American Christendom: just misunderstood (by the BBC, at least)

My main source for news is the BBC. With respect to the vast majority of current events, it's much more thorough and reliable than anything on this "side of the pond". But one thing BBC reporters really, really don't understand is American Christianity in general, and its intersection with American politics in particular. Maybe this ought to be an object lesson in how stupid people can be about other sorts of people.

I mentioned an example of this before, but here's a more egregious example.

In this article, Justin Webb discusses some trends in American Christendom, trends so drastic as to elicit a remark of "Golly, this is a big change." (That sounds more striking coming out of the mouth of a Brit.)

First, a note about the headline: "Bible bashing dying out in Kansas". Maybe that makes sense in Britainese, but around here you thump bibles. What gets bashed are gays. Bible-thumping, gay-bashing: that's what Kansas is known for.

Moving on:

Hiding in plain sight in this state is a revolution in American Christendom, a change of heart that could see American Protestant churches looking increasingly like their European equivalents.

Well, European churches look empty. Church attendance in America is down, but not exactly—and not in Kansas—down to the single-digit percentage rates you see in some European countries.

OK, so that's not quite his point, but what he's really getting at is no less crazy. The big hook for the article is Fred Phelps, about which he remarks:

The point is that Pastor Phelps and his followers are not much liked by anyone inside or outside Kansas. The "burning at the stake" wing of America's Christian churches - the wing that stresses vengeance over love - is in trouble.

The implication here is that, once upon a time, Phelps was beloved of all American Christians, or at least representative of the spirit of American Christendom; but now the wider part of Christendom has moved on, as is shown by Phelps' recent loss of popularity.

So, part of this is familiar enough. Phelps is the good old standby for those who want to caricature the abysmal state of American Christendom: Look at this bitter and hateful old man without a hint of love or caring in his whole withered soul—wow, aren't American Christians fucked up!

The only problem with this trope is that—as anyone who knows anything knows well—for all his notoriety, Phelps' "church" has always been limited to a few dozen members members of his (extended) family (and not even all of his family). Phelps' current lack of popular support is not evidence of any trend whatsoever. He has always been on the very fringe of the fringiest fringe of American Christendom. (Some would be tempted to place him on the fringe of the Christian Right in particular, but this ignores the fact that some of his stances—for example, that American soldiers deserve to die for the sins of their country—are utter anathema to American conservatives, and anyone else with any sense.)

So much for where Webb thinks American Christendom has been. How about where it's going?

Well, apparently,

Opinion polls suggest that younger evangelical Christians are falling out of love with the "big causes" their churches have championed in recent years, in particular with opposing abortion and supporting the Iraq war.

And Webb visits another church to illustrate how American Christians are increasingly turning their attention away from issues like abortion, and towards such concerns as "human rights and the environment".

About which, here are some instructive comments from Slacktivist a few months back:

The deciding factor for most evangelical voters -- including, based on their own words, the green evangelicals Caron talked to -- is still abortion politics. My guess is that while the folks Caron talked to might prefer a candidate who was both anti-abortion and anti-greenhouse gas, but when that option doesn't present itself, they'll settle for a candidate who is the former but not the latter.

So, sure, the political views of the evangelical "base" of the Republican party are changing somewhat. But not in the way Webb would have it.

The BBC article paints a picture of the average American Christian transforming from a soulless hate machine on the model of Phelps, to a polar bear loving member of Amnesty International. But both halves of this story are completely off.

Now, this is kind of an important topic. American Christendom, and the way in which it interacts with American politics, is a terribly important issue for American politics, which is in turn a pretty important issue for the rest of the world. And, what's more, it's not like Webb and his colleagues are trying to puzzle out the mindset of ancient Sumerians here: once you figure out the 'truck' / 'lorry', 'elevator' / 'lift' thing, and the etiquette for serving peas and beer, inter-cultural communication ought to go pretty smoothly. So this seems like one hell of a blindspot, and there's no excuse for having it. (Incidentally, Webb has in the past remarked upon bias and even anti-Americanism in the BBC's coverage of America, and religion in America—so he is really without excuse here.)

