Is your charity going to waste?

The "fire and forget" model of giving is broken

Haiti has received more than US$20 billion in aid for reconstruction and development over the past 60 years. Despite this, the country remains a failed state, and its development indicators are among the lowest in the world.

— United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research, Research Brief: Aid Failures in Haiti

Africa has received over US$1 trillion in aid in the last few decades. Yet more people live in extreme poverty in Africa than ever before, doubling to 433m since 1990.

The way that our society engages in charity is historically anomalous. I don’t believe that financial transfers actually qualify as charity at all, according to the true meaning of the word, for the reasons I outlined in my piece “You’re called to love your neighbor, not everyone”:

What is charity? Many of us would simply answer ‘giving to others’. But this is wrong. The Christian virtue of ‘charity’ is derived from the Latin ‘caritas’, which is a translation of the Greek ἀγάπη (agapē). Both caritas and agapē mean the same thing: love…

The fundamental distinction between the correct view of ‘charity as love’ and the misguided modern view of ‘charity as merely giving’ is made clear by St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 13:3: “If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.”

Charity means giving, characterized by love (yes, actual love) to those whom you encounter, not just in the form of financial transfers but in deeds.

Conversely, the normalizing of financial transactions to those whom you do not know and do not love, and whom you will never meet or touch, has paradoxically turned ‘charity’ into an entirely self-indulgent affair, in which the only thing that matters to the giver is the knowledge that they have given, rather than any knowledge of the recipient or the witnessing of the effects of their actions.

Hedi Xandt

This is not merely morally unhealthy. The new norm of charity as financial transactions to bureaucracies is highly destructive in practical terms too, as veteran charity leader Robert Lupton details in the book Toxic Charity: