Caring for the Poor: Some Thoughts from Thaddeus Williams

 * A piece from Thaddeus Williams' book Confronting Injustice Without Compromising Truth.

“It is common to hear that Christians who don’t support big government programs intended to help the poor don’t really care about the poor.  I heard the charge today, in fact.  This charge is often combined with the claim that Christians are so fixated on getting people’s souls to heaven that they don’t care how impoverished people’s bodies are on earth.  But what are the facts?  

 

“In a 2018 Barna study on global poverty, we learn that

 

·     75 percent of practicing Christians in the United States provided food to a poor person or family, compared with 58 percent of all US adults.

·     72 percent of Christians directly donated resources such as clothing or furniture to the poor, compared with 64 percent of all US adults.

·     62 percent of Christians spent a significant amount of time praying for poor people, versus 33 percent of all US adults.

·     47 percent of Christians gave of their personal time to serve the needy in their community, compared with 29 percent of all US adults.

·     nearly twice as many Christians compared to all US adults volunteered for an organization to serve the poor in other countries or traveled outside the US to help the disadvantaged.²¹

 

“A 2010 study from a nonreligious research group looked at a dozen faith communities around Philadelphia—ten Protestant churches, one Catholic parish, and one Jewish synagogue.  Researchers use a fifty-four-point metric to determine the economic impact these congregations had on their surrounding communities.  The results are astounding.  These twelve congregations brought $50,577,098 in economic benefits to their neighborhoods in a single year.²²

 

“There is a big difference between not caring for the poor and thinking that government-enforced redistribution of wealth is a bad way to help the poor.  Equating the two is a convenient way to feel like we’re on the side of the angels and those who disagree are in league with the Devil.

 

“Is it possible to be opposed to government-enforced redistribution of wealth precisely because we care about the poor?  The welfare state had noble intentions of helping the poor.  Yet it denied government checks to intact households, effectively incentivizing homes without married parents, thereby making poverty even in worse in communities that were already suffering.  In the last twenty-five years, 1.25 billion people have risen above extreme poverty.  That’s about 475 people who have broken away from extreme poverty over the last five minutes while you’ve been reading.²³  The major factor in this historically unprecedented rise from poverty, according to economists, has been the spread of free market economies, particularly in countries like India, China, and Nigeria.  The ‘Asian tigers’—Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan—have become prosperous despite a lack of natural resources as they have encouraged free markets, while resource-rich Russia and Brazil remain poor with big government systems that claim to help the poor.  Endorsing government wealth redistribution is simply not the same as caring for the poor.”  (pp. 189-190)

 

²¹“Three Reasons to Have Hope about Global Poverty,” Barna Research Group, April 26, 2018, https://www.barna.com/research/3-reasons-hope-global-poverty/.

 

²² David O’ Reilly, “A Study Asks: What’s the Churches Economic Worth?” Philadelphia Inquirer, February 1, 2011,https://www.inquirer.com/philly/news/religion/20110201_A_study_asks_What_s_a_church_s_economic_worth_html.

 

²³ Alexander Hamilton, “The World’s Poorest Are Getting Richer Faster Than Anyone Else.” Foundation for Economic Education, October 27, 2017, https://fee.org/articles/the-worlds-poorest-people-are-getting-richer-faster-than-anyone-else/.