Ep 427: How Good Intentions Can Trap the Poor, with James Whitford

Matthew Bellis: Welcome to the show that gets Christians thinking about faith and politics. Get ready to challenge the statist quo, expand your imagination, and tackle controversy head on. Let’s stand together at the intersection of faith and freedom. It’s time for the Libertarian Christian podcast.

Doug Stuart: Welcome to another episode of the Libertarian Christian podcast, a project of the Libertarian Christian Institute and part of the Christians for Liberty Network. My name is Doug Stewart, and I have a special guest with us today. His name is James Whitford. This is his second appearance on the Libertarian Christian podcast. James, it’s been a while.

You were back in episode two eighteen, and I’m really excited to have you on today, but I want to give you an introduction here. You’re the founder of True Charity, a local initiative in your area in Missouri. You can remind me of the city. It’s evolved into a national training organization championing the resurgence of civil society in the fight against poverty. Your work has been featured in publications like The Christian Post, The Hill, World News Group.

You’ve testified before Senate and US House subcommittees, and we’re here to talk about your actual book. I’m gonna hold it up here for those. I’m gonna hold it up here for those watching on YouTube. The Crisis of Dependency, How Our Efforts to Solve Poverty Are Trapping People in It, and What We Can Do to Foster Freedom Instead. James Whitford, thank you for joining us.

James Whitford: Yeah. Again, Doug, it’s great to be, yeah, great to be back again. It has been a while. Good to be here with you.

Doug Stuart: Yeah. Well, I I think the last time we chatted was prior to the pandemic, and so I’m sure your life is was changed during that period of time, and we we you can, you know, fill us in on any of that as we as we have this conversation in terms of your experience and stuff. But for those who are probably new to my show and haven’t listened to episode 218 with with you, What is tell us a little about your journey, how you became founder of Water Gardens and and now True Charity.

James Whitford: Sure. Yeah. Well, it was faith that led my wife and I in February, so it’s been twenty five years ago that we started a small little outreach, a mission in Joplin, Missouri, very Southwest Missouri, and we called it watered gardens. And watered gardens initially was kind of confusing to our community. People would call and wonder if we sold garden equipment or did landscaping or things like that, and so it always gave us the opportunity.

Doug Stuart: Names with metaphors are a little bit tricky, right? Yep,

James Whitford: but we were sure God gave us this name. We just know it, but anyway, it always gave us the opportunity to share the passage from which the name comes, which is Isaiah chapter 58, where God’s really chastising his people for going through the motions of a church, you might say, but they’re not actually choosing what God wants them to do, which is to help the poor. And I love Isaiah 5eight 10, where the prophet says you should extend yourself. Some versions say, Give your life to those who are afflicted and in need, and there are promises that are associated with that. One of them is, You’ll be like a watered garden and like a spring whose waters never fail.

So it’s a beautiful promise, really of a flourishing life that comes through giving rather than just taking and hoarding. And so we had discovered that. It caused us to launch this little mission, and it’s grown over the last twenty five years to be a five campus, very holistic approach ministry in Joplin, Missouri, that’s meeting tens of thousands of needs and in a pretty unique way. And so, Doug, the history, like the evolution of the ministry really leads into the true charity, national work. When my wife and I started our ministry, we just had a lot of compassion for people, so we gave a lot of stuff away.

People would come in. They said they had a need. We’d try to meet it, and we realized pretty soon that the outcomes we’d hoped to see in people’s lives simply weren’t being achieved. So we knew we needed to change our model, and there were some things that happened that resulted in us realizing that we were actually causing dependency in people rather than actually helping them be freed from poverty. We were practicing a form of charity that a lot of people would call toxic charity.

Now, that’s another book, Toxic Charity. And in it, the author delineates five steps to dependency, which are really key. If you give something to somebody once, they’re going to appreciate it. But if you give the same thing to that person again, then they’re going to develop an anticipation that it’s going to come a third time. If you hand out the same thing a third time, then an expectation develops.

