The Samaritan's Guide: Seven principles for effective compassion

Marvin Olasky, co-founder of Christians for a Sustainable Economy, wrote this article in 1995. It is perhaps more applicable now than it was then.

The crisis of the modern welfare state is a crisis of government, and it is more than that. Too many private charities and foundations dispense aid on the basis of what feels good rather than what works. As a result, they end up providing, instead of points of light, alternative shades of darkness. Too many act like the arrogant individuals criticized by F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby: “They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness… and let other people clean up the mess they made.”

Private charities and foundations can do a better job than government but only if they follow seven principles that effective poverty fighters of the past understood. Here are the principles, with historical meaning and contemporary applications, in alphabetical order.

1. Affiliation

A century ago, when individuals applied for material assistance, charity volunteers tried first to “restore family ties that have been sundered” and “reabsorb in social life those who for some reason have snapped the threads that bound them to other members of the community.” Instead of immediately offering help, charities asked, “Who is bound to help in this case?” Mary Richmond of the Baltimore Charity Organizing Society summed up in 1897 the wisdom of a century: “Relief given without reference to friends and neighbors is accompanied by moral loss. Poor neighborhoods are doomed to grow poorer whenever the natural ties of neighborliness are weakened by well-meant but unintelligent interference.”

Today, before developing a foundation project or contributing to a private charity, we should ask: “Does it work through families, neighbors, and religious or community organizations, or does it supersede them?” For example, studies show that many homeless alcoholics have families, but they do not want to be with them. When homeless shelters provide food, clothing, and housing without asking hard questions, aren’t they subsidizing disaffiliation and enabling addiction? Instead of giving aid directly to homeless men, why not work on reuniting them with brothers, sisters, parents, wives, or children?

We should ask, as well, whether other programs help or hurt. It’s good to help an unmarried teenager mother, but much such aid now offers a mirage of independence. A better plan is to reunite her whenever possible with those on whom she actually depends, whether she admits it or not: her parents and the child’s father. It’s good to give Christmas presents to poor children, but when the sweet-minded “helper” shows up with a shiny new fire truck that outshines the second-hand items a poor single mom put together, the damage is done. A better plan is to bulwark the beleaguered mom by enabling her to provide a better present.

2. Bonding

When applicants for help a century ago were truly alone, volunteers worked one-on-one to become, in essence, new family members. Charity volunteers a century ago usually were not assigned to massive food-dispensing tasks but were given the narrow but deep responsibility of making a difference in one life over several years. Kindness and firmness were both essential: The magazine American Hebrew in 1898 told of how one man was sunk into dependency, but a volunteer “with great patience convinced him that he must earn his living”; soon he did and regained the respect of his family and community. Similarly, a woman had become demoralized, but “for months she was worked with, now through kindness, again through discipline, until finally she began to show a desire to help herself.”

Today, when an unmarried pregnant teenager is dumped by her boyfriend and abandoned by angry parents who refuse to be reconciled, she needs a haven, a room in a home with a volunteer family. When a single mom at the end of her rope cannot take care of a toddler, he should be placed quickly for adoption where a new and permanent bonding can take place, rather than rotated through a succession of foster homes. Some failed programs spend a lot of money but are too stingy in what is truly important: treating people as human beings made in God’s image, not as animals.

3. Categorization

Charities a century ago realized that two persons in exactly the same material circumstances, but with different values, need different treatment: One might benefit most from some material help and a pat on the back, the other might need spiritual challenge and a push. Those who were orphaned, elderly, or disabled received aid; jobless adults who were “able and willing to work” received help in job-finding; “those who prefer to live on alms” and those of “confirmed intemperance” were not entitled to material assistance.

“Work tests” helped both in sorting and in providing relief with dignity. When an able-bodied man came to a homeless shelter, he often was asked to chop wood for two hours or to whitewash a building; in that way he could provide part of his own support and also help those unable to chop. A needy woman generally was given a seat in the “sewing room” (often near a child care room) and asked to work on garments that would be donated to the helpless poor or sent through the Red Cross to families suffering from the effects of hurricanes or tornadoes. The work test, along with teaching good habits and keeping away those who did not really need help, also enabled charities to teach the lesson that those who were being helped could help others.

