Charity Reconsidered Pt.1

Some questions I am thinking about.

Social work came as a profession out of the perceived need in the nineteenth century to make charity more organized and scientific. Random and sentimental charity needed to be replaced by a more systematic approach resting on a base of knowledge and skill aimed at truly helping those in need. By the turn of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th, the term charity itself became something of an embarrassment. It had roots in the Judeo-Christian tradition and, as with science and philosophy, some of its professional advocates sought to develop it as a secular activity independent of theology or religious duty.

Charity came under even stronger attack from Social Darwinists and eugenicists like Herbert Spencer and in the 1920s and 1930s, Margaret Sanger. The Great Depression and the rise of the welfare state further marginalized charity. The concept of individual rights—as understood historically and by the American Founders as a negative freedom from state interference—expanded into a claim on state provision. As this happened, social workers and statist liberals saw help for the poor as progressing “from charity to justice,” to a matter of rights or claims on the public purse rather than either gratuitous self-giving or a casual handout.

In more recent decades, the corporatist and statist assumptions of the welfare state came increasingly under critical scrutiny. This was partly as a result of concerns about long-term dependency and demoralization; partly because of the rising costs and perceived threat to competitiveness in a global economy; and partly because of a concern that services had become bureaucratic, fragmented, disempowering, and generally unresponsive to those they were meant to serve.

The earlier critiques of charity have thus lost much of their force in face of the problems of its statist alternative. (That charitable activity—in the sense of the voluntary giving of time, treasure, and talent to help others—is still in a kind of hydraulic relation with state, tax-funded provision is shown in the path-breaking work of Arthur C. Brooks (see his Who Really Cares? America’s Charity Divide—Who Gives, Who Doesn’t, and Why It Matters). That is, the more you favor public, tax-funded provision, the less you yourself give voluntarily to charity. There is a big gulf between the level of charitable giving between Europe (low) and the U.S. (high); between the secular (low) and religious (high); between liberals (low, except for religious liberals) and conservatives (high). It seems that modern social welfare, no less than its historic predecessors, cannot be understood without reference to charity and its interaction with state provision.

Is it time to reconsider the concept, history, and meanings of charity in a new, less dismissive light?

Science, Charity, and Scientific Charity

Paul Adams

Michael Novak makes the point, in his excellent new book, No-One Sees God, that atheists have a harder time empathizing with religious believers than vice versa. That is a serious handicap when you want, as Harris, Dennett, Dawkins, and Hitchens have done, to write books about God and religion without any attempt to understand the inner lives of serious believers.

Many people, and not only these evangelical atheist authors, react with intense hostility toward the Catholic Church in particular. They just want to fling some accusations at one, but do not actually want to hear a response, assuming perhaps there is none or that no-one ever thought of that before. As Dr. Johnson said of the 18th century atheist philosopher David Hume, "Every thing which Hume has advanced against Christianity had passed through my mind long before he wrote. . . . Truth, Sir, is a cow which will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull' (July 21, 1763).

You see this in the evangelical popular atheists like Dawkins and Hitchens, who pour scorn and ridicule on religion in general and Christianity in particular, without taking the trouble to inform themselves at even a rudimentary level on theology or history or philosophy. Other famous anti-Christians, from Celsus to Nietzsche, at least knew what they were attacking.

On many apparently unrelated issues, such as global warming or health insurance, people tend to cluster in their opinions according to whether they consider themselves liberal or conservative. But the liberal-conservative divide is hard to disentangle since both terms cover very different ideologies that overlap. So one tendency in conservativism is the Burkean perspective which values tradition and the wisdom and resources embedded in it. (Tradition is the democracy of the dead, I think Chesterton said.) Roger Scruton, the English philosopher, is my favorite writer in this vein--I loved his autobiographical England: An Elegy and Gentle Regrets, even the bits I disagreed with.

On liturgy, I also loved German novelist Martin Mosebach on The Heresy of Formlessness, which shows the importance of liturgy as it develops organically over centuries. He argues that the post-Vatican II iconoclasm and attempt to be "relevant" has been a tremendous loss that emptied the pews in Europe especially. He extends the argument to much modernist art and architecture too. I especially like his comment on "senile avantgardism."

