subject. Here is evidence that the Christian church
has recognized its responsibility for the physical, as well as the
spiritual welfare of man. For the church to assert complacently that
it has no interest in economic problems is very much like a select
party in the cabin of an ocean steamship sending out word that they
were engaged in spiritual culture and were not interested in the fact
that the ship had sprung a serious leak, or that the crew were
fighting afire.
What would be thought of a health officer who spent his time warning
against a certain disease when his plain duty was to direct the
removal of well known causes of it? That is exactly wherein the church
has erred in its attitude toward poverty, war, and crime. If it is
worthwhile to pay attention to the manifestation of a disease, to be
consistent, its source must be ascertained and eliminated. The
conclusion of the whole matter is that the church of today can no
longer honor charity as a virtue. It must accept its responsibility by
going to the root of the matter in order to eradicate that poverty
which violates the will of the Creator and is responsibility for more
misery than any other one cause.
The greatest of all conflicts today is that between poverty and
prosperity They cannot rightly exist together. Where one gains, the
other loses. Prosperity is the natural condition of man, evidently
intended by the Creator in the bountiful provision which he has made,
actual and potential, for all His children. Poverty, on the other
hand, is an unnatural visitation brought upon human society by the
stupidity of man himself in failing to recognize, and to be governed
by natural law. When the church comes to recognize fully its
responsibility to the Creator and to mankind, it will inaugurate a
mighty movement for the abolition of that greatest enemy of man,
undeserved poverty.
Poverty does not necessarily mean a lack of riches. It does not exist
with primitive people whose wants are few and easily satisfied. It did
not exist in human society until a comparatively recent time. On the
other hand, the poignant pangs of poverty frequently exist behind
brownstone fronts with those whose incomes have been reduced or lost.
As was stated by Carlyle, "The hell of which Englishmen are most
afraid is the hell of poverty." And when, as today, millions of
American citizens are dependent upon charity for sustenance, a
condition exists which produces fear throughout all classes that they
themselves may be precipitated into the distress which they see
beneath them. For the fear of poverty may even be worse than poverty
itself.
It is poverty and the fear of poverty which more than anything else
is responsible for the ending of thousands of lives by suicide.
Poverty is responsible for perhaps nine-tenths of the rising tide of
crime. Every human being is endowed with a divine spark which makes
human nature good; and the average man prefers to do that which is
right rather than that which is wrong. But poverty drives men to the
crime of robbery.
One phase of this change which the enormous power of the church might
bring about is international free trade. This, more than any other one
factor, it is believed, would produce that world-wide peace and good
will disarmament and prosperity for which Christian people constantly
pray, but the enactment of which they leave to Almighty God.
The abolition of this modern phenomenon, undeserved, poverty, is not
the impossible or even the difficult task which it generally is
supposed to be. Prosperity will logically follow the repeal of unjust
taxation. The process will simply be the liberation of those
beneficent forces of nature, ordained by the Creator, which are ever
ready to serve mankind, but which have been thwarted by stupid
man-made laws. Obedience to the demands of Justice is the only
condition necessary to the abolition of poverty and the consequent
liberation of prosperity!
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