A fourth time, they’ll feel entitled to it, and a fifth time, they’ll be dependent on you for it. So it’s appreciation, anticipation, expectation, entitlement, and dependency. And we knew we were guilty. We were doing that, and so we changed our model to more of an earn it model, where people are exchanging a little bit of what they can do for something that they need. We think this is a much more dignifying approach that respects the Imago Dei or the image of God and people.

We’re all made in the image of a creator or a great producer, and so we’re intended to create and produce. Too often today, charity is drowning out that drive to contribute what you can for something that you need, and I think we’re drowning out aspects of human dignity when we do that. So we made this change, and when we did, we saw literally thousands of people who were coming through our doors every year stop coming. Ended up, of course, going somewhere else where they could remain dependent on handouts, and it was like an moment for us. We thought, Oh my gosh, we need to do more than just change the thought and the culture and the practice of ministry within our four walls.

We need to see our whole community change. So we began to do PSAs and leader lunch and learns and different things like that to help educate our community about the importance of coupling compassion with common sense and really rethinking charity and poverty and the human person. That grew into the True Charity Initiative, which was initially a local work in 2012. And then in 2020, of all the years, it actually grew out of that into a national movement. And today, we have two fifty seven churches and nonprofits across 35 states who are leaning into the true charity principles, which for us, those are three primary things.

We really believe the best charity is privately funded, outcome driven, and work oriented. So we want to enter into reciprocity or exchange with people. We want to measure outcomes, and we think stay away from government funding to get it done. So that’s kind of the evolution of where we came from the little ministry in 2000 to the national work we do today in helping leaders rethink.

Doug Stuart: And you’re involved in both, they kinda run simultaneously, or is it just evolved from one into another?

James Whitford: Yeah. Well, it’s when you go to truecharity.us, it looks totally different than wateredgardens.org, but True Charity is a subsidiary of Watered Gardens.

Doug Stuart: Okay.

James Whitford: So the the parent organization continues to remain as the the umbrella five zero one c three.

Doug Stuart: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. You know, for for listeners and and viewers of this particular show, the the first one of, you know, charity should be private.

That’s not gonna be, you know, at all consequential. What were the other two? You said they need it needs to be private, outcome driven, and based on work. Outcome driven, I mean, generally speaking, nobody’s gonna object to that kind of thing, but what what is the the core there on the that third one where it’s like work work based?

James Whitford: Work oriented or sometimes we use the term challenge oriented, and we we just have to understand that if we don’t do that, the only other option is handout charity. Handout charity is going to march people into a pattern of dependency, which I think is a crisis where we have a national crisis of dependency today. And so the whole idea is it really boils down to this concept of subsidiarity, which is don’t take from an individual what he or she can do on his own and give it to the community to do for him. But also don’t take from the community what the community ought to do and give it to the government to do. So there’s this concentric layering.

That’s the whole idea of subsidiarity, but it starts with a respect of the individual as having agency with the potential and capacity to contribute. And so we really need to remember that. So before I ever got into this, Doug, I practiced physical therapy, and I was from time to time called a physical terrorist, and that’s because you know what physical therapists do

Doug Stuart: to I’ve done a different type of physical therapy before. You know, it’s not from debilitation, but I understand. I I I grasp the

James Whitford: Right. Right. The idea is that what we do usually doesn’t feel very good. But the truth is if we don’t challenge our patients to develop the strength and mobility they need to escape their bed of infirmity, they’ll remain there until they perish. That’s true for especially for people who are really like in a hospital bed, they’re stuck there.

If there’s not somebody who comes along and encourages, inspires, and challenges them to develop the strength and mobility that they need, they’re gonna remain there until they perish. The same thing’s happening with tens of millions of people in poverty in America today. We must, with compassion at the right time, implement challenge in order to help people develop the strength and mobility they need to escape their bed of poverty, and if not, they’re gonna remain there until they perish. My argument is that we have tens of millions of Americans who are on a trajectory today to die in dependent poverty because we’re not being work oriented or challenge oriented about our charity.

