I recently heard a feature on the local radio news about a School Uniform Bank. The idea is to make good use of school uniforms that children have outgrown at rapid speed but which still have plenty of wear left.
It struck me that this highly publicised story was quite remarkable — not because it was a brilliant idea, as the reporters and interviewees seemed to suggest — but because the concept of second-hand items, or hand-me-downs, now needed a re-launch.
I wondered how many local think tanks and government employees had been called into meetings to discuss this new venture? How much had been spent on advertising? What would the bank premises cost to set up? How many state employees would be needed to run it? The questions just kept coming.
It then occurred to me that we have lost our moral compass when it comes to giving, charity, and community outreach.
Where did this begin to go wrong? Once again, we come back to socialism and the hijacking of morality by the idealists. Socialism is relatively new in its conception in terms of the development of human society. Though anthropologists argue otherwise, with their beliefs that early societies were based on equality, there has never been a time throughout history when everyone simply gave all their money to the state and everyone lived happily ever after. It never happened.
Societies are made up of hierarchies — whether the Left care to admit it or not. The ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ are inevitable. What matters is the collective conscience of those societies. That is how charity is utilised and societies thrive. In his letter to the Corinthians (1 Corinthians 13), which you’ve probably heard read at a wedding or two, St Paul talks of charity — or love. He is explicit in his emphasis: love, or charity, must be done freely and without ostentation — or it quite simply isn’t love. It is something else entirely. You might now hear it called virtue signalling, which has been driving us all mad in recent years — the constant egocentric declarations of perfect human empathy or practice.
In the West, we have become what St Paul describes as “sounding brass” or a “clanging cymbal”.
Unless we, as individuals, start to take responsibility — voluntarily — for our society, our society will cease to exist.
The Labour government recently faced an enormous rebellion from MPs over its Welfare Reform Bill. The cost just keeps rising. More and more money is needed for charitable causes — it’s endless. Raise taxes again and again to pay for this demonstrative, empathetic state. More and more money is needed to provide for the have-nots. “It’s disgraceful cutting the Welfare Bill!” they bellowed. And they won, forcing the government to abandon the Bill. No — what is truly disgraceful is that we have put a price on giving.
If we examine the charity shop — which is essentially what the School Uniform Bank is — it too has lost touch with its original concept. Perhaps the only ones still aware of their founding principles are those run by the Salvation Army. Charity shops were supposed to serve a dual purpose: make things affordable for the have-nots and raise a bit of money for the charity in the process — a permanent jumble sale. Now they have become ‘vintage’ shops. Items are priced according to brand or store origin. For example: this garment is from M&S, so it would have been £40 new, let’s sell it for £20. But we can often buy new items for less — so what is the point? A kind of snobbery has crept into charity shops. They now have permanent salaried managers. Then we come to the enormous salaries of those running charities — people declaring they ‘want a career in the charity sector’. What exactly is that? A career in giving away other people’s money? If that isn’t the clanging cymbal, I don’t know what is.
The exploitation of the generous-hearted by charities has been going on for several years now. Chuggers — that pushy blend of charity and muggers — was applied to those who would hassle us in the streets, shaking collection buckets, showering us in guilt, and shaming us for refusing to cough up. Do we get a say in how these charities allocate our funds? Apparently not. And some projects funded in recent years have been controversial. Yet we are still expected to be impressed by those who ‘work in the charity sector’. Well, I for one am not.
I’m impressed when I find quiet devotion — from people who have given up their time to run things, sometimes offering years of unacknowledged service. The good they have done cannot be measured. The love they have shown, the care they have provided voluntarily, will have changed lives. This is the love and charity to which St Paul refers.
We must cut the Welfare Bill. It cannot go on. But to do this, we must take personal responsibility. We must give freely of our time. Our taxes must be cut. We must keep more of the money we earn so that we feel able to give up some of our time to help others — and so we have more money to give to others. For when giving is voluntary, the rewards are real and the love is real. Forced taxation creates anger, resentment, and inequality. Red tape must be cut. Our personal kindness must not be regulated and controlled by the state.
The network is already in place — in all our towns and cities. The parishes that spread across our country are there. Churches and church halls were built for these purposes: for community, fellowship, and giving.
The faults of societies are not new. We humans are not perfect. We flounder. We make mistakes — as St Paul wrote to the early Christians in Corinth, who had got swept up in a torrent of flamboyant charity nearly 2,000 years ago.
His advice still applies and offers us real solutions: give freely, quietly, without ostentation — and the love will be paid forward threefold.
By Rachael Tearney.
Follow Rachael at @WritesRachael
