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Editorial:
Thinking about the common good? From
the director: Untold stories Faith
and Politics After Christendom Comment:
Doing the Right Thing Give
Generously and Change the World? Economics
and the Common Good Interview
with Jim Wells (MLA): Polishing our Cars Review:
No Longer Strangers Division
and Diversity: Churches in a plural society Buying
in - Opting out Interview
with Fr Mariusz Dabrowski: Meet the neighbours Questions
& Answers: Reader survey responses Review:
Mark: Gospel of Action Bible
Study: The Common Good Difficult
Conversations: Let's talk about tax... |
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| You’re a generous soul. Earthquake appeals? Get on the phone and make a donation. The jeans you can no longer squeeze into? Give them to the Salvation Army. Starving kids in Africa? You have five copies of “Do They Know It’s Christmas.” Surely nothing could be simpler to put into effect than the Bible’s command to give generously? | |||
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BUT THEN AGAIN, maybe not. Giving generously is a lot more complicated than most of us think. There are many reasons for this but here are two of them: the welfare state and globalisation. The first Christians had no welfare state. Those who were at risk – orphans, widows, children, the sick – were dependent on their families and their community for help. Christians were dependent on the generosity of their fellow believers in the church. In fact, it is not that long ago that there was no comprehensive welfare state anywhere. And when there was some kind of provision for the poor and vulnerable it was often provided by churches and organised around the parish system. However, gradually the state took over so that now in most western societies the state provides services once provided by the church. Of course, the money to run the welfare system does not come from Tony Blair or Gordon Brown. It comes from you and me. If you pay tax then roughly 25% of what you earn goes straight to the state in Income Tax and National Insurance. On top of that, almost everything you buy is taxed at a minimum of 17.5%. And if you are buying petrol or alcohol you are paying a great deal more. So, all of us taxpayers are handing over at least 40% of our income to the state. And, if we are giving 40% of our income to provide for the community, surely we are already giving generously. Realistically, anything we give out of the money that is left, no matter how generous, is small change compared to the amount we give in tax. So, we come back to the question, What does it mean to give generously? We are already generous givers through the tax system (though whether we like it or not is another matter). But perhaps our commitment to or our involvement with our generous giving comes at the level of how that money is spent. And that, in turn, means that one of the ways we fulfil the biblical command to give generously is through political activism. This might be direct involvement through joining a political party and campaigning on our concerns. Or it might be indirectly, through supporting the work of lobby groups. Many of us already do this without realising it through support for agencies such as Tearfund or CARE. Either way, it seems that in our time the command that those who are rich should give generously might actually mean that those who pay taxes should have a voice in how the money raised is spent. If things are complicated enough at home, they are all the more so when we think about them on a global scale. It is not that long ago that for most people their world was limited by how far they could walk. Living localised lives, they encountered localised poverty and need. We, on the other hand, encounter few limits on our world. Our lives are global and, consequently, our awareness of need and poverty and suffering is global. We know what is happening in Zimbabwe and Sudan, even if we have never been there or even if we would find it difficult to locate them on a map. We know when floods, earthquakes and famines strike – we see the consequences. One result of this is that we are so overwhelmed by the extent of poverty and suffering that we are tempted to give in to despair or indifference. How, we wonder, can we give generously to the whole world? Well, if we want to try to answer this question we have to go back to politics again. If we should be concerned about how our giving through the tax system is used to deal with social problems here at home, then we should also be concerned about how it is used to respond to need and suffering far from home. But this is not our only option. If the biblical flip side of giving generously is not exploiting the poor and needy in the first place, then there are lots of things you can do. Do you worry about your pension fund being invested in British American Tobacco or Del Monte? Change it. You have plenty of options. Do you like the idea of producers being paid a stable and fair price for their goods? Buy fair trade bananas or coffee or tea. Of course it might be costly – you might have to pay a little more for your fairly traded bananas; your pension fund might not perform as well without BAT or Del Monte. But who said it would not be costly? Come to that, it might not be straightforward. Maybe some child made your expensive trainers in a sweatshop in the developing world. But maybe that child’s options were a sweatshop or a brothel or life on the streets. Maybe working slowly with a business to get it to improve its practices is a better option for the child than boycotts. We cannot give generously enough to solve all the world’s problems, but that does not mean that from our position as rich Christians we cannot make an impact for good in our world. The biblical command to us as wealthy people to give generously seems, at first sight, to be a simple matter. But, what I am suggesting is that it is far from simple for us in the world we live in. What is required of us is a different, creative kind of obedience. ALWYN THOMSON, formerly of ECONI, blogs at http://ourmanintirana.blogspot.com |
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