Philosophy as childhood trauma

A nine year old writes about his trip to the annual meeting of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association (via):

2 days after Christmas I went to a philosophy confrence [sic]. It was horrible. There were 200 philosophers. They all did weird things. They couldn't make jokes, many had beards.

In the elevator it was worse. Once a philosopher got off on the wrong floor, so said, "wait for me." "We'll take you to the 27th," said another. Nobody laughed. "Get it there are only 10 floors," said some random old guy in a country accent. You get the point it was creepy.

A few days later there was a fire. Only one person was hurt, but everyone did weird things. Like people were standing in the roads, so nonphilosophers had to lead them out. Some people went back into the hotel. Firefighters had to lead them away. Still one guy stayed and had his bags blocking the door. Firefighters told him to move his bags, so he did, but when they left he put them back. I'll never go to a philosophy confrence [sic] again.

Poor kid.

More about those Baby Killers for Jesus

I mean, the ones from that Guardian article.

1. The article mentions Stepping Stones Nigeria, a UK charity. I couldn't find another organization dealing directly with the issue. So they seem to be the ones to talk to about it, if you're into that kind of thing.

2. Letters to the Editor in response to the original article. One is from the director of the aforementioned charity.

3. Another of the letter writers, J Evans, complains:

...I was alarmed at the general tone of the article, which blames 'American and Scottish Pentecostal and evangelical missionaries' for the spread of fanatical beliefs.

The author fails to grasp the syncretist nature of Christianity in parts of Nigeria. [...] Nowhere in the Bible is violence against children condoned.

The message here is: Christianity is just fine, it's just that it's gotten all mixed up with those backwards Nigerian superstitions.

Point the first: J Evans is forgetting Psalm 137:9:

How blessed will be the one who seizes and dashes your little ones / Against the rock.

Or this other bit (as mentioned in the original article) Exodus 22:18:

Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.

(Note how that doesn't specify how old the witch has to be.) Now, you have to be reading the bible pretty poorly to see these as commands for Christians to kill children. But Nigerians don't get the patent on reading the bible poorly. They didn't come up with that all by themselves.

Point the second: Nigerians don't get the patent on syncretism, either. Around here people have no problem professing Christianity while pursuing wealth, even pursuing wealth as if it were a Christian ideal.

Point the third: This whole gig where you get rich through the shameless exploitation of the poor and desperate under pretenses of Christianity, destroying lives so long as it makes you money and you can get away with it--these Nigerian "prophets" didn't make up that stuff, either.

A vote for Huckabee is a vote for Christmas

Oh no, Huckabee's campaign ad has a subliminal cross in it!

Oops, did I call it a "campaign ad"? I meant, "innocuous message of holiday cheer paid for with political campaign dollars and run in the three states with the earliest primaries".

But about that cross: who cares? Of course it was intentional. But, hey, how about the fact that the perfectly explicit, not at all subliminal, content of the ad is something like: God Jesus God Christmas Christ Jesus I'm a Christian (psst, not a Mormon) Jesus Jesus Jesus I like God Christ yay Christianity God P.S. vote for me.

(Paraphrasing roughly there.)

The "subliminal" cross is there to communicate a message, but it's not exactly a hidden message. A blind person could probably listen to that ad and figure out what's happening on screen. "Are they showing a Christmas tree? A cross? Is he wearing a sweater?"

Well, I, for one, applaud this ad: how it repudiates even the slightest pretense, even the thinnest veneer, of actually addressing a genuine political issue; how thoroughly it embraces pure, unadulterated sectarianism; how it expresses with such refreshing honesty the state of so much political discourse in America today. Kudos to Mr Huckabee.

