Christian Charity in the Era of Government Joel D.

Hirst Keynote Speech, Andean Aid annual fundraiser August 17, 2012

Dear friends and honored guests. It is a great pleasure for me to address you here today. I would like to recognize Wayne Cramer and thank Andean Aid for the opportunity to come and share this special event with you. The truth is I know the Andean region and people well. Having grown up in the Argentine Andes, I got my first look at Venezuelas pristine Caribbean coast as a teenager. Arriving only a month before the infamous Caracazo; I was there through the instability and attempted coups of 1992. I was there again working with the residents and survivors of the Vargas mudslides, and again working with Civil Society groups in the last half of the first decade of the second millennium. My wife is Venezuelan; my mother in law lives in Maracay; and I count many Venezuelans among my dearest of friends. The trials and travails of the Venezuelan people I hold at the very center of my being. It is for this reason I jumped at the opportunity to come and share this event with you and to help what I think is the most noble of causes; that modest act of reaching out an un-coerced hand to find somebody else and in the process find ourselves through the simple act of Christian charity. There are several reasons why this statement and the acts which it describes are radically important. First is of course the nature of charity. The dictionary defines charity as, generous actions or donations to aid the poor, ill, or helpless. It is not, however, simply an act of transfer of wealth from the wealthy to the less well off. Charity does NOT have as its goal the efficiency of redistribution. In point of fact, I would say charity is less about money than anything else. To be sure, money is important. The United States is the wealthiest country the world has ever known. It is for this reason that we are holding this fundraiser here. Committed people like Wayne know that we as Americans have more than enough material goods; that we in fact have plenty to go around. We have been extremely blessed by God; a blessing which has come as a result of hard work,

integrity, faith, sacrifice, commitment and generosity. The United States is in fact the most generous country in the world. Recent figures place the value of American charity both financial and in time served at well over $400 billion a year. Universities like Moody Bible Institute, from where I graduated, not only thrive on this charity but send thousands upon thousands of missionaries and pastors into careers dependent upon this charity. The act of giving is part of the fiber of America. Charity, however, does not only have the beneficiary in its sights. It is not one sided; but in fact works the other way as well. The act of charity humanizes both the giver and the receiver. Mother Teresa once said, We think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked and homeless. The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty. We must start in our own homes to remedy this kind of poverty. Mother Teresa rightly knew, true poverty is not about money and true charity is not about its transfer. Poverty is in fact a condition that affects the whole man; and it is found everywhere. And true poverty is not only or even most often found abroad. I am not being flippant or facile when I state that some of the greatest poverty Ive seen in my life Ive found back here in the United States. You see, I live in Washington D.C. the center of the political universe of this grand nation. To be sure, I also work in politics and policy so perhaps I am at the center of the maelstrom; but I have found myself tremendously disappointed by the some of the comments, statements and attitudes of my fellow Americans. I find in the anger and vitriol of the political discourse of our country a deep poverty a poverty that stems from a profound ignorance; and one that is threatening the bedrock of American charity. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, We are prone to judge success by the index of our salaries or the size of our automobiles, rather than by the quality of our service and relationship to humanity. I think that the ignorance that we are seeing in the U.S. comes from exactly this; the ongoing ridiculous and dangerous ideas that relegate the discussion of American prosperity, charity, and our relationship to each other and the world to a simple tally sheet of material possessions; of who should possess material goods and who has the right to take away, and for what reason. What areas do we have the right to occupy, which programs may be forced upon us and what is the accepted response. An erroneously defined Social Justice, reeking of covetousness, breeds resentment. And in doing this, we divide rich and poor into opposing camps and then make them enemies; thereby destroying the very foundation of charity. This is, coincidentally, the same political discussion that Venezuela continues to have albeit in a much more advance state.

These discussions and dichotomies and the call to conflict between the rich and the poor keep us from seeing the symbiotic and Christian nature of human Charity in a God fearing society. Because realistically, most times those of us who are more fortunate receive from our charity far more than we give. When we work with those less fortunate, we ennoble our condition as we make common cause with those who have fought throughout the generations past against poverty, misery and death. We also make real relationships; not ones brought about by always agreeing, or by convenience, or even by shared culture or geography, but instead through the very human act of seeking out the spark in each others lives and fanning that fire until it burns white hot. In his short time on earth, Jesus talked a great deal about the poor; but always for the express purpose of building the church. He was not, as some teach, encouraging redistribution, confrontation or class warfare; but instead the communion of shared charity. In Jesus church, the poor and the rich were the same. This brings us to the next important point of charity; it must be un-coerced. Christ understood that coercion never brought about true conversion. A recent blogger put it best, When Jesus spoke about loving one another, there isnt the slightest indication that he was defining love as making sure others are charitable. He was calling each heart to act for itself in love toward others. Any external compulsion to act charitably would not be love, but coercion and thievery. There is an important reason for this. For those forced to give (be it of their wealth, opening their house or volunteering their time), the individual act of personal sacrifice is transformed into just another obligation. It becomes a tax; and the humanizing joy received as the counterpart to an act of generosity becomes instead the resentment at being forced to do something. For those on the receiving end, generosity is morphed from a kindly hand of a Good Samaritan to become instead a right. The individual contact that is the glue of society is lost; the social contract is broken. Gratitude is replaced with scorn; personal responsibility with entitlement. The result is envy, resentment, hatred, and eventually class warfare. And what is now a tax replaces trust in God; the central act of all Christian Charity. The Second issue that makes a robust charitable community important is that Christian charity serves in its own way as a check and a balance on overactive, usually Godless government. Give to Caesar what is Caesars, and to God what is Gods was Jesuss message, clearly differentiating between the roles of the two. Unfortunately, as we have seen too often in the world and at home, activist governments attempting to socially engineer their societies do so by using peoples poverty against them. They create programs funded at the point of a gun to bind the poor and the rich to the government through these charities turned entitlements, which are in turn managed by a string of

