Today’s conversations about poverty are based on a fundamentally flawed argument: that governments and non-profits don’t actively work together.
The State vs. NGOs
This is how conversations around poverty are often framed. We pit nonprofits against the government. We either start there, in the middle of a conversation about the roles of organizations or we inevitably end up there.
The reason is pretty simple. The politics of the day is obsessed with the role of government and the role of non-government organizations in serving the needs of the populace.
But there’s another reason, too.
We want to jump too soon to solutions. We’re tired and frustrated. And we’ve been arguing about poverty and economics our whole lives. So let’s just cut to the chase.
Of course, this betrays our common goal of alleviating poverty.
The one acceptable shortcut
The firm foundation of our common conversation is that we must not tolerate poverty.
There is a genuine and fruitful debate about expecting poverty to exist. This is, however, definitionally exceptional. As in, there is some wiggle room for what is excepted from the norm. And the norm is the elimination of poverty.
But we don’t start with the exception.
We start with our pursuit of the elimination of poverty. This pursuit forms our ethical grounding. And it informs our view of the common good which transcends culture, religion, and national origins.
We seek to care for our poorest members so that none are dying in our streets. We don’t want any of us to die just because they don’t have enough resources to survive. This is an intolerable condition. No ethical society which has the means of seeking the elimination of poverty can tolerate any amount of preventable poverty.
This is our footing.
What we try to shortcut around
When we jump straight into a conversation about the roles of government and NGOs, we’re taking a shortcut around a whole raft of value statements. Values like the common good and the community’s responsibility for community conditions.
And we do this just to land in a familiar, deadlocked political divide.
What the shortcut actually takes us around is all of our ethical arguments for our caring for one another. The things we learn from our world’s religions, philosophers, and humanitarians about seeking the common good and collaborating for greater impact. And the place of power and authority to transform our world.
We jump over all of that to get to the place where the rubber hits the road.
But the bigger problem with skipping forward isn’t simply the material we skip over. It’s that we are placing the rubber onto a certain road. And almost certainly not the one we’d be on if we started at the beginning.
And that road leads to a predetermined location.
The Fundamental Argument is Flawed.
The problem with placing the government and non-governmental entities against each other in a political cage match is that the match is rigged.
And when we take this shortcut every time we talk about poverty, we don’t realize the way we aren’t being true to one another. We don’t see how we’ve completely redefined the government or overestimated the power of NGOs to effect change.
And we throw the most important parts out of the conversation.
Let’s explore this problem through a classic Christian debate.
The Case of Paul
You’ve probably heard of Paul. He wrote some letters which are included as holy scripture in the Christian Bible.
Paul was Jewish and a convert to what they called The Way—a tradition which would later evolve into Christianity. And Paul is best remembered for his purple prose and challenging views of the world, gender politics, and the inclusion of all people into the faith.
But even more than that, he’s known for a theological conviction encapsulated in the phrase: righteousness by faith alone.
As phrases go, it isn’t catchy. But it does invite us into a singular conviction: that our being righteous comes from God. So then we can see that it isn’t about how super pious we are. It comes because God wills it.
This is pretty old hat for those raised in the Protestant churches in particular. But most of us can follow the logic.
However, for Paul and his friends, this was a pretty lively debate. Not within The Way exactly, or only in Judaism. But also in the culture. Remember that Greeks were used to offering sacrifices to angry Gods in hopes that the deities might throw a few scraps their way. For these people to hear about a God whose affection isn’t dependent on sacrifices was a pretty radical idea.
So in contrast with all the other gods of the world, Paul was saying this god doesn’t need you to prove your worth to be made worthy.
Another writer named James
There was another writer of letters included in scripture named James. He was writing a little later than Paul and to a different community. And he saw a different problem.
James saw people coming to The Way and not becoming better people. So he shares an important conviction: Faith without works is death.
So one can have all the faith in the world, but if they are not acting like children of God, they are still stuck in the culture of death.
These two aren’t adversaries.
Paul and James aren’t adversaries. But Christians have made them so. Why? Because they want these two complementary ideas to be at odds. So they redefine the authors’ central arguments to be definitionally opposite.
If God’s grace is to be truly unconditional, then the place of works is entirely subordinate.
But if works are completely irrelevant, then the God-inspired change has changed nothing fundamental about us.
So to make these two ideas into opponents seems natural and justifiable to some people. Heck, Luther based his theological revolution on Paul’s idea being supreme. Oh, and he also tried to cut James out of the Bible entirely.
And let’s be honest: creating dualistic conflicts is what we do best.
But it isn’t honest. Just look at the arguments again. If they are adversaries, opposing each other, then what we have isn’t a divine argument, but an imposed paradox. To make them adversaries actually makes them imply different words than are written.
They aren’t opposites, though! Both can be true and both can be false independent of each other.
So why do we make them fight each other?
Part of the reason we make them fight each other is that we see the world dualistically. We think that they must be arguing two different opposing sides in direct opposition to each other. Which means we are unwilling to see their independence from each other.
We impose dualism onto the subject!
James in no way addresses the sovereignty of God by suggesting that if we aren’t acting transformed, maybe the problem really is on us. He’s addressing a different problem from Paul’s.
And Paul in no way addresses the “what next” problem of faith. He’s really only speaking to the sovereignty of God in a basic and fundamental sense—not the pre-justification of unethical behaviors by faithful people.
In other words, Paul is directly focused on God and James is focused on people. So they are addressing very different parts of the same larger equation.
Now, if they were opposites, notice what would have to happen.
Paul is arguing for righteousness coming only from God. The opposite implies righteousness coming only from works.
Now ask yourself who is saying no righteousness comes from God? Is James really saying that?
No.