They will know us by our tattoos

I really couldn't tell the story better than this, so, quoting in full:

The only Christmas story New Yorkers are talking about this week begins with three Jews celebrating Hanukkah at a Manhattan bar, then boarding a Brooklyn-bound subway while carrying a menorah and dreidels. A group of eight men and two women—apparently Christians—then yelled “Merry Christmas!” at them, to which 21-year-old Angelica Krischanvich, a Hunter College student who is not Jewish, replied “Happy Chanukah.” This infuriated the Christian revelers, two of whom stood up to display their Jesus tattoos and to say, charmingly, “You have no savior!” An argument ensued, and Krischanvich said one of the guys spit in her face. Her reply: “Jesus turned the other cheek.” Fighting words apparently, because one of the Christians then pulled a knife and waved it near the face of Maria Parsheva, a 23-year-old Baruch College student. “You dirty Jews, you killed Jesus on Chanukah, you should all die,” was the next remark as a full-bore fight broke out. Walter Adler, the 23-year-old boyfriend of Parsheva, then pulled the emergency brake on the train, and was punched repeatedly for that particular act. While everyone was waiting for police to show up, a Good Samaritan waded in and tried to break up the fight, but mostly just tried to buy some time for Adler. Pushing the men away from the women, he was dogpiled and beaten up. He never even got in a punch, partly because he only stands 5-foot-7 and weighs just 140 pounds. When the police finally boarded the train at DeKalb Avenue in Brooklyn, they arrested 10 people for assault, menacing, and inciting riot, then asked the four injured people if they needed the hospital. Adler had a broken nose and needed four stitches in his lip, but the Good Samaritan didn’t go to the doctor because he was too busy working two waiter jobs and doesn’t have any health insurance. He’s 20-year-old Hassan Askari, a Muslim.

Suffer little children

American televangelists enrich themselves with junk theology, fraud, and exploitation of the poor.

But, hey, it could be worse.

Children are targets of Nigerian witch hunt

Evangelical pastors are helping to create a terrible new campaign of violence against young Nigerians. Children and babies branded as evil are being abused, abandoned and even murdered while the preachers make money out of the fear of their parents and their communities

See for yourself. (There are pictures.)

Hagee: God is an unreliable vending machine

After a substantial hiatus, I recently tuned in to TBN, and was richly rewarded with the spectacle of John Hagee laying out crazy TBN vending-machine theology in clear and unequivocal terms. This is stuff which one of our pastors called "pagan idolatry"—no offense meant to pagans, but it's considered poor form for Christians. (And, beyond that, this isn't just bad theology. It is socially-destructive, exploit-the-poor, rich-televangelists-get-richer theology.)

Principle the first: God will give you anything you ask for.

You might have thought that God has a will and judgment of his own. You might even have thought that God's judgment is a bit beyond ours. But a vending machine has no will of its own, can exercise no judgment of its own. And so it is with God.

If you want a promotion, or a good spouse, or money to pay your bills (for example), then just ask God. Stick your prayer in the prayer slot, and God will dispense whatever it is you want.

To prove this principle, Hagee used scripture such as:

Matthew 7:7-8 "Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened." (Similarly Luke 11:9-10)

Curiously enough, he left out the punchline:

Matthew 7:11 "If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give what is good to those who ask Him!"

Which, in Luke's gospel, gets even more specific:

Luke 11:13 "If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him?"

Principle the second (I think this is verbatim): "As powerful as God is, He cannot act until you ask."

You might have thought that God, having a will of his own, can do whatever he bloody well feels like whenever he bloody well feels like doing it. So, for example, he might go and get incarnated and born to some insignificant Jewish couple, and then maybe let himself die some ignoble death in some Roman backwater, never mind that no one had ever imagined that the king of kings should do any such thing.

But, well, I don't know about you, but I have never encountered a vending machine that would give me a tasty soft drink until I put in my money and hit one of its big friendly buttons. So it is also with God.

To prove this principle, Hagee referred to James 4:2, "You do not have because you do not ask."