Today, don’t we need to stop talking about “the poor” in abstraction and start distinguishing once again between those who truly yearn for help and those who just want an enabler? Programs have the chance to succeed only when categories are established and firmly maintained. Work tests can help: Why shouldn’t some homeless men clean up streets and parks and remove graffiti? Now, as thousands of crack babies born addicted to cocaine and often deserted by mothers who care only for the next high, languish in hospitals under bright lights and with almost no human contact, why shouldn’t homeless women (some are psychotic or sick, but others are healthy and gentle) be assigned to hold a baby for an hour in exchange for food and shelter?

4. Discernment

“Intelligent giving and intelligent withholding are alike true charity,” the New Orleans Charity Organization Society declared in 1899. “If drink has made a man poor, money will feed not him, but his drunkenness.” Poverty fighters a century ago trained volunteers to leave behind a conventional attitude toward the poor, seeing them through the comfortable haze of their own intentions. Barriers against fraud were important not only to prevent waste but to preserve morale among those who were working hard to remain independent: “Nothing is more demoralizing to the struggling poor than successes of the indolent.”

Bad charity also created uncertainty among givers as to how their contributions would be used, and led to less giving over the long term: It was important to “reform those mild, well-meaning, tender-hearted, sweet-voiced criminals who insist upon indulging in indiscriminate charity.” Compassion was greatest when givers could “work with safety, confidence, and liberty.” Today, lack of discernment in helping poor individuals is rapidly producing an anticompassion backlash, as the better-off—unable to distinguish between the truly needy and the grubby-grabby—give to neither.

5. Employment

New York charity leader Josephine Lowell wrote that “the problem before those who would be charitable, is not how to deal with a given number of the poor; it is how to help those who are poor, without adding to their numbers and constantly increasing the evils they seek to cure.” If people were paid for not working, the number of nonworkers would increase, and children would grow up without seeing work as a natural and essential part of life. Individuals had to accept responsibility: Governmental programs operating without the discipline of the marketplace were inherently flawed, because their payout comes “from what is regarded as a practically inexhaustible source, and people who once receive it are likely to regard it as a right, as a permanent pension, implying no obligation on their part.”

Today, programs that stress employment, sometimes in creative ways, need new emphasis. For example, more of the able-bodied might receive not housing but the opportunity to work for a home through “sweat equity” arrangements in which labor constitutes most of the down payment. Some who start in vigorous programs of this sort drop out with complaints that too much sweat is required. They find champions who would prefer to see a Department of Housing and Animal Development passing out free cages, but one person who stayed in a program said at the end, “We are poor, but we have something that is ours. When you use your own blood, sweat, and tears, it’s part of your soul. You stand and say, ‘I did it.’”

6. Freedom

Charity workers a century ago did not press for governmental programs but instead showed poor people how to move up while resisting enslavement to governmental masters. Job freedom was the opportunity to drive a wagon without paying bribes, to cut hair without having to go to barbers’ college, and to get a foot on the lowest rung of the ladder, even if the wages there were low. Freedom was the opportunity for a family to escape dire poverty by having a father work long hours and a mother sew garments at home. Life was hard, but static, multigenerational poverty of the kind we now have was rare; those who persevered could star in a motion picture of upward mobility.

Today, in our desire to make the bottom rung of the ladder higher, we have cut off the lowest rungs and left many on the ground. Those who are pounding the pavements looking for work, and those who have fallen between the cracks, are hindered by what is supposed to help them. Mother Teresa’s plan to open a homeless shelter in New York was stopped by a building code that required an elevator; nuns in her order said that their code forbade such mechanical helps and that they would carry upstairs anyone who could not walk, but the city stuck to its guns and the shelter never opened. In Texas and New Mexico, a Bible-based antidrug program run by Victory Fellowship has a 60 percent success rate in beating addiction, yet the Texas Drug and Alcohol Commission instructed the program to stop calling itself one of “drug rehabilitation” because it did not conform to the usual standards. Unfortunately, such examples of the lack of freedom are all too commonplace.

