When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor . . . and Yourself

by Steve Corbett

There is no doubt my father loathed the Klan when he thought about them at all. In his heart of hearts, he considered slavery a sin, racisms like Germany’s or South Africa’s an offense to the faith, and he taught me as much in occasional pronouncements on Southern history over homework assignments. “There is no justification for what we did to the Negro. It was an evil thing and we were wrong.” Nevertheless, the work of the Lord lay elsewhere. “Be faithful in church attendance, for your presence can, if nothing else, show that you are on God’s side when the doors of the Church are opened,” he advised in the church bulletin. Of course, packing the pews is one of any minister’s fantasies—there’s always the wish to grow, grow, grow. But the daily installments of Mississippi burning, the crushing poverty of the town’s Negro inhabitants, the rituals of white supremacy, the smell of terror pervading the streets like Masonite’s stench, did not figure into his sermons or in our dinner-table conversations or in the talk of the church. These were, to a good Baptist preacher like him, finally matters of politics, having little or nothing to do with the spiritual geography of a pilgrim’s journey to paradise. Unwanted annoyances? Yes. Sad evidences of our human failings? Certainly. But all of these would be rectified in some eschatological future—“when we all get to Heaven, what a day of rejoicing that will be.”3