I grew up in a large port city, with more than its share of the social problems common to most big cities. I have a snatch of memory of a young woman in Salvation Army uniform, wrapped against the cold of an English winter, moving quietly in the dark evening through the pubs and taverns of the dockland to seek out the working men who would dig in their pockets for loose change. I seem to remember that she did somewhat better when asking for donations from the slightly inebriated.
I’ve always respected the ordinary ranks of these people for their devotion and focus on helping the poor. For me, that young woman has always been a reminder of the deep motivation derived from the Christian gospel. Partly, she was doing what she was doing because it was the right thing to do. And the other part, I suspect, was that she knew she was serving Christ. Pure religion, according to the apostle James, is in part “to visit the widow and fatherless in their affliction….” Ultimately, the success and longevity of any Christian enterprise – whether with the homeless and destitute in an inner city or a Warren-style global response to AIDS – will always depend on this kind of individual, long-term commitment, and the Christian gospel can be a powerful motivator.
Nevertheless, Christians don’t have a monopoly on compassion, and there are enough poor and needy in the developing world to occupy our attention for a long time to come. Many individuals of social conscience have devoted their lives to alleviating social problems not from religious motivation but simply from a shared sense of humanity. At government level, responses may be altruistic or pragmatic. Sometimes the motivation for a government is economic (well-off nations with a middle class make better trading partners than those in abject poverty). Sometimes the motive is strategic. The Marshall Plan at the end of World War 2 was certainly intended to alleviate suffering, but it was primarily a strategic move to keep communism at bay in Western Europe. Ultimately, the difference didn’t matter much to a child with a full stomach.
Will poverty and disease ever be cured by such efforts? I have no such crystal ball. Jesus said that the poor would always be with us. It’s true that New York today isn’t the city Walt Whitman described in the 1830s, with its poverty and abuses. London isn’t like it was in the time of Charles Dickens, and people in Paris, à la Marie-Antoinette, do now actually eat cake. Yet billions in the developing world still live under the poverty line, and it seems to me that the best efforts to attack poverty, disease and homelessness will be partnerships between deeply committed individuals who don’t make artificial distinctions about whether the solutions should be provided by the religious or the secular.
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