7. God

“True philanthropy must take into account spiritual as well as physical needs,” poverty fighters a century ago noted, and both Christians and Jews did. Christians worshipped a God who came to earth and showed in life and death the literal meaning of compassion—suffering with. Jewish teaching stressed the pursuit of righteousness through the doing of good deeds. Groups such as the Industrial Christian Alliance noted that they used “religious methods”—reminding the poor that God made them and had high expectations for them—to “restore the fallen and helpless to self-respect and self-support.”

Challenge that goes beyond the material is still essential to poverty fighting. In Washington, D.C., multimillion dollar programs have failed, but a mile from the U.S. Capitol success stories are developing: Spiritually-based programs such as Clean and Sober Streets, where ex-alcoholics and ex-addicts help those still in captivity; the Gospel Mission, which fights homelessness by offering true hope; and the Capitol Hill Crisis Pregnancy Center, where teenage moms and their children, born and unborn, are cared for, are all saving lives. In Dallas, Texas, a half-mile from the Dallas Housing Authority’s failed projects, a neighborhood group called Voice of Hope invites teenagers to learn about God through Bible studies and to work at renovating deteriorated homes in their neighborhood. During the past decade, crime rates among the boys involved with Voice of Hope and pregnancy rates among the girls have been much lower than those in the surrounding community.

Giving by itself, we need to remember, is morally neutral. We need to give rightly so as not to impede the development of values that enable people to get out of poverty and stay out. When the preceding seven principles of effective compassion are widely understood and practiced, antipoverty work can be effective. In 1995, as in 1895, the best programs offer challenge, not just enabling, and deal with spiritual questions as well as material needs. In 1995, as in 1895, there is no effective substitute for the hard process of one person helping another. A century-old question—Does any given “scheme of help… make great demands on men to give themselves to their brethren?”—is still the right one to ask.

Christians for a Sustainable Economy make their CASE

David French introduces a new coalition to counter the Religious Left on economic issues. I'd say it's about time the claims of Jim Wallis and company were openly challenged.

Over the past several weeks I’ve been writing about the religious Left’s relentless effort to wrap its arms around big government and, disturbingly, the progress it’s making in divorcing evangelicals (especially young evangelicals) from fiscal and economic common sense. Jim Wallis and other religious leftists have formed a so-called “Circle of Protection” whose purpose is to ask, “What would Jesus cut?” This coalition — which gained an audience with President Obama two weeks ago — views federal budgeting practices that would ruin households, corporations, and local and state governments as not just fiscally appropriate but morally imperative.

The time has come to push back, to let the president and the public know that the religious Left does not speak for the entire faith community and that there is another relevant question to ask as we face a deficit crisis: “Whom would Jesus indebt?” I — along with my ACLJ colleague Jordan Sekulow — have joined an informal coalition of Christian leaders called “Christians for a Sustainable Economy.” As our first act, we’ve sent our own letter to President Obama. It begins:

Recently, in the midst of the debt-ceiling crisis, a group calling themselves the “Circle of Protection,” led by Jim Wallis of the activist group Sojourners, met with you and your staff to claim that biblical mandates preclude limits to federal programs for low-income people. The Circle includes representatives of the National Association of Evangelicals, Bread for the World, and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Wallis and the “Circle of Protection” do not speak for all Christians. However laudable their intentions, the consequence of their action is to provide a religious imprimatur for big government and sanctify federal welfare programs that are often ineffective — even counterproductive. Contrary to their founding “Statement,” we do not need to “protect programs for the poor.” We need to protect the poor themselves. Indeed, sometimes we need to protect them from the very programs that ostensibly serve the poor, but actually demean the poor, undermine their family structures and trap them in poverty, dependency and despair for generations. Such programs are unwise, uncompassionate, and unjust.