He oddly left out the previous bits of the verse, which tell us that this admonishment comes in response to bad desires: wanting other people's possessions and not being able to get them; lusting and, you know, "not having". He also left out the next verse: "You ask and do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it on your pleasures."

Principle the third: God can be slow on the uptake

Vending machines are prone to malfunction. Sometimes things get jammed. Sometimes the button is sticky, and you have to punch it a few times before it catches on. Or, sometimes your bag of chips gets lodged on the end of that screw doohickey, and you have to knock the vending machine around a bit before it'll drop what it owes you. God works in similar fashion.

In order to clarify this point, Hagee discussed (I shit you not) the case of telephone sales, and how it takes something like three or four calls before the average sale is made. This is what Hagee considers a good analogy for prayer.

To prove this principle, he... well, I don't recall how he went about it. To tell the truth, I think maybe he was making all this shit up.

Sonnets to Craig

On our way home I retrieved a book from the side of the road, much worse the wear from snow and ice. The title was Sonnets to Craig, and it was by someone named George Sterling. The first sonnet I flipped open to began, "To search thy heart! to know thine every thought! / Craig, art thou yearning for me...." And so on.

As we walked, Dawn and I got to wondering what "George" was doing writing all these overwrought poems to "Craig"--especially since this was clearly a very old book. I noticed that many of the poems were noted as having been written in San Francisco, leading me to the hypothesis that this was actually a work of early gay poetry. This definitely enhanced our appreciation of the work, although we did think it would have been nice if "Craig" had had a more poetic name--pretty much anything other than "Craig" would have been preferable.

Then Dawn went and looked it up. Spoilsport! I liked my story better.

How to celebrate Advent

According to the wiki entry:

In Normandy, farmers employed children under twelve to run through the fields and orchards armed with torches, setting fire to bundles of straw

Now that is a way to get the kids excited about a season. It would be hard to come up with a Christmas present that could top that.

Trash a televangelist for Jesus

Here's a story about Ole Anthony and how the Trinity Foundation got started. It includes the tale of how they got a bug up their bum about televangelists.

Another time Ole counted the number of homeless people in America, then compared that to the number of churches, and announced one day, "We don't have a problem! If one homeless person slept in each church, the problem is solved." Especially since most American churches are only used one or two days a week. So Trinity sent speakers out to ask churches to adopt a single homeless person.

That didn't take too well. Most of the local churches just sent all the homeless people to Trinity.

And it was those very homeless who led Trinity to its biggest and most controversial work, the trashing of televangelism in America. The homeless would arrive at Trinity after being kicked out of some place, usually by their families, who were overwhelmed by their constant problems and inability to make money. But in several cases, the homeless person had spent his or her last dollar, not on food, not on drugs, not on gas for a car, but on a "faith pledge" to a televangelist. Many of these television preachers talk about the "hundredfold blessing" you get when you donate money to God, suggesting that God is a kind of spiritual casino who pays 100-to-1 odds when people need Him.

[...]

"It was literally widows and orphans," said Ole. "That's who supports the televangelists. The weakest, most vulnerable people in the world."

Unfathomable are the ways in which that shit ain't right.

About Hillary Clinton

I have no desire to see her get the Democratic nomination. But for crying out loud, can we all call her "Clinton" already? Is she not more important than her husband by now? Since when are we all on a first name basis with the possibly-soon-to-be-President of America? If you want to be derogatory, fair enough (see "Dubya"), but it seems clear that many are under the impression that this is a perfectly inoffensive way to refer to her (see "Clinton backs up Hillary campaign").

It could happen here

Or so says Janet Folger, whoever she is. "It" being:

Nov. 20, 2010

To the Resistance:

I'm writing this letter from prison, where I've been since the beginning of 2010. Since Hillary was elected in '08, Christian persecution in America has gotten even worse than we predicted.

