Two presidents, two approaches to welfare. In 1854 when Congress presented Franklin Pierce with legislation funding mental hospitals, he vetoed it, fearing such federal involvement would curtail private giving: “[S]hould this bill become a law . . . the foundations of charity will be dried up at home. . .”1 However, when Theodore Roosevelt met with the White House Conference on the Care of Dependent Children in 1909, he left the details to experts: “How the relief shall come, public, private, or by a mixture of both, in what way, you are competent to say and I am not.”2 Charity was on its way from being a private to a state responsibility. How did this happen? A roadmap is in order.

In the early 19th century, private citizens, fueled by the fires of Christian revivalism, organized to both proclaim the gospel and relieve the needy.3 They met the needs of thousands.4 Because this giving stemmed from a Christian worldview, they gave not only generously but carefully. As Christians, they recognized humanity’s sinfulness and thus discouraged indiscriminate giving that failed to distinguish between the truly needy and the fraudulent. However, as the 19th century “progressed,” views of humanity began to change, and approaches to charity changed with them. A preeminent example of this worldview was articulated by Horace Greeley, the Universalist publisher of the New York Tribune.

Greeley believed everyone was basically good and, thus, he had no reservations about indiscriminate giving. Furthermore, he recommended the redistribution of wealth so that all would receive an equal share. Though his newspaper did much to change public opinion, Greeley was only the beginning. With an increasing confidence in humanity, charity became secularized. Citizens idolized the state, relying upon it for sustenance. By the end of the 19th century, the new direction was clear and chilling:

We ought, therefore, to regard the Nation as the Church, its rulers as ministers of Christ, its whole body as a Christian brotherhood . . . its progressive development, especially in raising the weak, as the fullest service rendered on earth to God, the nearest thing as yet within our reach to the kingdom of heaven.5

It is hard to overemphasize the practical effect of this change of outlook. In this new era, private charitable giving was actually discouraged so as not to crowd out government involvement.6 However, it was the federal response to the Great Depression—the New Deal—and the Great Society legislation that sealed the change in the Untied States.

President Franklin Roosevelt responded decisively to the Great Depression. His arguably necessary policies were a mixture of federal regulations (e.g., the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation) and social reform (e.g., Social Security legislation). From temporary jobs to cheap electricity, Americans expected Uncle Sam to provide relief. One young congressman who drank deeply from the well of the New Deal was Lyndon Johnson. He represented Texas in the House of Representatives beginning in 1937 and became known as Roosevelt’s protégé. When Johnson became president in 1963, he brokered his own New Deal, which he dubbed the “Great Society.” It was a federalized effort to battle social ills. As one sympathetic author wrote, it was a plan hatched with “the best of intentions.”7

There is much to commend Johnson’s work. The Civil Rights Act, for example, is part of his legacy. However, Johnson’s crusade to help the poor did not work. His policies failed, statistically,8 and they severed that vital relationship between charity and discernment. As Marvin Olasky, author of The Tragedy of American Compassion, argued, “The War on Poverty of the 1960s was a disaster not so much because of its new programs but because of their emphasis on entitlement rather than need.”9 This misplaced emphasis continues. A truly “great society” will embrace wise, private, charitable giving. Such giving is, after all, personal, effective and, at least in the United States, increasingly popular.10 With the failures of public sector welfare, one can hope that charity finds its way back to the Church and the private sector—home once again.
Footnotes:
1

Quoted by Marvin Olasky, The Tragedy of American Compassion (Washington: Regnery Publishing, 1992), 50.
2

Ibid., 139.
3

Thus, it was not surprising to hear pastors call for repentance but to also reminded their listeners, in the words of one evangelist, “that the removal of human wretchedness, and the elevation of degraded man is the business of life.” Timothy L. Smith, Revivalism and Social Reform in Mid-Nineteenth Century America (New York: Abingdon Press, 1957), 163. Social reformers of the early to mid 19th century combined spiritual and physical provision: “A chief result of such activities was to marry spiritual to social service. Organizations which still specialized in soul winning now carefully defined the import of that work for the improvement of society.” Ibid., 173.
4

The American Sunday School Union attended to unchurched urban children. Home Missionary and Tract societies did more than evangelize. They placed people in jobs, resettled destitute children and youth, distributed clothes, and fed the poor. Two hundred charitable organizations in Philadelphia in the 1850s (160 of the organizations being Church based) divided the city into sections for “systematic visitation and relief of every indigent home.” Ibid., 167.
5

Olasky, 122, quoted from William G. Fremantle, The World as the Subject of Redemption, 2nd ed. (New York: Longmans, Green, 1895), 221.
6

“It became evident in many communities that so long as private agencies, including charity organization societies, continued to care for those families eligible for a pension, it would be easy for the state to evade the responsibility.” Ibid., 137-138, quoted from Frank Dekker Watson, The Charity Organization Movement in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1922), 398-399.

article adopted from Karios Journal

First Baptist Church of Perryville is located on Rt. 40 across from the Principio Heath Center, Perryville MD