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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.
Christians are called upon to love their neighbors, and to treat everyone as their neighbor. The Christian thing to do is to try to figure out the best way to love those beggars on the streets. Maybe you'll make the wrong decision, but if it was made out of love then God will accept it.
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