Uncharitable: How Restraints on Nonprofits Undermine Their Potential

Chapter 1: The Morality of Outcomes

CHAPTER 1 The Morality of Outcomes Confusion of goals and perfection of means seems, in my opinion, to characterize our age. —albert einstein S ix o’clock on the morning of April 8, 1630. After ten days of southwest winds and stormy seas, the weather has finally turned fair, with a slight wind from the east and the north. John Winthrop , “brave leader of Christian tribes” and future governor of Massachusetts , is at last able to set sail for the New World from Yarmouth, England, aboard the 350-ton Arbella with fifty-two seamen and twentyeight brass cannons on its gun deck headed for Salem, Massachusetts. Winthrop leads a contingent of four vessels, with seven others to follow three weeks later, the first of seventeen that will carry one thousand passengers to Massachusetts in 1630. Some two hundred die on the eightweek journey. On the occasion of this voyage, Winthrop delivers a sermon entitled “A Modell of Christian Charity” that makes famous the symbol of “a City upon a Hill,” an image he drew from the gospel of Matthew.1 It begins, however unintentionally, by institutionalizing inequity , poverty, and the need for charity itself: God Almightie in his most holy and wise providence hath soe disposed of the Condicion of mankinde, as in all times some must be rich some poore, some highe and eminent in power and dignitie; others meane and in [submission . . .] soe that the riche and mighty should not eate vpp the poore, nor the poore, and dispised rise vpp against their superiours, and [shake] off their [yoke].2 An honest study of the sermon reveals it to be a heartfelt plea for unity and humanity, made impossibly complex by the oppressive religious dogma and class and racial prejudice of the times. It is a message of love delivered to a people taught to detest their nature. Therefore, it 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 Pallotta:Uncharitable page 1 2 UNCHARITABLE essentially ignores the daunting reality of self-interest by mandating self-deprivation. It is part vision, part rulebook for maintaining social order three thousand miles away from the institutions that normally enforced it. It establishes benevolence toward one’s fellow man as mandatory and formalizes it in a “covenant” with God. It warns that if these people abide anything less than “a strickt performance of the Articles contained in it,” then “the Lord will surely breake out in wrathe against [us and] be revenged of such a [perjured] people and make [us] knowe the price of the breache of such a Covenant.”3 The entire scene is a contradiction lost on its cast: a community of aspiring benevolence headed to a strange land to build God’s new world by appropriating it from its natives —determined to “possesse it.”4 If they keep their covenant, that possession will be their reward from God. These people, their beliefs, anxieties, and contradictions will create the basic construction for charity and philanthropy in America. Winthrop and his fellow Puritans were Calvinists, guided by the teachings of sixteenth-century French theologian John Calvin, who believed man was depraved—totally and hereditarily. This is important, because this belief would become the primary driver of their ideas about charity. The following startling passage is from Calvin’s definitive work on Christian theology, Institutes of the Christian Religion: Original sin, therefore, seems to be a hereditary depravity and corruption of our nature, diffused into all parts of the soul, which first makes us liable to God’s wrath . . . we are so vitiated and perverted in every part of our nature that by this great corruption we stand justly condemned and convicted before God . . . even infants themselves, while they carry their condemnation along with them from the mother’s womb, are guilty not of another’s fault but of their own. For, even though the fruits of their iniquity have not yet come forth, they have the seed enclosed within them. Indeed their whole nature is a seed of sin; hence it can only be hateful and abhorrent to God. . . . For our nature is not only destitute and empty of good, but so fertile and fruitful of every evil that it cannot be idle . . . the whole of man is of himself nothing but concupiscence.5 “Concupiscence” means...