Blame Henry VIII for Charity’s Conundrum

Early one morning many years ago I found myself sitting on my duffel bag in front of the Greyhound bus station in Casper, Wyo., waiting for a ride. Not far from where I sat I could see a man struggling to fish something out of his jacket pocket. His clothing was stained and bedraggled, and his complexion was unnaturally florid.

After many minutes of unsuccessful digging, he hailed me.

“Hey, partner, can you give me a hand here? I need a drink, but I’m shaking so bad that I can’t get to my bottle.”

I was not at all sure it was the right thing to do, but I walked over to him, removed the pint from his jacket pocket and placed it delicately into his outstretched hands. He thanked me and I nodded an acknowledgment, then retreated to the spot where my luggage sat.

I kept watching the man, and a few minutes later it became apparent that though he was firmly clutching the bottle in both hands, his tremor was preventing him from raising the spout to his lips. I felt uneasy about “enabling” his addiction — I knew a bit about alcoholism — and I did not want to be involved further. But eventually he looked toward me with a hopeful expression so I walked back, took the bottle out of his hands, and held it to his bloody lips long enough for him to drain an ounce or two. His hands stopped trembling almost immediately, and he mumbled something like, “Thanks, partner, I’ll be all right now.”

That was the end of our association, but more than 20 years later a question still gnaws at me: Was that or was that not an act of charity on my part? Was it charitable to relieve that man’s immediate physical suffering? Was it right to act on my sense of compassion even though I knew that by doing so I likely would be helping prolong his misery? Should I have saved my mental and physical energy to deal with the underlying cause of that man’s illness? Should I have consulted a phone book and, after a stern lecture, referred him to a government or nonprofit treatment center? Should I have ignored him altogether and found an outlet for my charitable impulses by volunteering at an effective alcohol-treatment program?

I still do not know the answer, but I have come to realize that it was with good reason that I had difficulty in deciding whether my actions were charitable. The Anglo-American culture in which I was raised is itself profoundly uncertain about the meaning and role of charity in our society, and since before the United States was founded we have vacillated on how to define and regulate it.

Even though charity, philanthropy, and volunteerism hold a central place in our civic self-image, we have failed in more than 200 years of political history to come to an agreement, in law or in our wider culture, about what charity and the associated terms mean and what concrete role they should play. And the uncertainty and confusion we wrestle with today can be laid squarely at the feet of Henry VIII.

In medieval England, before the reign of Henry VIII, monasteries tied to the Church of Rome were the main organizers and purveyors of charitable works. In spite of what we learn from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales about the corrupt practices of the medieval church, it was the church-affiliated monasteries that took primary responsibility for feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and educating the ignorant. Their charitable tradition sprang straight from Judeo-Christian doctrine, which held that charity was a reflection of God’s love, and that the charitable donor could enhance his spiritual relationship with his Maker by engaging in charitable acts. According to this view, the very existence of poverty showed that the vicissitudes of the poor were part of God’s plan, and that helping the poor was the best means by which the devout could reach heaven.

All of this changed as a result of two incidents during the reign of Henry VIII. First, and most famously, Henry decided to divorce Catherine of Aragon, his first wife, and marry Anne Boleyn. When the Church of Rome in the person of Pope Clement VII refused to enable the switch, Henry created his own, more compliant, institution, the Church of England, and seized all of the property — including the monasteries — that formerly had belonged to the Church of Rome. The new owners of the monastery properties generally took possession of them under the obligation to continue the charitable work, but in practice that rarely happened.

Second, new land-use practices and the birth of mercantile capitalism in England were giving rise to poverty and suffering on a scale not previously known. Noble landowners were converting their property to profitable sheep pasturage and in the process throwing hordes of peasants off the land. Many turned to begging, so that vagrancy and pauperism went from an occasional nuisance to a constant plague. Henry and later monarchs reacted to the poverty and attendant social unrest by creating a new definition of and a new role for charity.

The leaders of England realized that the state and, to a lesser extent, private donors would have to fill the vacuum left by the gutted monasteries. The new, secular stewards of charity diverged from “charity as love,” and moved toward a conception of charity as social engineering. The elimination of pauperism, rather than the saving of souls, became the focus of charitable activity, though the primary means of relieving pauperism in those days was to order the able-bodied poor to work and to whip, brand, enslave, or execute those who did not go along with the program.

In the years and centuries that followed, as the Anglo-American cultural and legal traditions surrounding charity evolved, these two very different meanings of charity persisted — charity as love and compassion, and charity as results-oriented social engineering. At their extremes, the compassion-based definition of charity has viewed the results-oriented camp as harsh, unjust, and unfair. The results-oriented crowd has looked upon compassion-based charity as ineffectual and often counterproductive. The former might condone my helping the alcoholic in Wyoming; the latter almost certainly would not.

Today, charity in the United States finds itself in a bind as a result of its ill-defined Anglo-American cultural and legal tradition. Charitable organizations are pressured by popular demand, shrinking government support, and impatient donors to adopt a results-oriented approach. They are urged to become more entrepreneurial, keep their eyes on the bottom line, form synergistic partnerships with for-profit entities, produce measurable results, and, ultimately, find ways to generate income so that they can pay their own way as they address social ills.

At the same time, society — our legal system in particular — recoils from these modern, entrepreneurial, social-engineering trends in charity. Any organization that becomes too entrepreneurial risks exciting the ire of state and federal regulators who apply a host of legal doctrines aimed at making sure nonprofit groups are sufficiently charitable — the operational test, which charities must pass to get tax-exempt status, and the ridiculously vague “commerciality” doctrine, intended to keep charities from acting too much like for-profit businesses, to name just two. All such doctrines are intended to ensure that the organizations hew closely to the Judeo-Christian version of selfless, compassion-based charity.

Where do we go from here? We could assemble a blue-ribbon commission to examine the problem and come up with a coherent definition of charity, but the Filer Commission, a private group created in 1973 that studied the relationships among government, philanthropy, and business, tried and failed to sort out that and other issues.

One thing is certain: Until we as a society develop a coherent understanding of what we mean by charity, charitable organizations in the United States will continue to find themselves trapped in a double bind.

Thomas A. Kelley is a clinical associate professor in the law school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.