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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34396 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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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:

  1. 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.)

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

Advance warning: I started writing a short answer, but the process of doing so dug up a bunch of things I've had rolling around in my head but haven't thought much about in 15+ years. There's no thesis here beyond the first paragraph.

I haven't considered myself Christian in a long time, but I don't think you're going to find a satisfactory answer to this line of questioning. If you're taking the words of Jesus and the general message in the New Testament seriously, you should have already given away all you possibly could and thus effectively have nothing left to give to such a beggar. If not, there's no settled doctrine I'm aware of (raised Protestant, maybe Catholics have one) that dictates how you should cut this particular knot. Church doctrine and the words of Jesus are often only loosely connected, anyway.

He didn't say "donate to every beggar you see", and he didn't say "work to give, become an EA and feed all the poor", he said to his would-be followers to give away what you have and follow him into an entirely different sort of life. He didn't tell the rich man to give away what he had because it wasn't fair he had too much, but because his material entanglements would distract him from following wholeheartedly and lead to destruction. The epistles double down on the idea that wealth and greed leads to suffering and destruction. And while the New Testament certainly contains explicit directives to take care of the destitute, those directives are not always unconditional. 1 Timothy has a long list of rules for how to give charity to widows and under what circumstances to give it, warning that although the Church should take care of those who really are sincerely destitute, there are many circumstances in which giving would be worse. It's far from the unconditional charity that commonly gets associated with the church:

Honor widows who are really widows. But if any widow has children or grandchildren, let them first learn to show piety at home and to repay their parents; for this is good and acceptable before God. Now she who is really a widow, and left alone, trusts in God and continues in supplications and prayers bnight and day. But she who lives in pleasure is dead while she lives. And these things command, that they may be blameless. But if anyone does not provide for his own, and especially for those of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.

Do not let a widow under sixty years old be taken into the number, and not unless she has been the wife of one man, well reported for good works: if she has brought up children, if she has lodged strangers, if she has washed the saints’ feet, if she has relieved the afflicted, if she has diligently followed every good work.

But refuse the younger widows; for when they have begun to grow wanton against Christ, they desire to marry, having condemnation because they have cast off their first faith. And besides they learn to be idle, wandering about from house to house, and not only idle but also gossips and busybodies, saying things which they ought not. Therefore I desire that the younger widows marry, bear children, manage the house, give no opportunity to the adversary to speak reproachfully. For some have already turned aside after Satan. If any believing man or woman has widows, let them relieve them, and do not let the church be burdened, that it may relieve those who are really widows.

What does all this mean for us today? I don't know, I guess I ought to pick that book up and try to figure it out again. It doesn't seem to suggest that we are obligated to give money to every random drunk on the street corner just because they asked though.

Instead of picking up the book again, I'd recommend looking up history of ancient Christianity videos, preferably by those not active in the faith, because I don't think reading moral lessons into the New Testament is ever going to be fully coherent without knowing who was writing the letters/gospels and what their motivation/politics was. I think Christians tend to underrate the problem of "should we be taking moral advice from people who were convinced of a looming apocalypse?" and "Should we be taking moral advice from a weirdo who never met Jesus but had visions of him alone in a cave, and didn't really talk much with the original 12 disciples, but due to the path history took had a profound influence on the gospels and most of the rest of the New Testament"?

Can you recommend a video or two to start out with?

This is a good intro to Paul, the weirdo I was describing: https://youtube.com/watch?v=GXJUVnlGmI8

James Tabor has a lot of his own videos on ancient Christianity and Judaism at that time, and Bart on that channel also has quite a few although I tend to prefer James. Paul and Jesus by him is also a very readable and fascinating book on the topic.

Cool, thanks

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