Charity: fuel of injustice?
by Mark Howard
One of the most striking images I have come across in over 25 years working alongside the church is this one of the Angry Christ. I wonder who is he pointing at? The money changers? The angry crowd? Me?
Stop hiding the good news!
Did you know that the UN’s 2013 Millennium Development Goals report shows that several targets have already been met ahead of schedule, or will be met by 2015?
The number of those living in extreme poverty has been halved. And in less than two decades. The best of all is that this is a result, not of what has been done for the poorest, but what has been done with and by the poorest.
This reflects a monumental and welcome sea change in global approaches to tackling poverty that puts more control in the hands of the people whose lives are most affected.
Advocacy, capacity building, self determination and sustainability are terms and phrases that are now being heard more frequently than ‘relief’, ‘aid’ and ‘charity’. And about time too.
Interesting then, that many ‘western’ agencies who engage in the promotion and support of the Millennium Development Goals keep this ‘Good News’ rather quiet, focusing more on what is not working, than what has worked. Why?
By doing so we are surely failing to champion the monumental achievements of the poor?
It wouldn’t be the first time...
More to be done...
We need to identify which remaining barriers to progress need to be removed.
Certainly, we know what many of the barriers are: unfair trade restrictions; unsustainable debt burdens; conflict fuelled by access to natural resources, or by religious and political ambitions; natural events; weak governance that is vulnerable to corruption; the negative aspects of colonial legacy whose impact is still painfully visible in the present...
For the most part, we consider ourselves to hold no direct ‘culpability’ for these things. We buy FairTrade; we respond to natural disasters; we choose our investments carefully. Or we choose not to get engaged, full stop. We keep our hands ‘clean’.
But there is another obstacle that is much closer to home, at its worst hiding behind an illusion of doing ‘good works’, offering plausible denial.
It is an obstacle of our making and it makes us all culpable. And I think that’s why Jesus is pointing at us.
Time for a change
I argue that, to a large extent, our own societal attitudes and awareness have not kept pace with the progress mentioned above. Our apparent ‘playing down’ of progress could be symptomatic; we’re just not used to it.
Our schools still teach young children from an early age that they are ‘giving’, sponsoring, or ‘helping’; with little sense of opportunity for reciprocal relationship. The African continent is portrayed as a ‘country’, a helpless one at that, not a diverse continent, full of promise and potential.
Too many charities still work within a paternalistic framework; working for the poor, using emotive language and imagery, inviting donors to engage on that premise.
The media still portray a divided world where the answers to many of the problems lie in our pockets. Television and newspapers know that the emotive words ‘relief’, ‘aid’, ‘charity’ and ‘Third World’ sell column inches.
Rather than challenging us to respond in a risky way, the language and imagery builds, and then reinforces, dangerous pre-conceptions; furthering stigma and victimhood, delaying the day when we can genuinely envisage, and seek, an equitable world.
Even if borne of a deeply felt frustration at injustice and inequality or heartfelt empathy with the poorest... I believe charity can still fuel the very injustices we seek to challenge if we look at the world through such a filter.
We have institutionalised the worst and most simplistic aspects of charity and forgotten that charity should be about change. And because we have lost sight of what charity should be about, the status quo of giver and receiver is further reinforced; and that, I think, is very dangerous.
Charity is fundamentally revolutionary. He’s pointing at us.