The answer is not higher taxes and more government spending:

The debt disaster is a spending issue. Tax revenues are finite, while the growth of government is unceasing. By any measure, federal spending has skyrocketed, from $2.9 trillion in 2008 to $3.8 trillion in 2011. We presently borrow over forty cents of every dollar we spend. While increasing taxes will generate additional revenues and reduce the deficit in the short term, it will ultimately harm the economy, constrain economic growth, and hasten the out-of-control growth of government. To give more money to Washington is to give the sickness the remedy it requests. The last thing the government needs is more money. It needs to cease its unwise and profligate spending.

And what is the true moral imperative? The letter puts its well:

We believe the poor of this generation and generations to come are best served by policies that promote economic freedom and growth, that encourage productivity and creativity in every able person, and that wisely steward our common resources for generations to come.

The letter represents just one step in a long battle to educate Americans — of all faiths — that the poor are not best served by welfare and that hundreds of billions of dollars of Great Society entitlements have not eradicated poverty but have instead created a permanent underclass and stifled the social mobility that is one of the cornerstones of the American dream. You can sign the letter as well and lend your voice to a new and vital effort.

Does a constructive Christian response to the debt crisis begin with tithing?

Jordan J. Ballor is not impressed with even the most valiant attempts to produce a Christian response to the debt crisis. But he does offer a very constructive alternative.

A truly constructive approach to the public debt crisis would outline the various responsibilities of government at various levels, with relative priority for each responsibility. This would help us address the question of whether spending on national defense is more germane to the role of the federal government than providing bed nets to fight malaria in Africa, or whether and to what extent the federal government has a role to play in providing things like medical insurance, infant formula, and public education to its citizens. Only on the basis of these first principles of government can we start to judge how current, as well as past and future, levels of expenditure line up against what government is supposed to do. We can then begin to determine what government has been doing versus what it ought to be doing.

Things that are not properly the task of the federal government might then begin to be privatized with appropriate institutions of civil society or localized to other levels of government. Privatization might be done over time and in an orderly fashion, as federal funding is phased out and private partners are formed, incentivized, or empowered to relieve the government of its responsibilities. Localization would have the advantage of compelling lower levels of government to raise funds for their own programs, rather than routing them through the federal level, and therefore keep the cost of government more transparent and accountable to its constituencies. While privatization and localization will not always be the appropriate solution, such efforts can often advance the Christian social principle of subsidiarity, which emphasizes the sovereignty and legitimacy of the responsibilities of lower and decentralized forms of organization and social life.

There are at least two basic threats that undermine the viability of such an approach, however, and they come from the government and the church, respectively. From the government there is an increasingly disturbing trend that locates the solution to social problems simply either in business or in government. The logic of this either/or mentality places us between market and state, restricting the vitality and independence of mediating institutions, particularly private charities. We see this mentality manifest itself in attacks on charities on a number of fronts, including the rhetorical conflation of “non-profit” with government, the looming decertification of more than a 300,000 charities by the IRS, and newly proposed limits to charitable deductions.

Even more troubling is the mounting evidence that Christians have adopted this mentality, too. We see this in giving patterns among American Christians. The majority of evangelical church leaders, for instance, seem not to think that tithing is a biblical imperative (estimates for levels of evangelical giving typically range from 2 to 4 percent of income). As Ron Sider himself put it, “If American Christians simply gave a tithe rather than the current one-quarter of a tithe, there would be enough private Christian dollars to provide basic health care and education to all the poor of the earth. And we would still have an extra $60-70 billion left over for evangelism around the world.” 

The problem with the CPJ/ESA Call and the host of other Christian responses to the budget crisis is that they do not embody the urgency or the significance of this charitable responsibility. Douglas LeBlanc, author of Tithing: Test Me in This, recently described the importance of tithing as “the beginning of breaking out of that self-indulgent life, primarily because it says to you that your money is not your own. And it’s a small sacramental way of saying that your money in your life is coming to you through the grace of God, through the gifts that He’s given you.”

