Effective Altruism and the Kingdom of God

Written by Colin Aitken

Every Sunday at church, just before communion, I join billions of Christians around the world and throughout the ages in praying:

Thy kingdom come

Thy will be done

On earth as it is in heaven

This is in many ways an expression of hope. We celebrate the fact that God’s kingdom is breaking through, pouring into the cracks of a hurting world, and we long for the day when everything wrong will be made right.

The hungry will be fed. 

The naked will be clothed. 

The oppressed will be set free. 

As the love and mercy of Christ work their way deeper and deeper into our hearts, we find this hope calling us to action. As we pray fervently for God’s final defeat of injustice and suffering, we learn that we have our own part to play in this drama, enacting the hope of God’s reign in our own lives and contexts. 

“Our future hope becomes the logic that shapes what we do today”

And so the words of our prayers take on new meaning. Our future hope becomes the logic that shapes what we do today. When we truly yearn for God’s ultimate defeat of suffering and death, we find that we’ve become willing to make real sacrifices for the smaller victories that are within our power. 

There will still be hunger, but we can feed somebody. There will still be orphans, but we can take somebody in. There will still be violence, but there is something we can do for peace. And so our lives become infused with the sacred, pointing towards and embodying (however imperfectly) the love of the God we adore.

This is a long and difficult process, and one that takes wisdom and support to successfully navigate. Instead of just saying “I’d love to help people who are suffering,” we find ourselves saying, “but how do I actually do that?” If you’re in this position, I’d like to introduce you to a community and a way of thinking that I think have a lot to offer Christians walking along this path: the Effective Altruism community.

Effective Altruism (EA) is a movement made up of people from many faiths, including no faith at all, who are devoted to serving others in concrete, evidence-based ways. There can be (as you might expect) lots of debate and disagreement about specifics, but the questions EA asks and the framework it provides to answer them are extremely useful tools for anybody interested in stewarding their resources well and making the world a better place.

“One of the best reasons to join a community like Effective Altruism (rather than just trying to be as generous as possible on your own) is that you can learn from and be encouraged by people who are striving for the same thing.”

So what is Effective Altruism all about? The basic values of the community are right there in the name: people in Effective Altruism believe we have a fundamental duty to be “altruistic” -- that is, to serve people who are suffering and to make the world a better place. And people in Effective Altruism also place a high value on effectiveness -- which we can loosely define as “using research and the intellectual tools God has given us to serve people as well as we possibly can.”

Unsurprisingly, people take lots of different approaches to this! 

Many “effective altruists” (including myself) care a lot about present-day human suffering. Most of my personal financial giving goes towards GiveWell’s Maximum Impact Fund, which funds things like malaria nets and unconditional cash transfers that rigorous research has shown to be effective. Others have donated kidneys, funded churches in low-income countries, and pursued evidence-based approaches like the graduation model for poverty relief.

Others in EA are concerned about the magnitude of animal suffering, particularly in the factory farming industry. (See e.g. Vesa Hautala’s articles for a Christian exploration on the moral value of animals). Groups like Animal Charity Evaluators try to prevent animal suffering as cost-effectively as possible.  

Still, others in EA care more about longer-term problems and how they might affect people in the future. Some care about the effects of climate change, and either work on or donate to political activism to stop its most appalling effects. Others work on limiting the catastrophic possibility of nuclear war, or the accidental havoc unchecked artificial intelligence might wreak. 

One of the best reasons to join a community like Effective Altruism (rather than just trying to be as generous as possible on your own) is that you can learn from and be encouraged by people who are striving for the same thing. I’ve personally learned practical tips for generosity from blog posts like Julia Wise’s “What’s it Like to Give Half?”, from talks like EA for Christians’ “Fireside Chat with Jay Dykstra”, and from numerous conversations with the humble, sincere, and dedicated people who make up the Christians and Effective Altruism community.

— Colin Aitken