Against Interfaith Work

Furthermore, when I myself was involved in homeless ministry as a Christian, homeless people had to sit through sermons and pray before we fed them. This shouldn’t be a surprise; it’s the natural consequence of tying “religion” to charity. If you want to be fed, you have to humble yourself before the religion. There is something uncomfortably manipulative about that, as one formerly homeless blogger notes:

Most shelters and kitchens have some sort of religious service people are required to sit through to eat or sleep there. I’m an atheist but this didn’t bother me much. Frankly, I was pleased to be in a climate controlled room and sitting at rest somewhere without fear of getting harassed by gangs or police no matter what I had to pretend to believe. It didn’t even bother me that I had to give lip-service to the notion that I was being punished by God for being a bad person.

However, some people object to this, often people with strong religious beliefs of their own who believe they already have a good relationship with God. I’ve met a decent number of people unwilling to sit through the services and pretend their situation is a just punishment from God for being a terrible person. Very religious people seem to get extremely offended when someone looks down on them and tells them they don’t have a good enough relationship with Jesus to deserve a place to live.

Do I really need to go on? We all have heard religious organizations insist that “religious freedom” means doing with their organizations as they please, so that their insistence that religious charities take over for government services seems to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing for them to have authority over those least fortunate. And I’m not saying this just because I’m an atheist. As the last couple paragraphs showed, there are many instances in which organizations that affiliate themselves with faith have actually done this. It’s not theory. It’s happened.

So, I don’t want to endorse the message that people should respect religion in order to get help — and it seems that many religious charities are just as intent about using charities to instill respect for religion among the people they help as they are about using charities to instill respect for religion among outsiders.

On top of that charity problem, I just don’t think it’s healthy to mix religious hocus-pocus faith in the brick-and-mortar of trying to make the world a better place.  I know “faith” seems like a great word that we should tolerate and respect in our culture, but it’s basically a tool that insulates incorrect beliefs from being disproven by concrete evidence.  So, in addition to not working with religious charity organizations that use those charities to bolster respect for faith, I think that we should try to avoid faith in our calculus for solving the world’s problems so that we don’t experience disastrous errors. I know that many rely on faith in the here-and-now, but that doesn’t mean doing so is healthy; it clearly seems best for us to stop respecting faith as much as possible in order to construct answers that are correct and will therefore work for today’s practical problems.

So I will help people — regardless of their religion — to make the world a better place. But I don’t want to help religious organizations or movements gain more power or influence for their religions through charity or a respected platform. In the short run, it might give someone a loaf of bread, but in the long run, it tends to have disastrous consequences, as it endorses a nonexistent God (or gods) who supposedly has authority over the judgment of human beings and defines them to their core, often against their will, while invalidating their ability to fight back.

Thanks for reading.

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[Image via Rebecca Olarte under CCL 2.0]