Two events this week highlighted faith-based initiatives in society. But if you are unfamiliar with how faith intersects culture, these two stories could leave you with a misinformed impression — that faith-based initiatives should only have a narrow and limited role in public life.
First, President Bush praised the efforts of faith-based organizations in this week’s State of the Union address, and rightly so. Many people fail to realize that if faith-based groups disappeared tomorrow; there would be a large gap in compassionate caring for the down-and-out. Second, you might have read that the Salvation Army received its largest gift ever — a 1.5 billion dollar gift from the estate of Joan B. Kroc, wife of Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald’s Corporation. Since the Civil War era, the Army has dispensed “soup, soap, and salvation” to the down-and-out.
These are wonderful — and necessary — works of compassion. Yet highlighting faith-centered care for the down-and-out obscures the fact that historic Christianity equally reached out to the up-and-in. In fact, the early church might have influenced the up-and-in more than the down-and-out! It’s only in the last two centuries that historians have portrayed the early church as primarily reaching out to the poor and disenfranchised. According to Rodney Stark, this view “was popularized over the last several hundred years by Friedrich Engels, claiming that Christianity was originally a movement of oppressed people: the religion of slaves and emancipated slaves, of poor people deprived of all rights, of people subjugated or dispersed by Rome.”
In Starks’ book, The Rise of Christianity, he counters that the early church… “Far from being a socially depressed group, was dominated by a socially pretentious section of the population of big cities. Beyond that they seem to have drawn on the household dependents of leading members. The peasantry and persons in slavery were the most underprivileged class. Christianity left them largely untouched.”
Peter Brown’s The Rise of Western Christendom makes the same point — the view that the church mainly helped the down-and-out and not the up-and-in is a late development. “What is certain is that there is no room for the later romantic myth of Christians as a perpetually hounded minority, literally driven underground by unremitting persecution. Nor is there much more truth to the modern myth that presents the advancement of Christianity as the rise of a religion of the under-privileged.”
More recently, William Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect enjoyed tremendous influence with the up-and-in along with the down-and-out. This community of Christian friends lived and worked together (1790-1833) to change the moral climate of the British Empire. They cared for the poor, but primarily influenced politicians, bankers, lawyers, educators, writers, clergy, and business professionals.
If you didn’t know about these additional stories, you might tend to think that faith-based initiatives should only focus on the down-and-out. That would ignore our history and heritage. Faith-based endeavors should also influence the up-and-in.