When the so-called "Fairness Doctrine" was signed into law, my radio program was yanked off the air along with all the others that dared discuss moral issues on Christian radio.

Etc.

I feel obliged to offer some comment about what could possibly make this scenario seem plausible.

Dawn offers the suggestion (which she attributes to some source which may or may not be Slacktivist) that, in the strain of the Christian Right to which Folger clearly belongs, there is a tendency to assume that we liberals aspire to use the law to ban, imprison, or otherwise forcefully eliminate all those things which we oppose. And that of course includes the members of the Christian Right and everything they hold dear. Since we dislike radio shows that only ever go on about how awful abortion or homosexuality are, we must want to take them off the air; since we think books complaining about Christian persecution in America are stupid and politically harmful, we must want to ban them; if you so much as think those thoughts, we must want to throw you in prison.

That is, of course, their way of thinking, not ours. But being so intolerant themselves, they are incapable of believing that our talk of tolerance is at all earnest.

That helps make sense of Folger's paranoia, but there remains a significant gap of plausibility: it is one thing to think that this is what American liberals want, and another thing to think that the one thing needed to achieve that goal is to get Clinton (why her in particular?) elected, after which all else falls into place.

(via JP)

"Shots fired"

The other day I slow-played a pair of kings at poker. Another player commented that this was a "dangerous" move, and I suavely responded something about that being my very way of life. I was then informed by all around me that "dangerous" is in fact "the opposite" of how I live.

Oh yeah? Well, check out my neighbourhood. Or "the 'hood", as I am wont to call it. This evening it was host to a couple dozen police cars, coming from all directions, sirens wailing, to converge right outside our door.



The camera's batteries were out, so by the time I started taking pictures, the cops had already started to disperse. A couple of minutes beforehand, there were even more cop cars in the street, with a small army of officers winding their way between them.



Here we see some of the latecomers returning to their cars:



The action was down the street to the right in the second picture above. Dawn overheard one of the officers tell a passerby that they'd caught a gunman just down that street.

Myself, Dawn, and Beezus, all managed to make it through the evening unharmed.

Let the fraudsters hit the floor

With any luck, the finances of some of America's richest and worst televangelists will soon be hitting the floor like the bodies at a Benny Hinn spectacle. Well, maybe that's a little too optimistic. But one can hope.

The backstory here is that Ole Anthony and the rest of the Trinity Foundation (the nice folks behind the Wittenburg Door) have spent decades researching the financial practices of these televangelist snakes (and also their religious practices--which, for them, also reduce to financial practices). And the latest news is that Republican (!) Senator Chuck Grassley decided to put this sort of information down on official Senate letterhead and demand some answers to some tricky questions--all leading up to the very big question of whether these "ministries" deserve their tax-exempt status.

(As it is, these organizations are tax-exempt because they are registered as non-profit organizations. But they don't have to report on how they spend their money, because they are "churches". Whose bright idea was this?)

See here for a summary, as well as (in the comments) a first-hand account of what it's like to be victimized by these assholes:

I'm so mad still at [John] Hagee [alas, not one of those who received a letter from Grassley] who fleeced me for over 12 years while I was a single mom with three abused kids, barely getting by. When I think of the times my electricity got turned off because I tithed and gave instead of paying my bills, I could scream. I was told to NOT pay my bills, but to tithe first and believe God for the money for my bills....then when my electricity was turned off I was told I had no faith. I thought God hated me.

OK, so, that's somewhat beside the point. It's unlikely that this sort of practice in particular breaks any tax laws. But it sure does piss me off.

Anyway, other info, plus clips of TV news coverage, available at the Door's Televangelism Scorecard. See Creflo Dollar (his real name) explain how he has only one Rolls Royce, not two. See Kenneth Copeland get asked whether he ever sees any of the prayer requests included in the cash-stuffed envelopes he gets, and then start whining. See Senator Grassley suggest that maybe a non-profit shouldn't be buying marble toilets.

