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I’ve been reading the debate downthread about how Christianity and a more tradcon approach (defined I think largely as a ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’, ‘turn the other cheek’, and ‘focus on improving your community rather than enacting political change’) stack up in a globalised, highly urban environment. I find the conversation very interesting but short on concrete detail. For example, ‘people do not enjoy being told to sit up straight and eat their vegetables’, and ‘You need to innovate and find a way to square your religion with the updated understanding we now have of the natural world.’. I have considerable sympathy for both of these statements! But they strike me as being a bit too abstract to tease out real-life disagreement, so I thought I would post an example of what seems to me to be a concrete, modernist/globalist adjacent problem that’s been troubling me for some time and get peoples’ thoughts on it.
I grew up in central London, and my parents still live there, on a fairly busy street. There is approximately one beggar every ten metres. It is strongly suspected locally that these positions are managed by organised crime - they are almost all foreign, burly, and articulate, to the extent that it makes you very suspicious as to why they can’t get a real job if they wish to. Each of these people expects at least a pound from you as you pass by, which means that even a trip to the grocery will cost you £5-£10, about as much as the groceries.
What is the appropriate, Christian, response to this situation? Off the top of my head:
Pay them. However, if you are giving money to every beggar you see in central London, you had better have a really stupendous salary. Moreover, because the beggars are now highly mobile, both nationally and internationally, the number of beggars is fully capable of expanding to the limits of your collective generosity. (This is the modernism/globalism angle.)
Don’t pay them. This feels straightforwardly unChristian. If memory serves, Jesus pretty much said, ‘take the coat off your back and give it to the coatless man over there.’ You can square it to yourself by pointing out that they’re probably predators, which they are, but they’re still more desperate than you are.
Don’t pay them, but feel guilty about it / donate to charity / tithe. I think these are basically 2 with extra steps. I sympathise with Scott’s view that tithing is basically a down payment on the limitless stuff you actually owe, but it still seems to fall short of genuinely Christlike behaviour.
In short, how does Christian charity hold up when the modern world is capable of delivering infinite suffering to your door? (This mirrors our immigration debate to some extent.) Apologies if people don’t find this helpful but I was interested to get your opinions.
Jesus didn't say anything about giving money to con artists.
Except for that bit in the Sermon On the Mount.
Jesus said you should give away your surplus wealth to the poor pretty explicitly several times. However, correctly interpreting this would preclude Christianity becoming a world religion, so it's not the version of the church that came down to us.
Or that's my read anyway. The church does have slight cover because later in the Book of Mark, Jesus says:
By this passage, the Catholic Church came up with the interpretation that poverty, chastity, and obediance are only required of the priestly class, and regular Joes can still be saved if they ignore those rules. However, he is definitely still saying that giving all your stuff away to beggars is a thing you should be doing, even if God will cut you some slack.
It seems to me that this is a pretty popular interpretation, especially with non-Christians. On the other hand:
If "become a mendicant" is the actual general rule Jesus was teaching, why doesn't Jesus apply it to Zacchaeus? One possible answer is that the gospels are all made up and they're an incoherent mess, so it doesn't matter. Another possible answer is that the rich young ruler asked what he, personally needed to do, and money was his idol in a way that it was not for Zacchaeus, so it was what he, personally needed to let go of. This interpretation fits quite well with the rest of Jesus' teachings, with those of the apostles after him: Christians can acquire and use money, but they cannot let that money be their master, and they must always see it as something they are stewarding, not something they own. They must always be willing to let it go if doing so is needful.
And of course, that last description can easily be used as an excuse to cover a Christian's actual greed, but it is like that for any rule. All rules can be gamed, when they're made and enforced by other humans; a core part of the Christian faith is believing in a God who cannot be manipulated in this fashion.
My interpretation is that the tax collector's generosity was an indicator of salvation (EDIT: I originally wrote "sufficient" here), but not ideal moral behavior. Ideal would be "If you have two coats, give away one" as John the Baptist said. But the tax collector's generosity does reflect awareness of god's grace, which Zacchaeus is reciprocating with good works.
I use as my touchstone Jesus saying "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God" but then "With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible." To me, this reads as saying Jesus thinks being rich is sinful, but also that the grace of god can still push a rich man through. Otherwise Jesus would not bother to point out richness as a possible disqualifying factor, to begin with.
Then again, using Zacchaeus, maybe the lesson is that a moderate nest egg is okay, but only "wealth" is a sin. Where "wealth" begins past not being stony broke is unclear.
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