C. S. Lewis once said, “If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.” The federal government has been on the wrong road for decades, and the answer to the public debt crisis in America lies in turning back to basic questions about the role of government in its various forms and its relationship to other aspects of social life. A truly Christian response to the challenge of intergenerational justice and the public debt crisis demands no less.

Economic Lessons from Robinson Crusoe

American Vision's Bojidar Marinov sees the emerging democracies of Eastern Europe learning from the heritage of America's founders, even as America seems to be forsaking that same heritage.

Several years ago a newspaper in Eastern Europe asked a socialist economist a question: “Why is it that the same worker works the same number of hours in Eastern Europe and in America but they make an average of $22/hr in America and only $1.5/hr in Eastern Europe? Where does the 15-fold difference in productivity come from?” The goal of the chief editor was to educate his readers with a short, easy to understand and illuminating article. The socialist economist replied with a 25-page essay full of religious . . . er, I mean, “professional” language that no one could understand, including the economist himself.

The chief editor filed the article in the round file, and called me, the Protestant missionary. “Bojidar,” he said, “I need an article. I need it quick, and I need it simple, digestible and informing. Do you have one?” I did. A good Reformed missionary always has a simple, digestible and informing article on every aspect of human life and action. If he doesn’t, he must go to his Reformed heritage. So I went to one of my Puritan ancestors in the faith, Daniel Defoe, and his character Robinson Crusoe.

Imagine Robinson on an uninhabited island. He has one immediate problem to solve: He needs to eat. He may have a few tools from the ship, but none of these tools give him any immediate solution. What gives him a solution are the few trees near the beach with fruits on them. There is a problem though: The trees are tall and difficult to climb. It takes Robinson one whole day of work to gather only as much fruits as to survive, and then go to sleep at night. He can’t do more than that, unless he wants to go hungry for one day.

Well, one day he has an idea and he really decides to go hungry for a half day. He spends that half day making a long 20 ft. pole to knock fruit down without having to climb the trees. The next day he tries his new production tool, and finds out that it has doubled his productivity: He can knock down the quantity of fruits needed for his survival in a half day instead of one whole day.

So, our first lesson about increased productivity is: It comes from sacrifice, i.e. from forbearing present consumption plus ideas and work. Increasing productivity always comes at a cost.

Alarmist Rhetoric and the Christian Worldview

At the very foundation of the Christian, biblical worldview is the belief that a holy and righteous God created human beings in his image and likeness to be stewards of his good and perfect creation. In rebelling against God, human beings corrupted that creation and sent it into a downward spiral toward destruction. But, because of God's inexhaustible love for humanity, he sent his Son Jesus Christ to die on the cross in order to redeem his creation out of its slide toward destruction. In rising from the dead, Jesus defeated the forces of evil which had held creation in bondage and guaranteed the ultimate victory of God and the restoration of all things to God's original good purpose.

The Christian worldview is neither overly optimistic nor unduly pessimistic. Rather, it sees all of history through the lens of God's revelation of himself in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Therefore, it sees the final outcome of history as the ultimate realization of the decisive victory of God in Christ, establishing forever a dominion of perfect love, joy, and peace with Christ himself at the center of a redeemed creation. As God acted in the past to redeem his creation through the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, so he will act again in Christ to bring all things in line with his holy, good, and perfect will. Knowing this, all Christians should be inspired to live at the present time with an unshakable faith in a God who is able to work all things together for good, according to his will and purpose. Armed with such a faith, we ought to be thoroughly equipped to confront a dying world with a bold message of hope which will transform every nook and cranny of this decaying, hyper-secularized culture.

The present economic unpleasantness has proven fertile soil for alarmist rhetoric from the White House to Capitol Hill to the campaign trail. Like most utterances from the oral cavities of politicians, such rhetoric is overblown and rooted in an artificial conventional wisdom weighted toward the furtherance of activist government. As we will undoubtedly be bombarded with more such rhetoric in the coming days and weeks, particularly as the presidential race enters the home stretch, we would do well to keep things in perspective, according to a genuine biblical and Christian worldview.