Churches have it easy with fundraising don't they? What with a ready-made morally-charged audience and all... David Philpott discusses the role of faith in giving.
If you listened to the politicians, you can draw no other conclusion than that money does in fact make the world go around. Billions of pounds and euros respectively have been pumped into failing banks and similar eye-watering amounts of money have been printed for the purposes of quantatitive easing. The banks must start lending we are told, if the economy is to start working again. Yet we had already lost faith in our banks and now the Libor rate-fixing scandal has dragged usury to ever deeper levels of contempt in the public mind. It makes one wonder if St. Paul was right when he said 2,000 years ago that "The love of money is the root of all evil".
However, the Church is not without blame when it comes to filthy lucre. When I first started visiting the USA in the early 1980s I quickly formed the view that America was both the most wondrous and at the same time the weirdest place on earth. As a multi-culturalist by instinct, whereas I found the fusion of Afro-Caribbean, Latino, Irish and Jewish heritage – to name but a few – both stimulating and mind-stretching, my jaw dropped often at the plain absurdity of things. And there was nothing more absurd and scandalous to my as-yet-unformed mind, as the plethora of phoney preachers on daytime television.
Evangelists and gypsies
When I say ‘phoney’, I do not mean that what these white-suited, perfectly tanned enthusiasts believed or proclaimed with theatrical ease was in any way deficient. To be critical of a style of delivery or the way a man dressed would be churlish and I always knew that one only had to cast a sideways glance at Greek or Russian orthodoxy – what with all their bells and smells – if one wanted to see an alternative interpretation of the same creed.
No, it was never the Gospel they proclaimed that disturbed me but its link to Money, Money, Money. Rarely was a sermon concluded without said evangelist looking into the camera with uber-sincerity and asking me and countless thousands of others to dig deep into our pockets and send in a donation. Having made his appeal, Brother Love and His Travelling Salvation Show or whatever he might have been called, would then invoke the blessings of God on me for my obedience, and by inference the opposite if I had not opened my wallet. In this context, a gypsy woman of my casual acquaintance at Piccadilly Circus springs to mind. “Buy some lovely heather darling; it’ll bring you luck,” she says with threatening menace in her voice.
The reason for my musings about money was a conversation I had a couple of weeks ago in Dining Room B of the House of Commons. I had all day been tweeting with egregious show-offery that I would be making a speech in the House later that day – but had of course failed to mention that mine was not to be in the chamber but in the bowels of the building where Old Father Thames licked and lapped at the terrace.
It was, you see, the Great Britain launch of the Irish Christian charity, Fields of Life and the evening had begun with an overview of the amazing successes of this little-known group which has been working in post-conflict East Africa for the past 20 years. The statistics were impressive. Some 103 schools built; teacher accreditation and training programs; child sponsorship schemes; 180 rural boreholes drilled - and all delivered by a charity whose accounts showed that 93 pence in every pound they raised was going to frontline services.
“Do you think faith-based charities are fortunate in having a ‘ready-made’ audience so-to-speak?" asked the lady with the soft Edinburgh brogue. "Don’t you think that perhaps they appeal to a more naturally charitable audience and play somewhat easier on a person’s morals, particularly in Africa, where they have an instant connection with its beneficiaries – correct?" she continued with the forensic skill of Robert Jay QC at the Leveson Inquiry. Some people are good at that. It sounds like they are asking an innocent question when in fact they are challenging the very core of your beliefs. I am reminded of spoof television chatshow host Mrs Merton who once asked Debbie Magee: “What first attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?”
And of course my inquisitor was right. According to Trevor James, partner at accountancy firm Sheen Strickland LLP, “Research by my firm shows that Christians give out of their income whereas non-Christians give out of their surplus income. Assuming this continues to be the case it is probable that, as personal finances become more challenging, the input of the Christian community to the sector will become even more important.”
An act of worship
And I think that’s the point. It is not about Christians, Muslins or Jews being more virtuous or philanthropic than anyone else. It is because giving money and making donations so often forms part of their act of worship. The practice of tithing – giving 10 per cent of gross income to God – was one of the many Jewish Old Testament traditions that found its way into the culture of the New Testament Church and is today a way of life for hundreds of thousands of believers. It is this regular giving that maintains thousands of religious buildings, inner-city community support programmes and overseas missions. The contribution of the Church and other faith-based groups to transforming society and indeed the world is truly staggering and because this funding does not pass through government departments, quangos or commissioners, it perhaps fails to register in the public psyche as a force for enormous good.
There is of course a case to be made about those who have no faith but who still give generously without any hope of reward for their virtue in an afterlife. They are perhaps the most generous of all. My point is corroborated by an old Church of England recruitment advertisement in the 1970s which said: "Join the Church. The pay is poor but the benefits are out of this world."
So enough of this banker-bashing – for a while anyway. Let’s instead celebrate the community of faith, which through its giving - whatever the motivation – brings hope to our streets and life to the developing world. And here’s a thought to finish with. St Paul did not say that money was the root of all evil. He said the love of money is the root of all evil. I can live with that.