Doug Stuart: Yeah. You know, I wanna I wanna ask a question. It’s a it’s a very detailed question about how you’re doing this, so and I don’t wanna save it for later because I might forget, but how do you work with somebody who hasn’t yet discovered that they have something to give? Like, they they might whether it’s just a psychological you know, they just don’t have any motive either motivation or self a self appreciation for what they’re capable of. Maybe they’re mostly an invalid or something like that, where they’re looking for something that they need to be fed, they have what you they have a need that you can meet, but they don’t see themselves as capable of contributing in some meaningful way.

My guess is that you have you and your team have found ways to encourage them and move them in that direction, but I’m I’m really kind of interested in, like, well, what does that actually look like? Because my personality is not such where I’m going to be an encourager in that direction. You’re you’re probably more in that direction than I am.

James Whitford: Yeah. Well, a couple of things. One, you know, when you use the term invalid, the first thing I wanna say is there are times when relief, just a one way handout, is necessary. And we’ve got to understand that relief is not always a bad form of charity, but we, I believe, have gone from, you know, the Great Depression when relief was needed, and we never got out of the relief business, and so there’s a lot of one way handouts that continue when they shouldn’t. So sometimes there is a need for relief.

It should be short lived, and we really should be looking for reciprocity from the recipient as often as we can, because if we don’t, here’s the second point, we see learned helplessness develop. And I want to be careful when I talk about the study that was done, I think in 1967, by Seligman and learned helplessness, but it’s very interesting. And later on, they’ve proven this to be true, not just with the animals they did the research on, but in people as well. But the research project was basically you’ve got dogs who are trapped and they can’t get out. There’s a shock plate.

Can you imagine? 1967, they did stuff like this. There’s a shock plate that kind of shocks the feet of the dogs. And in some of the boxes that the dogs are being held in, are levers in all of them. But in some of them, when a dog hit a lever, it actually shut the shock off.

But in some, the lever didn’t do anything. And so the ones where the lever didn’t do anything, they learned helplessness, so much so that when the dogs were out of that and they were in a different situation where they could easily jump over a barrier and escape the shock, Only the dogs that had working levers who had not learned helplessness jumped out, but the ones that learned helplessness, they just sat there and took it. Well, I think we’re seeing a lot of that in America today, a lot of learned helplessness. People are not coupling the fact that they have agency, they can make decisions, they can begin to work to escape poverty. They just don’t realize that anymore.

And so we have a job to do. You know, it’s interesting now that I think about it. In that study, if you kind of read the tail end of it, they actually helped the dogs that had learned helplessness to escape that scenario by literally moving their legs and helping them, like physically assisting them. And then they realized, Oh, I’m not helpless. It’s similar with people.

We do need to come alongside people. We do need to be hands on. We’ve got to be willing to Well, you know, Isaiah 5eight 10 says, Extend yourself. There’s a portion of your life you need to give to people. But what this means is we can’t do mass food distribution tasks that are like government mandated and think that anything’s going to happen.

This is very individual, face to face. It requires understanding the nuances of the person and what’s going on. If we’re going to help people escape poverty, it’s going to be one at a time.

Doug Stuart: I known of the phrase learned helplessness, and I think a lot of people, especially people who think a lot like you and I do, we’ve heard that. I didn’t actually know it was a study, to be honest, and it just makes intuitive sense to me. Maybe it’s because I’m a parent, and, you know, your your kids can sort of you can you can sort of watch yourself do that for your kids, and you’re like, oh, wait. They’re they’re learning to just depend on me, and, you know, I know I need to, as a parent, help them depend on their own initiative and their own, you know, capabilities and strengths. One thing that I love about your book, and it it’s interesting that it doesn’t it it actually comes out in the title.

