Moral Ambition: Mobilization and Social Outreach in Evangelical Megachurches

Chapter 6: Compassion Accounts

chapter 6 Compassion Accounts But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, you will be sons of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful. —Luke 6:35–36 Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow —T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men The dismantling of the federal welfare state in the 1990s sparked renewed public interest in religiously inspired or “faith-based” charity work and welfare activism. Religious conservatives in particular were emboldened by the idea that the downsizing of government’s role in the business of welfare would usher in a new era in which religious charities, social services, and local congregations would reclaim their rightful roles and legitimacy on issues of welfare and moral governance in community life. In addition to revivalist and missionary ideals, the moral ambitions of socially engaged evangelicals during this period were fueled to a large extent by the belief that faithful, discerning Christians (what George W. Bush called the “armies of compassion”) were best suited to the task of reviving the spirit of civic responsibility and local charity that many felt had been undermined by the welfare state and its liberal policies of entitlement. Yet despite their activist enthusiasm, 153 154 | Compassion Accounts conservative evangelical outreach workers and volunteers encountered ethical dilemmas and frustrations as they attempted to reach across the race and class divides in their home communities. They grappled with multiple and diverging aspects of evangelical theology and with the dif- ficulties of managing the intrinsic power dynamics between themselves and the recipients of charitable aid with whom they sought to interact through social outreach. Socially engaged evangelicals in Knoxville often talked about “compassion fatigue” as being one of the primary hardships they dealt with in the process of doing the actual work of social outreach. It was a recurring theme over the course of my research that came up during interviews as well as church discussion groups, workshops, and planning meetings. The concept of compassion fatigue has currency outside of evangelicalism as well, but its meanings vary depending on the group or social context in which it is invoked. One popular use of the phrase refers to the emotional desensitization that is believed to occur as a result of the shallow and formulaic manner in which humanitarian crises in remote regions of the world are represented in Western news media (Moeller 1999). In the lingo of the nonprofit sector, the idea of compassion fatigue explains why charitable donations from the general public drop after seasonal periods of accelerated giving (Allahyari 2000). Among evangelical pastors and churchgoers, the phrase carries a rather different meaning, although it is similar to other uses in that it evokes contemplation of the relationship between one’s expectations and actions—or, more precisely, the gaps between one’s moral ambitions and the conditions of existence that reinforce and simultaneously threaten to undermine them at every turn. When evangelicals speak of compassion fatigue, they refer to a condition of emotional exhaustion—also called “burnout”—that they attribute to frustrating experiences of being resisted or manipulated by irresponsible and unrepentant beneficiaries of charitable aid. Socially engaged evangelicals and outreach volunteers in Knoxville who got involved in the lives of poor people claimed to have had such experiences at various points in their involvement, and a few even cited compassion fatigue as the main factor in their need to withdraw, sometimes permanently, from social outreach activity. That white churchgoing southerners should remain fixated on the potential difficulties and drawbacks associated with charitable social outreach makes sense in light of the conservative and segregationist tendencies that characterized their churches and denominations for so Compassion Accounts | 155 many decades. But other cultural factors are involved as well, and in this chapter I focus on the influence of a pair of twin imperatives, compassion and accountability, that ambiguously define the purpose of charitable giving in the context of evangelical outreach. Compassion , on the one hand, invokes an ideal of empathetic, unconditional benevolence. Accountability, on the other hand, imposes certain reciprocal obligations on the part of beneficiaries as a condition of continued benevolence (Bartkowski and Regis 2003). To an outside observer it may seem that compassion fatigue is simply...