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| Billie Silvey |
| Giving in America |
| Early this month, I opened my internet browser and saw the headline, “Charles, Camilla head for New Orleans.” My first reaction was, “Oh, no, not two more storms. They’ve really had enough.” Of course, I soon realized that the Charles and Camilla of the headline weren’t storms, but the British prince and his new bride. As I considered their possible motivation for coming to New Orleans, I recalled the footage I’d seen of Charles’s grandparents, the current queen’s parents, visiting victims of the London Blitz. They were most sympathetic, pointing out that the palace had been struck by a bomb as well. Families who came through the Battle of Britain know what it means to lose loved ones, homes, everything. In fact, it may have been foremost in their minds, because they went to New Orleans from laying a wreath at the World War II Memorial in Washington. According to Associated Press Writer Jill Lawless, “Throughout the royal tour of the United States, Charles has underlined the bond between Britain and this country--forged, in part, by the common struggle in World War II.” Charles’s charity, the Foundation for the Built Environment, is helping fund reconstruction projects in New Orleans. But most Americans haven’t experienced the level of devastation caused by the London Blitz or Hurricane Katrina. Just how generous are we? In an article, “The Christian Paradox: How a faithful nation gets Jesus wrong,” Bill McKibben points out that America may not be as Christian as we think we are. Explaining that “only 40 per cent of Americans can name more than four of the Ten Commandments, and a scant half can cite any of the four authors of the Gospels,” he lists a couple of statistics that would be humorous if they weren’t symptoms of a deeper failure. According to McKibben, “Twelve per cent of Americans believe that Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife. And three-quarters believe that the Bible teaches that ‘God helps those who help themselves.’” That statistic can play a big role in the generosity of our country. The Joan/Noah confusion indicates our lack of historical perspective, while McKibben points out, “the quote by Benjamin Franklin is not only ‘not biblical; it’s counter biblical. Few ideas could be further from the gospel message, with its radical summons to love of neighbor.’” McKibben concludes that “America is simultaneously the most professedly Christian of the developed nations and the least Christian in its behavior. . . . In the days before his crucifixion, when Jesus summed up his message for his disciples, he said the way you could tell the righteous from the damned in this area of helping others was by whether they’d fed the hungry, slaked the thirsty, clothed the naked, welcomed the stranger, and visited the prisoner.” Based on this standard, he pointed out that “In 2004, as a share of our economy, we ranked second to last, after Italy, among developed countries in government foreign aid. Per capita we provide fifteen cents a day in official development assistance to poor countries. And it’s not because we were giving to private charities for relief work instead. Such funding increases our average daily donation by just six pennies, to twenty-one cents. It’s also not because Americans were too busy taking care of their own; nearly 18 per cent of American children lived in poverty (compared with, say, 8 per cent in Sweden). . . . Overwhelmingly Christian America . . . trails badly in all the categories to which Jesus paid particular attention. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the number of households that were ‘food insecure with hunger’ had climbed more than 26 per cent between 1999 and 2003.” As a nation, and as individuals, we need to consider just how Christian, just how generous, we are. Do we truly identify with and seek to alleviate the suffering of others? |
| December 2005 |
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