How Should We Approach Charity as a Minority Community?
Aaron Renn’s Life in the Negative World is full of bitter pills for American Protestants to swallow. One of the hardest but most needed is that “Evangelicals need to learn to act like a minority.” In a society where the mainstream culture and institutions are non-Christian or anti-Christian, members of the Christian community “have to self-consciously focus on sustaining their culture and community life.”
Doing this will necessarily involve charity and – more broadly – a healthy civil society, defined as “a community of citizens linked by common interests and collective activity.”
What would this look like? We can look to the past for inspiration. John Winthrop’s A Model of Christian Charity (which gave us the phrase “city upon a hill”) laid out guidelines for charity within the Puritan commonwealth of Massachusetts Bay.
Interestingly, Winthrop sees lending within the community as a form of charity. We hear echoes of this in Renn’s argument that Christians should start privately owned businesses to employ other Christians and generate income for donations. Winthrop would no doubt approve of New Founding, the venture firm started by some of the cofounders of American Reformer. As Josh Clemans has written previously, New Founding supports Christians who are “building heroic enterprises in service to God.”
The distinction between for-profit and nonprofit ventures is largely a result of 20th century tax law. We should remember, too, that many American colonies like Massachusetts Bay were founded as private corporations. Christians who want to build and sustain a healthy culture in the Negative World should be flexible in choosing their vehicles, whether nonprofits, donor advised funds, or corporations. The rise of social media, crowdfunding, and blockchain open new possibilities for decentralized network actions, and we should not dismiss their potential.
But setting aside the question of means, what mindset should Christians bring to the task at hand?
In his history of American philanthropy, Jeremy Beer notes that “colonial communities saw themselves as obligated to assist those needy individuals and families in their midst – those persons who were their own” (emphasis in the original). But who did Winthrop’s Puritans consider their own? Primarily other Puritans living in the same communities. When Winthrop called on his fellow Puritans to “not look only on our own things, but also on the things of our brethren,” he meant his fellow Puritans living in what would become the commonwealth of Massachusetts, which had a clear sense of itself as a self-governing community. That mindset was appropriate for early America, when most people lived in farming villages and their lives had a local scope. In the age of social media, national events are no longer far away. They play out on our TV and smartphone screens. The national government, too, is intruding more and more into our personal lives.
The rise of the Negative World affects all American Christians. To respond to new challenges, we must each recognize our membership in an American Christian community. Christians need a “civil society” mindset.
But why not call on every Christian to respond to the Negative World by getting more involved in their local church? Certainly, we hope our readers will do this. Many already do. But the qualities that make a good church – confessionalism and a strong local focus – give them a strong appeal to their members while limiting their appeal to those outside. Even a multi-campus megachurch can only have a significant impact on the communities where it has a presence.
Many of the most successful organizations of the Neutral World were parachurch ministries like Young Life and Campus Crusade. They were able to mobilize large numbers of Christians by focusing on their commonalities instead of their distinctives. Their lesson is that, for an organization to be seen as a leader of the national Christian community, it cannot be tied to a specific church or denomination. It must be an institution of civil society.
Cooperation is easier than ever in the Negative World, when differences between the various strains of Christianity are irrelevant to the dominant secular culture. The point of contention is not any specific tenet of Christian theology, but Christian anthropology – its ideas of gender, marriage, and family. Presbyterians are just as guilty on this count as Pentecostals, so we should work together when possible. We should, of course, be honest about our theological differences, but any new civil society institutions should bring Christians together to pursue their common interests.
An Extraordinary Time
Winthrop counseled his Puritan followers to give in ordinary times “out of their abundance” and to give even more in “extraordinary” times. More specifically, times when the entire community fell under persecution, such as the Early Church or the anti-Puritan backlash in England, called for “extraordinary liberality.” The period Winthrop cites in England, though it saw bitter clashes over theology and church practice, was an undeniably Christian society. In America today, this is not the case. Though we do not face the same physical dangers as Winthrop and the Puritans, the future of our community is equally precarious. This is a pivotal time that requires us to think more creatively and give more generously. The decisions we make now will set the course of our community for decades to come.
For three years, American Reformer has led the movement to chart that new course. We have brought together Protestants from across the country to examine our history and start building our future. As the inheritors of Winthrop’s Puritans and the many other Protestants who helped build this country, we have a duty to invest our gifts in a way that honors our ancestors and guarantees an inheritance for our children and grandchildren.
The road ahead will be long and uncertain, but we can be sure of a few basic priorities. We must foster a new Protestant elite and give them a voice in national politics. We must build classical Christian schools and revitalize Christian universities. We must invest in Christian businesses that will hire the graduates, and we must build communities for them to raise their families. Each of these institutions is a fortress that will safeguard our community.
For every person who works directly for one of those institutions, several more will need to contribute their time, money, and connections to help it succeed. Just as the Puritan colonies needed overseas investors and the dissenting academies needed funding boards, our new institutions will need Christian leaders, business owners, and families to stand behind them.
Though the dominant culture has turned hostile to Christianity, many American Christians still enjoy considerable wealth and a desire to do good. Instead of resigning ourselves to pessimism and passivity, we must recognize the unprecedented opportunity we have before us. Like our forebears, we should attack the problems with vigor and prudence.
As we follow Winthrop’s example, let us remember the final note of his sermon:
“Therefore let us choose life,that we and our seed may live,
by obeying His voice and cleaving to Him,
for He is our life and our prosperity.”
Join our endeavor by going to AmericanReformer.org/Donate to make a tax-deductible donation today.
Image Credit: Unsplash
Has the current society and culture turned hostile to Christianity or to Christendom? Charity is great and necessary, but inwardly directed charity only is spoken against by Jesus. Didn’t he warn us against measuring our love for others by our love for friends and family?
We speak about this “hostility” toward Christianity as if there was no context to it. Nothing could be farther from the truth as Christendom shows. The intolerance of others and atrocities committed during Christendom plays a major role in the current rejection of Christianity.