Baker at Man vs. Debt hit the gong at several blog carnivals this week with his rumination on the various excuses not to give money to charities. While the article is well written and I respect the passion with which his readers respond, the enthusiasm for giving away hard-earned wages escapes me.
I rarely donate cash to any charities or churches. There’s a reason for that: charitable giving warped my father’s psychology, influencing his entire life for the not-necessarily-better, and it permanently alienated his two older brothers from each other. Effectively, it destroyed his mother and his family. Because of his experiences, he would never allow my mother to teach me religion or to drag me to church, and he would not permit her or himself to donate to anything.
At the turn of the twentieth century, my grandmother inherited a substantial sum from her father, who had accumulated a small fortune in freighting buffalo hides out of Oklahoma to market in Texas. By the time my father came on the scene, rather late in her life, she was pretty well set: she owned two houses and a commercial property in Fort Worth, and she had money in the bank.
My father was a change-of-life baby: the youngest of his two brothers was 18 years older than he. At the time he was born, his father ran off, abandoning the middle-aged wife to care for the new baby herself. Her two other sons were, by this point, out of the house and launched on their own lives. One became a ranch hand, running cattle in west Texas; the other went to work at a Fort Worth dairy. Both men had their own families, with all the concerns that entails.
Over the next decade or so, my grandmother became engaged with an alternative Christian church that since then has evolved into the mainstream. Neither brother paid much attention to what was going on, although my father realized something was awry by the time he was about ten years old. She was quietly giving money to this church: large amounts of money. The church was gratefully accepting it and offering exactly nothing in return.
The two older brothers learned about this only after it was way too late. They found out when the county seized their mother’s home for unpaid taxes. She couldn’t pay her property taxes, because she had no money. She was flat broke, having given every penny of her fortune to the church.
Did this make her a better person? No. Did it contribute to her personal happiness? Obviously not. Did it make her holy in the eyes of God? Maybe. God didn’t do much to keep a roof over her head, though. Nor did He prevent creditors and the government from taking away what little she had left. She lost both houses and the gas station, and everything she had ever had was gone. There was no help for her from any direction. She died in desperate penury, without a word from the worthies of the church that had taken all her money.
My cattleman uncle blamed his brother, my other uncle, for this state of affairs. He felt that his brother should have been keeping an eye on their mother, since he was the one who stayed in Fort Worth. The two men fought, and after that they never spoke to each other again.
My father was a little boy, but he was old enough to understand that his home was gone, his mother was reduced to poverty, and a substantial inheritance that should have supported her and all three of her sons had evaporated into the coffers of a church. He determined that he would earn back the entire amount that she had lost.
And he did. By the time he reached his goal, forty years later, the dollar amount wasn’t very much, and because he wasn’t an educated man, he didn’t understand that to match the buying power of what she lost, he would have had to save over seven times as much. But that didn’t matter: in his mind he’d regained her losses. As soon as he reached his goal, he retired, imagining he would be set for life.
To do it, he
• dropped out of school in the 11th grade;
• lied about his age to join the navy;
• worked like an animal all his life;
• spent ten grim years of his life, my mother’s life, and my life in a godforsaken outpost in the Arabian desert;
• pinched every penny that came his way;
• based his marriage and his entire life on the accumulation of savings;
• lived a miser’s life right up until the time he died.
To say he was a frugal man is to understate. Saving money became an obsession, and he focused all of our lives on it. Because he didn’t really understand money well, he made some serious mistakes, topmost among them investing all he had in insurance securities, which during the 1950s were returning at a rate of 30 percent. He didn’t realize a) that investments should be diversified, and b) no investment that was earning that much could possibly last long. When the bottom fell out of the insurance securities market, he lost almost everything—just as he stood at the verge of making his goal.
He did eventually earn the lost savings back, but this fiasco added another ten years of hard labor to his financial plan, and it pinched his personality even more than it was already pinched. Overall, he fared pretty well, considering that he had no education and only the opportunities he managed to wrest from life by main force. He kept us in the middle class, and he left about a hundred thousand dollars to his wife, my son, and me.
