Charity (from the Latin “caritas”) originally meant Christian love of humankind. Love of humankind can motivate anger at suffering, discrimination, injustice and hypocrisy, as Jesus Christ himself showed, as well as kindness and altruism.
But over the centuries, the word got used in a narrower sense, to denote compassion and alms from the well-off towards the less well-off: it became top-down, a way for better-off people to get to heaven by being virtuous. Righteous anger and purposeful action against injustice were airbrushed out.
This diminished concept of the word charity is weaponised by those on the right and left of the political spectrum as they battle for the soul of charities.
Pressure from the right
There is a resilient conservative notion that charities should bring people together through acts of kindness and selflessness, and that those who get into contentious campaigning and political debate cannot therefore be true charities.
This may be felt particularly strongly by vested interests and privileged classes who are directly threatened by righteous anger against injustice. However, those who are more generally content to look after themselves and their families within the accepted norms of our society may also resent charities that challenge those norms.
But the ideology of diminished charity runs deeper than that. For parliament to declare causes to be charitable, it is assumed, they should be self-evidently good in the opinion of society. The generosity of citizens behind such causes, the argument continues, is good for society and brings out the best in everyone. We should encourage altruism, selflessness and social unity for the good of all.
This is the ethos of the charity days of companies or schools, where everyone gets together to give generously to a cause that inspires everyone. That’s not wrong, it just doesn’t properly describe the work of charities generally.
To the many people who think this way, rancorous dissent and noisy challenges to the status quo should be a completely different category.
It’s tempting for right-of-centre populists to tap into those assumptions, which offer an incomplete view of the sector, and weaponise them in attacks on charities’ political activity or perceived “wokeism”.
Pressure from the left
The same diminished meaning of charity is weaponised by critics of charities on the left of politics. This view assumes that charity is the antithesis of the fight for justice. It’s understood as a top-down model that fails to engage with unequal power relationships and structural injustices.
The traditional socialist variant is that the state should provide good levels of service to all citizens, systematically and as a right, with charity a poor substitute that may undermine the focus on providing proper public services.
A wider grouping assumes charity as top-down kindness cannot deal with crises and injustices such as global warming, structural racism, patriarchy, heterosexism and class inequalities. Worse than that, many charities stand accused of institutional racism, class bias or patriarchy in their make-up and cultures, not to mention hierarchy.
In the overseas aid sphere, INGOs have long been accused of being top-down, reflecting unequal power relationships, and failing to decolonise their practice by giving power away to the oppressed in developing countries. In the philanthropic sphere, we have a major charitable foundation – Lankelly Chase – deciding to dismantle itself altogether as part of its “journey from supporting charity to promoting justice”.
Charities can learn from critiques from both sides of the political spectrum. For example, pressure from the left has led many charities to do more to counter, rather than merely reflect in their own make-up and ways of working, the unequal life-chances of different classes and groups in society, and there’s a lot more to be done. But charities generally don’t correspond to the diminished stereotype.
Why many charities fight for justice
Back in the 1980s, when the Charity Commission upbraided Oxfam and Christian Aid for calling for an end to apartheid in South Africa, there was a fight to establish the right and duty of charities to tackle the causes of poverty, illness, poor education and misery rather than administer sticking plasters without contentious comment.
There could be no satisfactory charitable outcomes without justice, they passionately argued, and so tackling injustices was a proper part of advancing charitable objectives. Bit by bit, that legal and regulatory battle was won. The commission and parliament developed their understanding of the law in that direction.
Charitable purposes themselves were markedly expanded to embrace justice. The advancement of human rights was added to the list, along with the prevention, not just the relief, of poverty. The advancement of citizenship and community development included the promotion of community capacity-building, and along came the promotion of equality and diversity, which includes “eliminating discrimination”. Another purpose is the advancement of environmental protection, with its commitment to justice for future generations.
The commission’s CC9 guidance, published in 2008, established that charities were entitled to engage in non-party political activity in pursuit of their charitable objectives, though changes (or opposition to changes) in legislation couldn’t be their actual purpose. That allows huge latitude to charities to campaign for justice and social progress, including emotive campaigning where appropriate. Sundry threats to tighten up CC9 have been seen off. And the recent covenant embraces charities’ right to challenge and criticise government.
We do it for love
So, charities generally don’t reflect inadequate stereotypes of what charity is. We choose who we are, without being boxed in by that narrow understanding.
We choose our values. We choose whether to fight for justice and empower the oppressed or provide aid and comfort, or both. We choose how democratically or otherwise we manage our organisations. We choose whether we want to change the world or make a small part of it a bit better.
We choose whether our cause requires campaigning and lobbying, awareness-raising, direct service delivery or all of those. We choose how to be the most effective we can be as we pursue the very wide range of charitable objectives.
And in explaining our choices, we – and the commission – are best advised to avoid that word “caritas” or “charity” as a defining value, because it’s so commonly diminished and weaponised as part of polarised culture wars.
Never mind charity. It’s enough to do what we do for love.
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