History of Christian giving – part III

Meester Van Alkmaar: De zeven werken van barmhartigheid, 1504. Detail.

by Ethan Edwards.

This is part three of a three part series on the early history of Christian charity. Part I and part II explored the development of Christian philanthropy in the early church and in the era after Constantine when the church gained more access to wealth. This post will draw from the examples discussed to explore the implications this history should have for Christian Effective Altruists.

Christians have a variety of approaches to history and tradition and some reject post-biblical sources altogether. However we can learn much about the apostles and about Jesus through their immediate followers. We need not regard early Christians as either exemplars to follow or as corrupters to avoid, but treating them as fellow Christians with unique opinions on issues which have faced all Christians can be extremely valuable.

Who are the poor?

The major moral consequence of the rise of Christianity was a revaluation of who mattered ethically. Christians greatly expanded the circle of concern in a way that Pagan society had not really considered. The poor and the sick (as well as infants intended for exposure), those who had no reciprocal power of giving, were for the first time marked as people worthy of care. While this population was at first only the Christians of local church communities, Christians gradually changed this, and saw the enactment of God’s love as their moral mission.

This is in many ways the beginning of the tradition that Effective Altruism belongs to. When we argue for an expansion of concern towards poor people in foreign countries or to animals, this parallels the original revolution of the first Christians. While Christians did not necessarily advocate for global giving, this was not really possible considering their resources. And when they did become more able to help more people, they accordingly expanded. When debating with other Christians about giving priorities, it is worth reflecting on this history. 

Church Ethics

The early church’s ethical debates have some parallels to ours, but also wide and important divergences. The surviving writings of the church fathers show a similar concern with how much is right to give and what counts as true philanthropy. However it is notable that the well defined philosophical positions which constitute current moral theory – utilitarianism and deontological systems – are nowhere to be seen. The lively debate about how to weigh good and bad motivations, results of actions versus intentions, or who should be favored never feature a tendency towards these pure positions. While many Christians argued that one should give to the poor instead of frivolously, these do not seem to be necessarily arguments for utility. Spending on church buildings, on shrines, and on alms were not necessarily prioritized or weighed against each other, at least explicitly. Jesus’s command to sell everything and give to the poor was almost never interpreted as giving only to the poor themselves.

Perhaps more strange to us is that many of the Church fathers seem to have held that the benefit of giving is for the giver. Contemporary economic thinking views philanthropy as a transfer of utility from the rich to the poor, but certain Christian authors argued that it was really the reverse. It was not even uncommon to posit that the reason God allowed for the existence of poverty was as an opportunity for giving. This view seems extremely backwards to us, but it was a real position and does not seem to have been seriously resisted.

Social Roles and Giving

Christian philanthropy was distinct from traditional civic giving. While in later centuries some of the wealthy did both, Christian giving to the poor was a unique social act with particular social markers. When rich Christians like Paulinus of Nola or Melania the Younger decided to give away their wealth they radically distinguished themselves from high society by entering the church and leaving their old lives behind. The church had developed different kinds of life involving living in communal houses, celibacy, and taking on church work which those who abandoned the secular world could then fill their time with. They now occupied a new social role – the holy renunciate – which they could personally enjoy and use to inspire others to such radical acts.

There is no equivalent to this within contemporary philanthropy. Wealthy people who fulfill patterns of civic giving, to arts institutions or public facilities of their local city, are not really distinguished from those giving from other motivations. Giving to Christian causes has actually become very similar to the old Roman system, a method of the wealthy showing magnanimity within their community. Rich donor’s lifestyles are more defined by what they keep than what they give.

Effective Altruism has a different and more radical ethic: people are not just giving a portion of their wealth, they are sometimes giving much more and enduring significant financial hardship. Yet even the extremely generous are expected to follow the same lifestyle as everyone else by maintaining a normal job and a typical family and social life. Effective altruists regularly feel tension between the cost of normal life – expensive dinners, private schools, raising children – and competing causes such as the eradication of extreme poverty in developing countries. They have made an extreme sacrifice, but there is no attendant social transformation visible to external observers.

It may be advantageous to change this. Creating new social institutions which allow the extremely generous to live out a total commitment to the poor could allow both for greater giving and serve as inspiration to the larger population. A life where every minute is devoted to bettering the lives of others is not really possible to imagine in our current world of divided and competing personal commitments, but with new social worlds it may be. Monks who refused to handle money and willingly fasted from food even when it was available were illegible to the Roman society of the past; perhaps a pure effective altruist that we cannot yet conceive is in our future. This is largely a strategic question, some potential donors might be scared off by any pressure to change their own lifestyle, but there are opportunities to create some new and better institutions around giving.

Institutions and Donors

After its adoption as the official religion of the Roman state, the Christian church seems to have leaned into more centralized institutional authority as the best method of distributing its increasing funds in line with Christian teachings. This probably seemed like a natural decision, it had always been the elders and leaders of the church who had distributed alms in the past, and it made sense that the Bishop as the wisest of a congregation would take charge. However, if one follows the later evolution of the church, Christian giving practices certainly diverged over time from the intentions of the original church fathers. The medieval church gradually became more of a collector of wealth than a distributor, and many of its governing officials (whether pope or patriarch) were compromised by secular politics and personal corruption.

Effective Altruists have been building excellent institutions to coordinate giving more effectively, including Give Well and EA for Christians itself. However if we are to be good longtermists, we must seriously examine whether such organizations are at risk of institutional drift and how best to prevent that. It is tempting to blame the church’s deviation on simple corruption, but the change of focus from the poor to monastics was a well justified and argued philosophical change. It is worth considering new governance mechanisms to prevent this, and possibly even investing in multiple kinds of organizations that can exist independent of each other far into the future.

Changing the World

The first Christians had a very different outlook on how much the world could be changed. Some notable thinkers argued that perhaps poverty could be ended if only the rich gave their fair share, or that humanity could one day return to an edenic equality, but by and large a complete escape from the cycle of famine and plague that beset the ancient world was not a real possibility. Ancient Christians believed in giving to the poor and caring for the poor, but they did not believe that all the poor could become rich. Through God’s grace, individuals could be saved, but the poor and sick as a whole class were understood to be a permanent presence within society.

Christians were correct at the time. Without modern medicine or agriculture, civilization was largely trapped in the condition of general poverty. The past few centuries have completely transformed our understanding in this area, now most of humanity is richer and more comfortable than the average Roman citizen, and total elimination of extreme poverty and some of the worst diseases are within our reach.

Ancient Christians could only hope for God’s grace and the eventual establishment of His kingdom to end these persistent inequalities. Now we have opportunities to relieve poverty which Christians then held for inevitable.  This change has been for the best, but we should be careful to examine how we are called to act with a sudden increase in our own worldly wealth and power.