Faith, Hope, Love, and Welfare Reform

by Patrick Hynes - January 25, 2008

Reprinted with permission.

Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth about Compassionate Conservatism
Arthur Brooks, Basic Books, 250 pages, $16.95

Charity, Pope Benedict XVI reminds us in his first encyclical, is the highest form of love. St. Thomas Aquinas called it the "form, mover, mother and root of all the virtues." If we reach it "we shall find rest," St. Augustine tells us. Without charity, Paul said, "I am nothing" and "I gain nothing." Jesus issued a "new commandment to his followers: "Love one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love one another."

Real charity, then, involves more than simply giving your time or money to the cause or non-profit organization of your choice. Caritas is that perfect manifestation of love of God and love of neighbor.

Arthur Brooks, professor at Syracuse University, approaches his study of charitable giving in America from an entirely pragmatic perspective. He has no qualms arguing:

Charity depends on behavior, not on motive. Looking for motives leads to the nonsensical argument that someone who gives nothing but supports the idea of helping others is more generous than a person who donates the charities and causes but who has no apparent great love for mankind. Although this argument might have theological merit, it is not useful for understanding private generosity and its benefits for society. (And it sounds suspiciously like an excuse not to write a personal check.)

Catholics will wonder at these occasional sections in Who Really Cares where Brooks dismisses any examination of motives; after all, his pragmatic view is quite a bit different from the definition of charity offered in Catholic Encyclopedia: "a divinely infused habit, inclining the human will to cherish God for his own sake above all things, and man for the sake of God." And yet Catholics – particularly Catholics on the conservative end of the political spectrum – will vigorously agree with virtually every other section of this book.

In 1997, Vice President Al Gore and his wife, Tipper, reported charitable donations totaling $353. Within two years, Gore was the Democratic nominee for president, running on a populist platform and claiming the Republicans were "for the powerful, and we are for the people." During his career as a wildly successful trial attorney, former U.S. Senator John Edwards took no pro bono cases. Today, Edwards is one of the frontrunners for the Democratic presidential nomination. He is running on a populist "two Americas" theme: one America for the rich, and another for everyone else who probably can't afford him.

Neither anecdote will come as a surprise to conservatives who have long accused their political rivals of posturing publicly as champions of the poor while privately hoarding wealth. Brooks closes the case once and for all in Who Really Cares. He writes:

First, imagine two people: One goes to church every week and strongly rejects the idea that it is the government's responsibility to redistribute income between people who have a lot of money and people who don't. The other person never attends a house of worship, and strongly believes that the government should reduce income differences… [T]he data tell us that the first person will be roughly twice as likely as the second to give money to charities in a given year, and will give away more than one hundred times as much money per year (as well as fifty times more to explicitly nonreligious causes)…

As these examples imply with their emphasis on faith, government, and parenthood, the evidence on giving might lead one to the conclusion that culturally traditional people – maybe even political conservatives – are the biggest givers in America today. And the data indicate that political conservatives are, on average, more personally charitable than liberals.

There is more at stake here than a simple game of I told you so. In a perfect world – or even simply a better world – Brooks's research would profoundly alter American public policy. He thoroughly proves the "crowding-out effect," the idea that increases in social spending tend to displace private charitable giving. Worse, he shows how the mere support for redistributive economic policies (irrespective of whether those policies are realized) stifles an individual's charitable impulses. And so we end up with debacles like the case in Fairfax County, Virginia, in which the county health department shut down church soup kitchens for feeding the homeless without a license. Feeding the homeless is a government enterprise, you see.

But here is another wrinkle: As Benedict tells us in Deus Caritas Est, political initiatives cannot substitute for Christian charity. "Christian charitable activity must be independent of parties and ideologies. It is not a means of changing the world ideologically, and it is not at the service of worldly stratagems, but it is a way of making present here and now the love which man always needs," he writes. Catholics "must not be inspired by ideologies aimed at improving the world, but should rather be guided by the faith which works through love."

If real charity is something more than the simple act of giving money to the poor, as Catholics believe, and the growth of government spending reduces personal charitable giving, and if that government spending – a political initiative, certainly – cannot stand in the place of genuine charity, then perhaps redistributing wealth is not the Christian approach to fighting poverty, as many on the newly resurgent Religious Left have argued. If we want to encourage personal charitable giving as an act of faith, reducing social spending might do the trick.

That solution may not be as heartless as it sounds. Brooks documents the existence of a "crowding-out-in-reverse" effect: "Just as an increase in government social spending displaces private giving, decreases in state funding stimulate charity," he writes. It defies current wisdom to cut government spending as a way of spurring us on to love and good deeds. And yet, almost twelve years after passing the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, we have seen the sharpest reduction in African-American child poverty rates since the government began keeping statistics.

The Welfare Reform Act worked for two reasons. First, it told welfare recipients that this was not a lifestyle. Second, countless private charities stepped in to help these poor people make better lives for themselves and their families. Critics such as Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan predicted a crisis, but they did not count on the intervention of conservative religious people, motivated by love for their fellow man.

Patrick Hynes is the author of In Defense of the Religious Right (Nelson Current).