By Kevin Nye
When Ebeneezer Scrooge is first asked to give charity to the “hundreds of thousands [who] are in want of common comforts,” he asks, “Are there no prisons? And the union workhouses? The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?”
The charity collectors are confused, and after some back and forth, they suggest, “Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.”
Scrooge replies in a most disturbing fashion: “If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
Reading Dickens’ A Christmas Carol this December, I couldn’t help but notice the striking similarity to a conversation earlier this year on Fox & Friends, the number one watched cable news morning show in the country. In mid-September, the hosts were discussing the issue of homelessness, when the following dialogue eerily echoed Ebeneezer:
Lawrence Jones: You can’t give them a choice. Either you take the resources that we’re going to give you, or you decide that you are going to be locked up in jail. That’s the way it has to be now.
Brian Kilmeade: Or involuntary lethal injection. Or something. Just kill ‘em.
Kilmeade later issued an apology after an enormous outcry; likely visited not by Christmas ghosts but by an executive telling him to take it down a notch.
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The similarity between these callous responses to poverty and homelessness underlines our deep obfuscation of what poverty is, and what we ought to do about it–especially those of us who celebrate the birth of Christ this season.
Responding to homelessness, and helping Christians to do the same, has been my vocation for nearly a decade. I have encountered many opinions inside and outside the church that echo Scrooge’s and Kilmeade’s, but more often those indirectly influenced by their callousness into indifference, or to misunderstandings about the causes and solutions to a problem like homelessness.
In researching for my upcoming book, Hope for the Mission: Getting It Right in the Call to End Homelessness, I sought to understand what makes different faith-based responses to homelessness effective, dignified, and sustainable. I found my search continually taking me back to the Gilded Age in America (roughly 1870-1920, the era just after Dickens’ Carol), when so many of our country’s ideas about poverty, wealth, charity, and common good were formed and solidified.
One of the most influential movements of this time comes from an 1889 essay titled Wealth by Andrew Carnegie. Carnegie is considered “the father of modern philanthropy” for arguing that the wealthy should not simply pass their wealth to their heirs, but had a responsibility during their life to better society. For Carnegie this not only as economics, but as religion. He referred to this precept as “the Gospel of Wealth”.
On the surface, Carnegie seems to be one with Dickens’ hopes for the role of the wealthy. But Andrew Carnegie did not invent charity or almsgiving–his vision for philanthropy instead offered a new twist on the idea, which elevated the wealthy as the arbiters and gatekeepers of what worthy charity could be:
Such, in my opinion, is the true Gospel concerning Wealth, obedience to which is destined some day to solve the problem of the Rich and the Poor, and to bring “Peace on earth, among men good will”… the man of wealth thus becoming the mere agent and trustee for his poorer brethren, bringing to their service his superior wisdom, experience and ability to administer, doing for them better than they would or could do for themselves… It were better for mankind that the millions of the rich were thrown in to the sea than so spent as to encourage the slothful, the drunken, the unworthy.
In Andrew Carnegie’s gospel, the announcement of the angels at Jesus’ birth–”peace on earth, among men good will”–will be brought to fruition finally by the shrewd stewardship of the illustrious elite. These superior men of wealth, emboldened to distinguish between the deserving and undeserving poor, will bring about God’s ends. Forty years after Dickens penned Scrooge’s redemption, Andrew Carnegie rewrote the philosophy of charity to forever elevate the rich and denigrate all but a few “worthy” poor.
What The Bible Says
The Bible has quite a lot to say about giving to the poor; our sacred text is no stranger to the concepts of almsgiving or charity. But Carnegie’s version of philanthropy is a far cry from how the rich and poor are discussed by scripture. Jesus, who had the most right to Lord himself over anyone, lived instead in communion and friendship with the poor, and everyone else that the elite had deemed “unworthy.” He taught that the poor are blessed, and that the rich would have a really hard time entering the kingdom of God.
Ebeneezer Scrooge learned this firsthand. His revelation was not merely that his unkindness and lack of charity were unseemly, but that they were both cause and symptom of a life full of misery. In past, present, and future he reckons with the life he has lived and the pain it has wrought on himself and everyone around him. His pursuit of wealth and prestige costs him dearly, and in the end it will leave him with nothing and no-one. For Scrooge, this is not philosophical–it is deeply personal. Those who he once loved, and the few remaining who care for him, all ache for his dwindling humanity.
And when he returns from his night of revelation, he immediately sets out to the kind of charity that would make Carnegie scoff. He anonymously sends the town’s largest turkey to the Cratchitts; he overpays a boy to run an errand; he promises such an extravagant amount to the charity collectors that they are dumbfounded; he raises Bob Cratchit’s salary, an act not of charity but of justice. And in the book’s epilogue, we learn that Scrooge became a second father to Tiny Tim, the sickly Cratchitt child whose destiny shook Scrooge to his core.
Scrooge gives to the poor, whom he knows, in extravagance, and according to what he has learned they want and need. Carnegie believed in the superior wisdom of the rich to decide what the poor need; Scrooge knew that the poor know what they need, and gave it in abundance.
A Christmas Carol is not, then, a story about a shrewd man who learns to be charitable; it is about a man whom wealth has made miserable and lonely who learns to love and be loved by his community. Scrooge does not become a benefactor to the Cratchitts; he enmeshes his destiny with theirs. He discovers the gift of presence and connection–a gift that not only cannot be bought, but which the amassing of wealth can prevent by calcifying the heart.
And is this not the lesson of Christmas, too?
Scrooge’s dead partner Marley makes this connection, when as a ghost he wonders, “Why did I walk through crowds of fellow-beings with my eyes turned down, and never raise them to that blessed Star which led the Wise Men to a poor abode? Were there no poor homes to which its light would have conducted me?” Peace on earth is found not because the rich will bring it about through philanthropy, but because God chose a different kind of gift: embodied presence. Always a God for us, but now a God with us. Emmanuel.
As we enter the final days of the year, when charitable giving is at its annual peak, let us consider the messages of A Christmas Carol and of Emmanuel. Give, of course! But commit to practicing a generosity of presence alongside your donation. Enmesh your lives and destinies with all of your neighbors, especially the most vulnerable. Know their names, their stories, their hopes and fears. Learn from them which organizations deserve your support; not because they produce the best campaigns or most activate your guilty conscience, but because they build up the dignity of those they serve.
Like Scrooge, our redemption lies not in charity but in a reordered neighborliness; where the rich learn from the poor how to love and connect; a communion together that frees the poor from the misery of day-to-day survival and frees the rich from the misery of loneliness and callousness. This is how Christmas saved Scrooge, and it remains the invitation of the first Christmas, and every Christmas since, to save us all.
Emmanuel.
Kevin Nye is a writer and advocate working toward ending homelessness by engaging best practices. He has written on the intersections of homelessness and faith for Religion News Service, Sojourners, Red Letter Christians, and more. Since the publication of Grace Can Lead Us Home: A Christian Call to End Homelessness, Nye has become a sought-after writer and speaker on the topic of homelessness for people and communities of faith. He has spoken in more than a dozen cities across the United States, preaching and leading workshops. He is also a respected voice in the secular homelessness services sector, having presented at conferences like the National Alliance to End Homelessness and the Housing First Partners Conference. Nye lives with his wife and sons in Minneapolis, where he works as a housing director at an organization addressing youth homelessness.
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