A Costly Story

Every once in a while, the same topic or event becomes the zeitgeist for two diametrically opposed sub-cultures – usually in very different ways. This week’s example comes to us from the world of Tik Tok, where a young woman called forty or so houses of worship, asked for formula for her 2-month-old baby, and posted the call recordings.

The shortest form of this story is that just about all the houses of worship either couldn’t or wouldn’t do it. At any rate, that’s the story that quickly went viral on TikTok, shot up to the front page of Reddit, and filled the algorithms driving user feeds on Facebook, Instagram, and X.

Was it true? Was it fair?

The other side of the political divide in the US certainly didn’t think so. Wherever it spread, so, too, did a counternarrative that the videos were cleverly edited, that they were all demanding things no church could or should offer (like cash), that she selected the churches she included and excluded from her video series to suit the point she wanted to make, or that the videos treated reasonable referrals to affiliated ministries or services better equipped to handle the response as the same as a refusal.

There are a lot of pretty sticky narratives at work here.

The world of Reddit and the very online political left have invested a lot of identity in the story that the American evangelical church is a den of hypocrisy and hate that has made itself a de facto arm of the political right wing. The same goes for Facebook armies of church-going folk who are convinced there is a movement to eradicate all signs of Christianity from American society, full of people who go out of their way to antagonize and take advantage of churches.

One topic. One event. Two zeitgeists in which two polar opposite stories were ‘confirmed’ for two political tribes.

For what it’s worth, having listened to each of the calls, I don’t think the facts here are equally distributed. Not that this sort of thing matters anymore, of course. But the calls were mostly conducted in a similar way and most requested food assistance (i.e. the formula vs. direct or indirect requests for cash). I think it’s entirely fair to question whether the project was in poor taste and whether a bunch of “good calls” that would be inconvenient to the narrative got buried. But beyond that? It’s just one guy’s opinion, but that was not a good look for American churches.

But it isn’t that story or whether either of the tribal stories at play here was more or less confirmed that I think is most interesting. What IS interesting is what the story of American charity going forward is going to be.  

For the most part, aid for material desperation in the United States is widely available and accessible. If you are desperate for a place to sleep, a coat to wear in the cold, or a meal to have when you are hungry, you can get it with very few exceptions. Sometimes in ways that would challenge most of our dignity and pride if we're being honest with ourselves, I think, but available. To that end, I think it is also true that aid for emotional desperation is practically non-existent. Needing to know that the community has your back, that there’s always somewhere you can go, that things are going to be OK – all of that is in short supply, and all too often unavailable when it is most needed.

I think a big reason for that short supply is America’s thorough embrace of the stories of shrewdness and stewardship. These are not evil stories! And yet, the scale of our embrace means that we have systematically inculcated a fear of being taken advantage of into the American story. In the terms we use often around here, the scale has tilted heavily toward Clear Eyes over Full Hearts. It’s hard not to guess at some of the reasons. What percentage of the phone calls you receive on a given day are not scams? Physical mail? Email? Tried canceling cable, gym memberships, or a subscription lately? Yet our shrewdness in creating systems of applications for access to Benevolence Ministries like the one that came up in the Tik Tok call to Lakewood Church, for example, means that they offer little more than one more bureaucratic and impersonal venue for material assistance.

You’d find even more of this in the bureaucracy of government programs, of course. Again, this is a universal thing, and we depersonalized and bureaucratized acts of charity by making them a government function long before church secretaries started making referrals to affiliated food pantries instead of getting in the car and grabbing a can of Similac from the Kroger down the road. I think if America is ever going to be a high-trust society again, however, the story of American charity must once again be a story where we say, "Yes, I know this may be a scam. Yes, I know they are probably just taking advantage of me. And I'm going to do it anyway."

I am not sure if there's ever been a harder, more dangerous, more doomed-to-fail point in our history to tell this old story. I'm also not sure if it has ever been more important.