It's significant, isn’t it, that "liberal religion" within mainline Protestantism and the "liberal" tendencies within Catholicism are dying on the vine. When people from nominally Catholic countries (Mexico, South America) convert to Protestantism, it is to forms like Pentecostalism because they see them as more demanding, not less, more counter-cultural, not more accommodating to secularism. Within the Catholic Church, it is the more "traditional" and orthodox seminaries, dioceses, religious orders, and movements that are thriving and attracting the young.

Making the question more paradoxical is the fact that the defenders of tradition in indigenous or traditional societies--ones that are hierarchical, intolerant of dissent, conformist, anti-democratic and characterized by gerontocratic polygyny--are often political liberals and post-modernists who oppose all those features to the extent they survive in their own culture. In contrast, Christianity played a revolutionary role in the development of science, democracy, civil and human rights, separation of religion/church and state, ending of slavery, the liberation of women, and insistence on that core social work value, the equal and intrinsic dignity and worth of the individual person (slave or free, male or female, able-bodied or disabled, from conception to natural death). All of these in themselves undermine traditional cultures. (See David Bentley Hart's wonderful book, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies as well as the work of Rodney Stark--The Victory of Reason, The Rise of Christianity, etc.)

So who is liberal, who conservative? Another tendency in "conservatism" comes from classical liberalism and is thus very different. It supports the free market and the sweeping away of tradition that it brought and brings about. The Economist magazine represents this tendency--pro-market, against protectionism and statism in most of its forms, but pro-same-sex marriage and decriminalization of drugs, etc. Like Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan. In its strongest form, it becomes libertarianism, the hypertrophy of individual autonomy against the demands of culture, family, and community and thus the opposite of Burkean conservatism.

In a milder form, neo-conservatism ("liberals who were mugged by reality" as they say) takes this sort of view. Within Catholicism, George Weigel, Michael Novak and others take this position--orthodox on everything except the Church's social teaching, with its preference or option for the poor. The Church, of course, is the major provider of social services and direct aid to the poor in the world. Novak and Weigel would agree and support this work and point to the much higher level of charitable giving in time, talent, and treasure, of the orthodox-religious. But the Church hierarchy--traditionally Democrats--also favors things like national health insurance (except insofar as it involves taxpayer subsidies for plans that provide abortions) and other governmental protections of the poor.

I just finished the book Michael Novak wrote with his daughter, Jana, then in her early twenties, called Tell Me Why: A Father Answers His Daughter's Questions About God. It discusses all the questions people raise against religion in general and Catholic Christianity in particular, but in a civil and respectful way. (It would not be helpful for those of my family and acquaintance who are so hostile as to be unwilling even to hear counter-arguments or responses.) Now I'm reading Novak's more recent book, No One Sees God: The Dark Night of Atheists and Believers. It is very interesting and also very empathetic and respectful of atheism. He especially likes Albert Camus, but also is remarkably patient and civil in the face of today's polemical atheists, some of whom are personal friends.

There is a view or assumption that the most “liberal” in religion, those who most accommodate to or approximate secular-liberal thinking are also the most rational or committed to reason. But I would argue that that distinction belongs to the Catholic Church, for which Reason (Logos) along with Love (Caritas) are central to their understanding of God. It was that commitment to reason and hence the intelligibility of everything in a reasonable God's Creation that made possible the rise of science (as even atheists like Alfred North Whitehead recognized, unlike today's public atheists). It also explains why most of the world's great scientists, theologians, and philosophers have been Catholic or at least--after the Reformation--Christians. As Juergen Habermas, the distinguished leftist, atheist German philosopher who had an interesting dialog with then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, put it, 'Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this day, we have no other options [than Christianity]. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter.'

In contrast to Protestantism, at least to those tendencies within it that see reason as depraved since the Fall and hence unreliable, Catholicism always emphasized the centrality of reason in defining and developing doctrine, and the complementarity and necessity to each other of both faith and reason. Every phrase and aspect of this most complex of religions has been subjected to intense scrutiny and theological discussion. (Not to discount Catholicism's mystical and contemplative traditions, but these developed within the rational structure of Catholic doctrine, not as substitutes for it.)