Happy Remembrance Day

The Parable of the Old Man and the Young

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb, for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretched forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an Angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him, thy son.
Behold! Caught in a thicket by its horns,
A Ram. Offer the Ram of Pride instead.

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

- Wilfred Owen, 1918

An accidentally discovered bit of blog gold

Here.

To be honest, I have never liked the idea of some guy smacking some female around for whatever reason but on the odd occasion there seems to be no other option as she refuses to stfu. Women must know that if they keep attacking the male, he just has to take some type of drastic action just to put an end to that verbal and psychological abuse.

I am of the belief that in most situations, women are just as responsible for the abuse as if they perpetrated it themselves.

Well, top marks for frankness, gotta give him that. Maybe we should find this refreshing--this sort of thing is assuredly much more commonly thought than said. (In case you're wondering: nope, no signs that this is satire whatsoever.)

Holy Prepuce

Huh. News to me.

(via comments at the new Wittenburg site)

Mother Teresa: less charitable than Bill Gates

Bill Gates has done some major good in the world. He's given away billions of dollars to various causes which are undoubtedly worthy. But I think it's safe to say that no one would accuse him of being a man of irreproachable virtue. Some thoughts from Peter Singer (h/t):

Gates may have given away nearly $30 billion, but that still leaves him sitting at the top of the Forbes list of the richest Americans, with $53 billion. His 66,000-square-foot high-tech lakeside estate near Seattle is reportedly worth more than $100 million. Property taxes are about $1 million. Among his possessions is the Leicester Codex, the only handwritten book by Leonardo da Vinci still in private hands, for which he paid $30.8 million in 1994. Has Bill Gates done enough? More pointedly, you might ask: if he really believes that all lives have equal value, what is he doing living in such an expensive house and owning a Leonardo Codex? Are there no more lives that could be saved by living more modestly and adding the money thus saved to the amount he has already given?

Gates has proven to be an all right guy. Certainly he is much more of an all right guy than the average member of the superultramegarich. He is almost certainly much more charitable than most of the rest of us would be if we were in his place. But, as Singer points out, if the needy really were his top priority, he would be giving quite a bit more than he has. He does care about the poor to an extent, but his devotion here is quite far from perfect. No one would dream of calling him a "saint".

But, if we judge purely on how each of them used the financial resources at their disposal, I'm pretty sure Bill Gates is more devoted to helping the needy than Mother Teresa ever was. Again, Gates' devotion to the needy is far, far from perfect. But I think it's better than Mother Teresa's.

Since we don't really have solid numbers of Mother Teresa's finances, I'm speculating a bit here, but I feel pretty safe in saying that (considered in proportion to total funds controlled) Bill Gates has done much, much more than Mother Teresa ever did in terms of spending his money towards making people's lives tangibly better.

Gates has given about a third of his riches. If Hitchens was right, then there are at least $50 million in just one of the bank accounts of the Missionaries of Charity. Given how pathetic the MoC's facilities clearly are, how the MoC apparently hates to shell out what little cash it takes to buy new needles before the old ones go blunt, etc., I wonder how much of just that one bank account has gone to any decent use.

Even worse: The money that Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity got from donors was sent with the (at least partially justified) expectation that it would go to help the poor. And that money got accepted with full knowledge that that was the intention behind the giving. In my mind, this yields a pretty serious obligation to use that money for the poor. In contrast, Bill Gates' charity comes out of money he got from his business. There has never been any expectation that he would donate such a sizable amount to charity, and the source of his money, in and of itself, yields no obligation for him to use it for the good of humanity. Mother Teresa was supposed to be charitable, in a way that Gates isn't.

