How Charity Hurts the Poor
In his book The Tragedy of American Compassion, Marvin Olasky documents how Christians in early America and Great Britain cared for the poor in their communities. He tells of successes and failures and notes important principles that governed effective charity in the 18th and 19th centuries, principles that can make us more effective in our ministry to the poor.
The consensus of early Americans was that the most helpful charity was offered in the giving of time and not treasure. Personal involvement and mentoring relationships were seen as the best way to lend a hand. Charitable groups emphasized the importance of getting to know the poor and teaching them the life transforming word of God. Preaching was essential if they were to be delivered from the habits of thought and life that kept them in poverty and decadence. Giving physical aid without giving God’s word was deemed cruel.
Our forebears also recognized the importance of sometimes withholding charity. “The poverty which proceeds from improvidence and vice ought to feel the consequences and penalties which God has annexed.” So those who were unwilling to forsake destructive vices and habits would be left to suffer the consequences of their folly until they came to a better mind. “The open hand was not extended to all.”
Today it seems everyone is pro-charity. Anyone who gives money is praised and the more indiscriminate the giving, the more generous they are thought to be. In contrast many early Americans believed that charity wrongly administered hurt the poor. Cotton Mather (in 1710) preached against giving to those who refused to work, “Don’t nourish ’em and harden ‘em in that, but find employment for them. Find ‘em work; set ‘em to work; keep ‘em to work.” Charles Chauncey (in 1752) quoting 2 Thessalonians 3:10, “If a man will not work, he shall not eat,” said, “It would be an evident Breach of the Law of the Gospel, as well as of Nature, to bestow upon those the Bread of Charity, who might earn and eat their own Bread.”
Furthermore, these charities rarely gave money. “Aid…almost always was in kind—food, coal, cloth—rather than in cash.”
Charles Brace, founder of the New York Children’s Aid Society (1850s), also realized the folly of indiscriminate giving. He said, “Experience soon shows that if you put a comfortable coat on the first idle and ragged lad who applies, you will have fifty half-clad lads, many of who possess hidden away a comfortable outfit, leaving their business next day ‘to get jackets for nothing.’”
Also if charities offer more benefits than working, paupers will work the charities instead of working a job. “They pass from one [charity] to the other; knowing exactly their conditions of assistance…the industry and ingenuity they employ in this pauper trade are truly remarkable…and a waste of talent.” Brace was astounded at the hard work involved in not working. So charities must be careful not to give too much, lest they undermine the motivation to work.
In Scotland a minister named Thomas Chalmers (early 1800s) saw how indiscriminate and impersonal state aid tended to hurt the poor. “State aid has been a mighty solvent to sunder the ties of kinship, to quench the affections of the family, to suppress in the poor themselves the instinct of self-reliance and self-respect—to convert them into paupers.” State aid subsidized men estranged from family and encouraged dependence on handouts.
So Chalmers gained permission to try an alternative plan in a district called the Parish of St. John. Chalmers’ church offered to meet the expenses of all needed relief in their district by charitable donations. His only stipulation was that those who wanted to give indiscriminately stay out.
Chalmers divided the parish up into 25 districts each overseen by a deacon. Whenever a need was expressed, the deacon of that district would investigate and minister to the family only giving aid to those who were truly needy. In a few years pauperism (the state of unnecessary dependence on charity) sank from 164 to 99 people, in a population of 10,000.
Modern attempts to help the poor have had tragic results in America, but our forefathers point us in a better direction. If we begin to build personal relationships with the poor and teach them the Scriptures, if we help the able-bodied to find employment, if we give only enough to meet pressing basic needs, careful not to squelch initiative or create dependence, then we can truly begin to help the needy.