Charity Does Not Have the Effect Christians Want

GCSE Religious Studies (Philosophy & Ethics)

CHARITY DOES NOT HAVE THE EFFECT CHRISTIANS WANT

IT MAKES PEOPLE LAZY AND KEEPS THEM POOR. DO YOU AGREE? GIVE REASONS FOR YOUR ANSWER, SHOWING YOU HAVE CONSIDERED MORE THAN ONE POINT OF VIEW

There is much conjecture about whether charity really helps those in need or whether it promotes laziness and keeps them poor.

People that believe that the giving of charity works, argue that underprivileged societies would suffer more than they have without it. Perhaps recognising that just giving money to poor people will promote laziness, many Christian charities now try to give aid in the form of knowledge and skills rather than simply throwing money wantonly at the problems faced.

For example, the Catholic charity CAFOD, who recently sent a guest speaker (Dermott McNulty) to our school, showed us some of the work he did for CAFOD in South America. Instead of simply giving money and leaving, CAFOD stayed and gave the people the equipment and skills necessary to work their own way out of poverty by running operations like soup kitchens. This is a good illustration of how charity can work and totally improve people’s life for the longer term.

By giving poor people skills, training and basic equipment, they can learn how to support themselves for the rest of their lives, even passing on those skills to others. If they were simply given money or high technology equipment to use, once the money runs out or the equipment fails, they would be back in the same situation, making them in need of ever more aid. This should not be the desired outcome.

Another issue to consider is whether poor people themselves actually want ‘hand-outs’. As expressed by Mr McDermott, most poor people are uncomfortable even embarrassed to ...

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Another issue to consider is whether poor people themselves actually want ‘hand-outs’. As expressed by Mr McDermott, most poor people are uncomfortable even embarrassed to be receiving aid. They are often desperate to get by standing on their own feet. They want control of their own lives. Most do not like being felt sorry for and prefer to manage on their own at the first given opportunity.

On the other hand, those who support the statement in question would argue that charity often does make people lazy and over dependent on the support provided by charities. They hold the view that it is clear that no amount of charity can ever fully solve the problems faced and charity only makes matters worse by giving them a taster of what they are missing. Also, they believe that recipients of charity can often lose any motivation to work or improve things for themselves. Why work when your needs are being provided by others?

Such advocates believe that charities are making the situation worse for the poor by giving their governments’ an excuse not to take more responsibility in solving the problems. They contend that whilst charities keep providing resources, their governments’ are able to abandon their responsibility to their own people.

We can surmise that Jesus is suggesting in the Parable of the Talents that Charity does not necessarily have to be a Christian obligation. The Parable tells us that the third servant used his talents badly and is punished as a result. This implies that just because one (in our case, .developed countries) has talents i.e. monies/resources, this does not mean that those talents have to be used in one particular way. Talents are useful in the right hands ( the 1st and 2nd servants used it wisely)

An important factor to bear in mind is that Jesus does not appear in the ‘Parable of the Talents’ to condone simply giving aid to people in the form of money – the people in the country must use their talents. The third servant in the parable represents the poor people i.e. they need to use their talents to do things for themselves rather than accept handouts from charities (the master in the parable).

It is worth remembering that we have seen the negative effects of ‘charity’ on poor countries before. For example in Bangladesh, for many years, the country flooded. Many crops and homes were destroyed. However, due to what became a regular annual problem, charities started to anticipate the disaster and relief became almost automatic. Accordingly. the Bangladeshi government and its people came to ‘assume’ this help and abandoned progressive thoughts of improving the cause of the problem (deforrestation), thinking that all their problems were solved each year by the charity that was forthcoming. Arguably, without the aid, it would have been more likely that the Bangladeshis would have tried harder to solve the cause of the problem. This situation has moved on in more recent times, and now much of the aid ( in collaboration with the government) is focused on providing longer term solution for the people most affected. e.g. building of levees, irrigation systems, re-forrestation etc.

After considering the different points of view and the supporting evidence, I think that charity, if used well, can be very beneficial to small communities. It can give poor people a chance to work and improve their conditions. As in the example set by CAFOD in South America it can give people the opportunity to work themselves away from poverty by offering them some measure of self sufficiency. It can provide incentives to work rather than take the easy option of being lazy. .

Charity needs to be well conceived and planned. It is not just about money and ‘having its heart in the right place’. Otherwise, things can turn out badly and the people can become lazy and more dependent on the charity they get given.