But his character was changed by his mother’s charity: warped and crabbed. And he was effectively left alone as a teenager, his two brothers spun off like asteroids in deep space. What remained of his family fell apart, and he spent his entire life trying to put what he thought was his birthright back together.
And that’s why I don’t give to churches.
To my mind, charity begins at home. If I give any money away, it’s to my son, who has returned the favor by growing into a decent man. By keeping myself off the public dole, I save the taxpayer a great deal of money. And let us bear in mind that what I do to keep myself off the dole—mostly teaching—is itself a form of charity: I educate young people for a small fraction of what anyone with comparable skills doing a comparable amount of work with comparable management responsibility would earn in business. She who gives away her time, energy, and skill for the public good donates something worth a great deal more than cash.
. . . to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
I have to admit that I have trouble understanding this logic.
My father has a similar rationale for avoiding churches. In his case, as a small boy, he watched a church congregation squabble over who should be honoured with a stained glass window. In the end, a bunch of families ran roughshod over the elderly widow who had donated the money for the window in the first place. To this day, my dad avoids association with any church.
What I find hard to understand is why a single bad experience (whether with a charity, a church, or anything else) is used to justify damning the whole lot. Hell, I dated a fellow who ended up stalking me and harming a lot of people in the process. Would it have made sense for me to swear off romantic relationships forevermore?
There are a LOT of crappy charities and churches (feel free to substitute synagogues, mosques, etc.) But then there are the ones that, in their small ways, offer fellowship, and community, and security, in a way that is otherwise largely absent in our society, especially for folks living on the margins.
I can understand why *he* took it to those extremes – his life story was built around the theme of redeeming that which was lost to the church under a charitable guise. It takes a toll on the psyche. I’m sure I carry scars from my past ten years and they were nothing compared to his discovery and subsequent lifestyle.
And I’m not one for organized religion, but if I found a church or charity doing good work, and my bases were covered many though they are, I would be willing to give to them.
Heck, I give bits and bobs now when I’m unemployed and pass on spending on myself. But I think it’s important to find a balance between taking care of yourself and lending a hand in the community one way or another. I remember all the stories of my parents receiving some small form of assistance when I was growing up and they were truly poor, with the single change of clothing, and I can’t help but want to help in some small way as well.
I find it important to have generosity towards my friends and strangers because so many have helped me along the way, and I’ve been all but a stranger to them as well.
@ Marianne O and Revanche: IMHO, she who doesn’t learn from history remains a child. To disregard experience, even if it’s one’s parent’s experience and not one’s direct experience, would be foolhardy.
Granted, not all churches are the same (or so we’d like to think). But the fact is that when your assets are limited and you have a family, your first concern should be to benefit your own, not an institution that disburses your money in ways over which you have no control.
As for the widow who didn’t get the window named after her, money should be given anonymously anyway. If she really loved the church, maybe it didn’t matter to her whether someone else’s ego got in the way. On the other hand, if she donated because she expected to see her name on one of those gilded plaques (they’re all over my church), possibly she was giving for the wrong reason.
I donate to my church: I donate time and talent. At one point I was donating 5 hours a week on a regular basis, plus a significant amount more ad hoc. Right now I give them 3 1/2 hours a week of my time, but that may go up, now that the insane job at the Great Desert University ends.
Time has monetary value. Since my time bills out at $60/hour on a contract basis, effectively I donate $840 per month.That is the equivalent of 20 percent of next year’s income (which will be tightly constrained by Social Security’s earnings limitation), or 10 percent of my present income.
What a sad story. Our perspective about money, both the one taught and the one learned (not always the same) certainly influences our outlook on life. I like to make the occasional donation to a charitable cause — not generally religious — but absolutely after all my needs are met and only what I can afford to give. I can understand why you might chose to do otherwise.