Now, some who are totally on board with the oppositional system would say this is what “progressives really mean”. But that is neither critically true nor socially responsible to argue. As one so accused it is not what I’m arguing.
Instead, James promotes twin responsibilities: he is assuming the transformative power of God’s grace and addressing human agency in accepting responsibility for actions after we’re changed.
So, in the overly-simplified dualistic paradigm of left vs. right, this depiction of grace vs. works isn’t actually a war between two extremes. It’s one exclusivist view vs. one centrist compromise.
But that’s if we accept the dualistic frame.
And I don’t.
What Paul gives us is an entirely necessary argument for his moment. It demonstrated the inclusiveness of God during a time of exclusion. But it didn’t deal with behavior. Nor was it intended to. Paul wasn’t designing it to do that.
It isn’t a complete argument for the entirety of faith by itself!
Paul wasn’t prepared to deal with the free rider problem because he was focused on people still trying to game the system and win their way into righteousness.
But once we see start to see the loophole in Paul’s argument, that anybody can get in and not have to do anything different, we have to take on an additional value judgment.
James helps us deal directly with this free rider loophole in Paul by taking for granted what Paul has said. God is responsible for grace. Yes! But if we turn around and demonstrate character that doesn’t reflect that grace, we’re abusing it.
James doesn’t expect us to be perfect (though remember how Paul speaks of striving to be perfect), but that for grace to be effectual, it has to change us. So we have to actually be changed by grace.
Now take this dynamic and expand it.
Most of our conversations around poverty and public works operate with a similar dualistic framework that we impose. So, for our arguments, we speak of merit and deserving and present our arguers as oppositional extremes.
So in this way, we speak to the government versus the nonprofit sectors. And we put intentional public works on one extreme and market forces and individual giving on the other. But just like the false Paul vs. James debate, these aren’t polar opposites locked in an either/or dynamic.
They are essentially complementary and speaking to different needs with different terms.
Take for example the level of impact.
When Sister Simone Campbell came to Terre Haute with the Nuns on the Bus back in 2016, she shared with us a conversation she had a few years earlier with then vice presidential candidate, Paul Ryan.
Ryan had proposed a budget that made dramatic cuts to many social service programs. Campbell asked him how his Catholic faith dealt with this . And he offered that giving should happen from churches, not the government. Ideologically, that can make a certain sense. And Campbell acknowledged that she is grateful for the generosity of the church in areas of poverty.
Then she asked Ryan if he knew what the real cost of shifting that responsibility from our common institution onto the shoulders of others would actually look like.
To deal with only the cost of the cuts to SNAP, every church, synagogue, mosque, and religious institution would have to raise an additional $10,000 per year just to cover the cuts in that one program. And while some large institutions could absorb that sum, the vast majority of religious institutions could not.
Just for the cuts to that one program. And the plan was to cut many more.
To make the ideal perform at scale would require a drastic change in the charity model at an unprecedented scale. Just to keep pace with what we’re already doing.
Social Programs and Personal Giving are not connected.
With charitable giving at 1.5%, there is very little evidence people will choose to give to churches to do the work the government does. Why am I so sure? Because we’ve seen over several decades of decreasing tax rates that there is no remarkable increase in giving commensurate with those cuts.
In other words, the precise market conditions offered to “free” people to give more generously have led to no increase in giving. People don’t give more because taxes go away. So this central thesis of eliminating taxes to increase giving has never been demonstrated to be true.
The reasons for our stagnant giving are pretty obvious. Incomes have remained flat for three decades while costs have increased, so tax cuts have not been used toward more generous giving but to make up for the increasing cost of living. So it would seem that taxes and economic forces are not singularly focused on generous giving.
But there’s a more elemental reason for this. We’re comparing complementary forces with complementary missions as if they are oppositional. Personal giving and the state’s support for the poor are entirely unconnected properties. They aren’t adversaries or polar opposites.
Why do we do this?
For the case of expediency and political clarity, we place the responsibility of individuals in opposition to the responsibility of the community as a whole. And it should surprise no-one that those mechanisms which deal with the public good most directly are our governments.
The very purpose of government is to make decisions for the wider community that benefit the whole community. And it is uniquely positioned to make the decisions we would not make for ourselves. They are fundamentally different in character, scope, design, and impact from any other non-governmental organization.
Comparing the two isn’t comparing apples to oranges, it’s comparing the entire continental eco-system to a couple trees, some ants, and a flock of birds. This is an unnatural and imposed frame for our conversation.
But it isn’t just an unnatural imposition. Accepting this as an either/or debate as a given, however, gives particular advantage to some. Specifically, those who gain from conditions which impoverish others.
And let’s be plain about it. This false debate helps the rich offload their responsibility for eliminating poverty by transforming a responsibility into charitable giving.
But the moral hazard doesn’t stop there.
First, they shift the burden of dealing with poverty. Which then, in turn, frees them of economic and social responsibility for their creating poverty.
We need a real conversation about poverty
We might compare our usual debates about solving poverty to James and Paul. Going all in on Paul, like private solutions to poverty brings an ethical dilemma with it. Making poverty only personal still traps millions of people in poverty. As many already are even with present government support.
And at the same time, a government’s attempts to alleviate the problem of poverty don’t preclude the individual from acting. Like James, the focus is on the effect, not exclusive control.
Therefore any discussion of poverty, just like faith, that doesn’t deal with the material needs of actual people with our greatest centralized tool for engagement is an underdeveloped position. And to reject the government’s role on purpose is ethically dubious. Precisely because the government is so effective at scale.
So to remove it from the conversation makes our discussions ineffective and logically incomplete.
But if we recognize both our personal commitments to our local community and our collaborative responsibilities to the common good, we can find that our efforts are not only vastly more effective, they are also more affirming of the dignity of the whole population.