anonymous bureaucrats. Even worse, they then use these entitlements to return a favor to an interest group or demand that people of faith go against their most sacred principles in response to a partisan agenda or a campaign promise. Instead of the free act of a free man; finding and funding the issue that we most believe in; we are forced to give our hard earned money to that which dont care about, or worse that we believe actually harms our society. Finally, church-based charity counters the entire toxic argument of sustainability (budgetary or otherwise). Charity is not meant to be sustainable because sustainability reduces faith, commitment and individual sacrifice. Charity is instead a helping hand to those most in need, in their time of most need. This is true whether it is for the survivors of an earthquake abroad or a family who loses a job and is having difficulty paying their mortgage. The Lords prayer says Give us this day our daily bread. We are entreated to trust the Lord. Budgetary sustainability brought about by the morphing of charity to entitlements is of course more comfortable; but who then do we trust? Uncle Sam? He may not have the churchs or the poors best interests at heart. No, the act of helping people through these difficult moments is an act of personal sacrifice (for both those helping and those being helped). It must be motivated by the humanizing emotion of empathy and compassion, not that of pity. Because of this, charity must be managed by believers, not bureaucrats; and it must thrive on donations made by people of faith who know that the Lord will provide if we only look to him. Why do I bring this up at this moment? Because I am worried about American Christian Charity. The aforementioned angry rhetoric, and policies, emanating from Washington may be doing irreversible harm to our community of charity. As this happens, it reduces our ability to work through groups like Andean Aid faith based initiatives upon which so many people both in America and in the Andes depend; charities that show the love of God to the least of these. In his inaugural address President H. W. Bush said, I have spoken of a thousand points of light, of all the community organizations that are spread like stars throughout the Nation, doing good. We will work hand in hand, encouraging, sometimes leading, sometimes being led, rewarding. We will work on this in the White House, in the Cabinet agencies. I will go to the people and the programs that are the brighter points of light, and I will ask every member of my government to become involved. The old ideas are new again because they are not old, they are timeless: duty, sacrifice, commitment, and a patriotism that finds its expression in taking part and pitching in.

He was talking about the American charitable community. Here, people come together voluntarily to stitch the richest fabric of any society that has ever existed. Churches, neighborhood committees, think tanks and NGOs all work, not to control each other but to improve the quality of our democracy; and to deepen our faith. This is what has sustained Americas place in the world. Citizens coming together voluntarily to do good. Not coming together in a violent act of occupation, or to demand something that is not theirs; but instead to give back freely from that which they worked so hard to achieve. You see, President Bush was comfortable with the American narrative and content to step back and fan the flames that light up our national landscape. Flames like Andean Aid. He was a wise leader. This should not be taken for granted, for it is not always the case. Distrust often seeps into the debate by leaders who do not believe in America or trust in the Lord. Thinking primarily of the evils of society and yes there are many they want to replace the individual pinpricks of light with a blanketing federal bureaucracy. Do-gooders are replaced with an army of unthinking bureaucrats; which has the unintended consequence of extinguishing the individual lights that illuminate us. And the fabric of faith in America starts to shred. For all these reasons, when the function of human charity is devolved to communities of faith; it frees the act of caring for others from the murky and turbulent waters of partisan politics and empty pity; humanizing both ends of the relationship. It wrests from the government another funding stream for their use on partisan political projects and the creation of bureaucracies to perpetuate those projects; and it allows individual acts of human compassion to flourish. The Christian can then continue to be the salt and light of the world. And here is the rub. This will only continue to be the case if we defend it with courage and conviction. Freedom is not a natural state; and laissez faire compassion is under a sustained assault; perhaps like no other time in history. But there is an answer. Like everything else in our society, our freedoms are only defended through their use. For this reason, as we come together today to celebrate the excellent work of Andean Aid in Venezuela and Colombia, I would entreat you all to look to your faith. Understanding that it is only in acts of Christian charity that we can preserve our country and better our world, I ask you to

dig deeply and give with courage. Because, if we abdicate the role of the church in human charity; who else can we look to, to illuminate our world and preserve it?