It would be going too far to say I don’t donate to any causes whatsoever. Certainly I give to Goodwill and St. Vincent’s, though most of the time I use things up and wear them out, so there’s not much left to give.
And I do donate to NPR and to causes like Andrea’s Closet. I have been known to give an entire paycheck to Planned Parenthood, and I sent cash whenever I could to the Obama campaign.
I just happen to think that donating to religious organizations is somewhat questionable, especially given the kind of social pressure that is brought to bear on parishioners. When a group tries to make you feel you’re not going to heaven unless you divest yourself of your wealth by giving it to the group (nevermind how you’re going to put food on the table in your old age), something is wrong. Unfortunately, that’s the standard fund-raising MO in too many churches that I’ve been in.
Then there’s the “you don’t really care about us unless you give us money” approach. This one manifests itself when the sermon takes the tack that it doesn’t really matter how much you pledge; even a small amount will prove your commitment to the church.
And the “you can’t be part of this group unless you tithe” line: how Christian is that, really?
If these were commercial entities, Consumer Reports would be all over them!
Maybe the story about the widow will make more sense if I explain that her son had been killed in WWII, and she wanted to dedicate the window to his memory. She was willing to give up most of her savings so that he would have what she saw as a fitting memorial as well as an asset to the church.
But other families insisted that the window should honour their sons who died in WWII as well — which would have been FINE, except that they weren’t willing to chip in any money to help pay for it. The final options were: (a) the widow pays 100% of the cost of the window, and all the sons’ names were on it; or (b) no window. She paid.
Anyway, I was trying to say that we can’t afford to respond to widespread ugliness by closing our eyes & missing those flashes of compassion and fellowship that make life worthwhile. I feel very lucky to have found a couple of communities that fit that bill. Sounds like some of you have as well.
@ Marianne O: My goodness, that is quite a story! What d’you suppose gets into people?
I think the stories here are extreme examples. The thinking that ALL religous organizations require congregants to give more money than they can comfortably give or hold the threat of not going to heaven over their heads is wrong. That bad experience prejudiced your family against all religous organizations.
It’s important for church members to support the church with time, talent and gifts (financial and otherwise) but not to their own detriment.
About churches and money: While I was serving on my church’s search committee for a new rector, one coreligionist remarked that people who were not giving money to the church should not be members of the church at all.
Is that extreme? Maybe. But he appeared not to be alone in that thinking. Although his comment was allowed to drop, I had the distinct impression a number of folks agreed with him.
Listen to sermons during fund-raising time. Invariably you will hear that ’tis harder for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. The spin: Jesus told his followers to divest themselves of their wealth and give it to the poor (i.e., to the church), for this exemplary behavior will save us in the afterlife.
These are not extremist Bible-pounders. These are ordinary Episcopalians.
Just for clarity’s sake, I didn’t mean to suggest that 1) you were in the wrong with your perspective, or 2) you don’t give.
I value time more than money, and I know you do donate your time. I don’t at all disagree with this statement:
“But the fact is that when your assets are limited and you have a family, your first concern should be to benefit your own, not an institution that disburses your money in ways over which you have no control.”
That’s pretty much the basis on how I choose to give or not to give — whether or not my family has been taken care of.
I suppose I consider my divergence a slight one: I know that I’m perpetually concerned about the long term and forget that sometimes a small donation of money to a specific area could make a bigger difference to the recipient than it takes away from me as a giver. For instance, treating a broke friend to lunch, or making a small donation to a grassroots cause I believe in. I’m ok with doing that because in the long run, I’m just taking that from money I would have spent on myself, I wouldn’t touch money that’s been set aside to take care of my parents.
There will always be an excuse for who we do or do not give to or why we give or do not give. I give of my time, stuff and money where and when I can.
See, that whole idea that a person who choose not to give to X or Y cause is looking for “an excuse”: that’s what I object to. It’s aggressive. It’s accusatory. It says there’s something wrong with those who choose to direct their funds in ways other than the way the speaker thinks is appropriate. That kind of rhetoric makes me dig my heels into the sand.