I think there is an interesting parallel between the professionalization of science and of social work. Both were important activities of the clergy in particular--the amateur parson-scientist was a stock figure of 19th century literature--and charity remained and remains at the heart of Christian "ministry." But as these fields professionalized, they distanced themselves from their clerical roots. Social work emerged as a profession out of the Charity Organization Societies, an effort to adopt "scientific charity" in place of the earlier disorganized efforts of amateurs. Scientists became professionals and also distanced themselves from amateurs and their association with the Church. The narrative of a fundamental opposition between science and religion, so dear to today's public atheists, was an invention of the 19th century--of two books in particular, Draper's History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874) and Andrew Dickson White's History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1876). (For a modern analytic philosopher's assessment, see Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism.) This was the very same time as the COS's were getting under way in the eastern U.S. Not cause and effect of course, but two expressions of the professionalizing tendencies of the time and place (White was the first president of Cornell).

Explaining Atheism Pt. 1

I have been reading both recent popular atheist books by the likes of Dawkins, Hitchens et al. (Ditchkins, as Terry Eagleton calls them)and also some of the critiques of this outpouring of militantly anti-religious (primarily anti-Christian) bestsellers. The best of these critiques of the atheists (so far) are by David Bentley Hart, Alister McGrath, Dinesh D'Souza, and the formerly leading atheist philosopher Antony Flew, as well as the Marxist critic Eagleton himself.

All of the anti-religious writing and much of the response assume that it is religion that needs to be explained and justified. During the heyday of atheism in the 19th century, the leading atheist intellectuals, wrote not to refute religion but to explain it as a social or psychological phenomenon. That is, Feuerbach, Marx, and Freud, most influentially, took as their starting point that the truth claims of Christianity and all other religions were false and did not trouble themselves with the task of refuting them. The default position, the truth, was atheism. The task then was to explain why religion had been such a universal phenomenon in human experience until their time. (See McGrath's excellent, The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World for a review of the explanations advanced by Feuerbach, Freud, and Marx.)

But what if we examined atheism in the same way? We assume that it is false as well as rare in the cultures of humankind. Then the task is to explain its rise to prominence among European intellectuals in the 18th and especially 19th centuries, its political spread so that half the world's population lived under officially atheist regimes by the mid-20th century; and its rapid decline, along with theresurgence of religious belief since the late 20th century. From this perspective, atheism is a socially constructed, historically specific phenomenon, of immense importance in its day and still of wide appeal in Europe and among the elites of North America.

McGrath's Twilight is immensely helpful in this regard. Of particular interest to me is the way that the notion of a "war" between science and religion arose in the social conditions of 19th century England and eastern North America. It is of course the opposite of the truth as far as Christianity is concerned. Almost all the great scientists from the Middle Ages through Newton were either churchmen (priests or monks, etc.) or at least devout Christians. One of the greatest scientists of the 19th century, Gregor Mendel, was a Catholic monk. In 19th century England, the parson-scientist was a stock figure in literature, reflecting in part the underemployment of the clergy in the state-supported church. The rise of professional scientists led to a rivalry between the scientific amateurs (clergy) and professional scientists as the latter asserted their claims to recognition and support. A war was thus invented between science and religion, put forward by two highly influential books, John William Draper's History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874) Andrew Dickson White's History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1876).

Today, no reputable historian of science, to my knowledge, accepts this account of such a conflict or war, but the influence of this anti-religious narrative is still widespread among popularizers of atheism and the general public.

I am intrigued by McGrath's interpretation of the rise of this story of a social opposition between scientific amateurs and professionals. Is there a similar phenomenon in the history of social work where, with the gradual professionalization of social work, charity came to have a bad name? At first it was to be "organized" in a "scientific" way, replacing the old-style random acts of kindness with a more systematic approach to social casework. Today, the old Charity Organization Societies, in which the profession has its origins, is regarded in a poor light by most professional social workers, not because they lost sight of charity as love and a fundamental Christian duty, but because they were too moralistic and insufficiently professional and scientific--or insufficiently devoted to social change and justice. Just as the parson-scientists were seen as insufficiently professional by full-time scientists, so the pastoral care of the clergy was seen (by professional social workers) as a kind of amateurish social work.... [more to follow!]