Of course, one thing that might seem to make Mother Teresa a better person than Gates is that she lived more or less in poverty (with some hypocritical exceptions, which I'll get to another time), while Gates lives a life of mind-boggling luxury. But living a life of poverty doesn't actually make you a better person. If you're living a life of poverty because, say, you've sold your possessions and given to the poor, then that might make you a better person. But if you're living a life of poverty because you've got millions of dollars sitting around, and have decided that it shouldn't be used at all - neither for yourself nor for others in need - then that doesn't make you a better person at all. I'm not sure what it makes you, but it doesn't make you a better person.

But maybe Mother Teresa had something else going for her. If so, I'd like to know what that is. (I'll get to at least one other possibility some other time.) Barring that, though, it looks like one should sooner admire Bill Gates than Mother Teresa. But then one shouldn't admire Bill Gates, or at least not very hard or for very long. So why admire Mother Teresa at all?

(P.S., that essay by Singer is worth reading in full.)

The aforementioned shirt

Dawn suggested I post a picture:

Mother Teresa and money

At some point I'm going to want to argue that Mother Teresa was a bad person. But I'm going to start more modestly. In this post, I'm just going to show how Mother Teresa's use of money invalidates the myth that she was some kinda paragon of moral virtue. I won't argue that this makes her an especially bad person. But I do think it makes her not-a-champion-of-the-sick-and-poor.

Fact: Mother Teresa controlled lots and lots of money.

How much? Well, it's hard to say for certain. Unless I've missed something, the finances of the Missionaries of Charity remain undisclosed and unaudited. But it was (and remains) a lot of money.

Says Susan Shields, former Missionary of Charity:

As a Missionary of Charity, I was assigned to record donations and write the thank-you letters. The money arrived at a frantic rate. The mail carrier often delivered the letters in sacks. We wrote receipts for checks of $50,000 and more on a regular basis. Sometimes a donor would call up and ask if we had received his check, expecting us to remember it readily because it was so large. How could we say that we could not recall it because we had received so many that were even larger?

Shields doesn't suggest how much that might add up to, but Hitchens has it that there were at least $50 million in the New York bank account of the Missionaries of Charity, and figures that, this being but a part of the organization's wealth, there must be several times more all told. So let's place the MoC's wealth in the 9-10 figure range.

Now, it would not be correct to say that all this money belonged to Teresa. I take it that she herself owned next to nothing. I'm just saying that she controlled this money. It didn't belong to her personally, but, if she'd really wanted, she could have used it, on behalf of her organization, to buy all sorts of medicines, pay all sorts of trained medical personnel, and maybe even keep her facilities stocked with clean new needles on a regular basis.

You may be able to guess what's coming up next.

Fact: Mother Teresa used only a tiny fraction of that money to improve the lives of the sick and the poor

Shields continues:

We received touching letters from people, sometimes apparently poor themselves, who were making sacrifices to send us a little money for the starving people in Africa, the flood victims in Bangladesh, or the poor children in India. Most of the money sat in our bank accounts.

[...]

The donations rolled in and were deposited in the bank, but they had no effect on our ascetic lives and very little effect on the lives of the poor we were trying to help.

Well, who cares about the lives of the nuns: they got what they signed up for, right? That bit about the poor, though, that's a little worrisome.

Here are some examples of how the MoC failed to spend its money.

Shields gives one: in Haiti, "the sisters reused needles until they became blunt". Out of the MoC's bloated bank accounts, no money could be spared for new needles.

Likewise, in an article in the British Medical Journal (a review of Hitchens' book), Mary Loudon reports visiting the MoC's facilities and seeing "syringes run under cold water and reused, aspirin given to those with terminal cancer, and cold baths given to everyone". No money for oncological care beyond aspirin, no money for hot water, and, again, no money for new syringes, or even proper sterilization for old ones.

And in an article in the Lancet (9/17/94, Issue 8925), Robin Fox reports having visited the Home for the Dying in Kolkata, and describes the medical care there as "haphazard": no trained medical personnel are present unless some happen to drop by to volunteer their time, and the sisters themselves are not given any proper training in medical care. "How about simple algorithms that might help the sisters and volunteers distinguish the curable from the incurable? Again no." Out of the millions or billions, not enough for the salary of a single Kolkata doctor, or any other way of ensuring minimally consistent medical care.

That should do for now.

Ethical claim: If you are a champion of the sick and poor, and you have lots and lots of money at your disposal, you will use more than a tiny fraction of that money to improve the lives of the sick and poor.

Or, equivalently:

Ethical claim: If you have lots and lots of money at your disposal, and you use no more than a tiny fraction of that money to improve the lives of the sick and poor, then you are not a champion of the sick and poor.

This post is already going to be too long, so I'm going to be dogmatic and just assume that that claim is right.

Conclusion: Mother Teresa was no champion of the sick and poor.

It's been a while since I studied logic, but I'm pretty sure that follows.

Now, again, this has not been an argument to the effect that Mother Teresa was evil. The world is full of people who have lots of money, and spend none of it, or next to none of it, improving the lives of the needy. I wouldn't say that means they're particularly evil, but it does mean that they're not particularly good. Similarly, I'm not (in this post) arguing that Mother Teresa was particularly evil, just that she wasn't particularly good, and that she certainly was not the epitome of moral virtue that her mythical image makes her out to be.

Now, in light of some common objections, I'd like to close with a few notes about that ethical claim above.

1. Note that the claim goes against more than self-indulgent greed. The claim is not "If you are a champion of the sick and poor, and you have lots and lots of money at your disposal, you will refrain from spending it on luxuries for yourself." It's quite irrelevant that Mother Teresa lived a life of poverty herself. It sure helped her image that she did, but her personal poverty did nothing to improve the lot of other poor people. It's quite irrelevant to the poor that the MoC's millions or billions sat rotting away in bank accounts, rather than providing Mother Teresa and her nuns with habits embroidered with gold threads (or whatever it is that a greedy nun would do with lots of money). Either way, the lives of the needy are not much improved. But improving the lives of the needy is what a champion of the needy would do with lots and lots of money.

2. The problem this makes for Mother Teresa is not just that she could have made better use of the MoC's money. When faced with criticisms of her use of money, Teresa's defenders often respond with something along the lines of: "Well, fine, so she could have used her money better or more efficiently. No one is saying that she was perfect, and certainly not a perfect administrator!" This response misses the point, which is this: The problem with Mother Teresa's use of money isn't just that it imperfectly embodied the ideal of using financial resources to improve the lives of the needy; rather, the problem with Mother Teresa's use of money is that it didn't embody that ideal. Mother Teresa manifested indifference to that ideal. That ideal just wasn't one of Mother Teresa's ideals. (On occasion she said as much in fairly explicit terms. More on which later.)

3. Also note that I'm not saying that being a good person is just a matter of how you spend your money. All I'm saying is that being a good person is in part a matter of how you spend your money. Of course, it is not only that. For example, how you spend your time also matters.

4. On a related note, one might object that a person can be virtuous in one way, not so virtuous in another. So one of Teresa's defenders might grant that Mother Teresa did not use her money in ways that benefited the poor, but still maintain that, say, she did use her time in ways that were genuinely helpful. Indeed, the myth of Mother Teresa leans heavily on an image of how she devoted her time to the poor. Washing lepers by hand doesn't involve much money, but the image of her doing that sure does warm the heart. Well, here are three points about this line of thought. First, she could have spent some of her time figuring out what to do with all that money, or at least telling someone else to do so. At any given point in time, she could have said, "Sister so-and-so, I want you to figure out how to use the millions or billions to help the poor," with plenty of time left over for washing lepers. Second, I think it's bad ethics to give her a pass on how she spent her money, no matter how she spent her time--especially since her money could have helped the needy so much more than her time. If she'd cared for the poor as her mythical image says she did, she would have made better use of that money. Third, I hope to show how Mother Teresa didn't spend her time in a particularly good way, either--so neither her money nor her time was put to good use. But that will have to wait.