It says in what we can do to foster freedom instead. So if astute readers of the book I’m looking down here at the title, Crisis of Dependency, How Our Efforts to Solve Poverty Are Trapping People in It, and then here’s the contrast. Well, what can we do to foster freedom instead? Now, every libertarian is gonna look at that and say, yeah, that sounds great, And you really do you’re not using the word freedom just on the cover just to kinda get us you know, to kinda get the American conservative libertarian liberal spirit to to read your book. You truly I mean, you quote Frederick Bastiat, You quote John John Stuart Mill.

You dive into you you really what’s the word in? You dig in on the freedom mindset. So I I really appreciate that, of course, and I know all of our listeners would really love that. Why is this such an important concept? And and when you know, give us some examples of how you apply that to your ministries.

James Whitford: Well, yeah, it’s interesting. The book initially was gonna be titled, I think, For Liberty and Charity or Liberty and Charity. Mhmm. And I was told by people who are smarter than me that that probably wouldn’t sell. So isn’t that sad, Doug?

Doug Stuart: Hey. You know what? It’s great. I whatever gets them to read the book. Right?

Like, the content is, you know

James Whitford: yeah. No. No. That’s so but but for me, I’ve I’ve just seen over the years those two things. They’re so symbiotic in my opinion.

If we want to live in a society that’s free, we’re not going to be able to escape the need for good, compassionate, sometimes sacrificial charity. See, if we’re willing to sacrifice our liberty for a utopia of sorts, we’re just going be looking to the government to try to solve the problems. Hey, look, can’t we just redistribute the wealth here? I mean, there are billionaires out there. Let’s just make sure the poor have enough.

Okay, quit dealing with the official poverty measure. Let’s look at the supplemental poverty measure because lifting people out of poverty by redistributing wealth. Well, we’re not really. We’re actually trapping people in a form of dependency. And so the ideas of liberty and charity come together very closely.

I’m thinking of what Marvin Olaski wrote in The Tragedy of American Compassion. He wrote that dependency is merely slavery with a smiling mask. We’ve got to be asking ourselves, what’s our charity doing? And not just on the private front, but the public front as well, public charity from the government, private charity from organizations. Is our charity fostering freedom, or is it creating a dependency and a form of bondage instead?

And so I do get into a lot of that. I think, you know, I do agree with it. I mean, when I read Bastiat’s The Lava, and I thought, oh my goodness. That’s so clear that if if a if a person cannot take from someone and give to another without it being called theft, how can we authorize the government to do that? And I think we’ve abandoned a strict interpretation of the constitution that would say, Look, there are an enumerated list of powers, and taking from the rich to give to the poor is just not one of them.

And I know I sound like a radical to everybody, but your listeners. And so I don’t always speak so candidly, but the truth is we have got to get away from this redistributionist thinking and realize that the way we’re going to live in freedom is understand that we’re not going to be able to redistribute, and we know that the freer nations, they have lower regulation, they’ve got lower redistributionist policy. We know that. So we want to be a free nation. Well, we’re going to have to get away from redistributing goods and giving it to the poor.

What does that mean? That means we are going to have to step in. As local, you know, compassionate Christians in our communities, we’ve got to step in and be ready to help those who are struggling in poverty. And in some ways, Doug, we’re starting to see a little bit of that with some recent legislation that’s actually going to result in some folks coming off of the welfare rolls. And so we I think we have an opportunity.

Civil society has an opportunity and the to step in and do a good job here.

Doug Stuart: You know, want I have a thought, and then I have a quite kind of a follow-up question. I I’ve often wished that there would would have been a figure. You know, Barack Obama, for for all of his faults, he was a very good speaker. He was a very good motivator. He was able to move people to action, and so if we could go back in time and give him this book thirty years ago, and he latched onto that, I could see a president saying, hey, we’re gonna eliminate all of these, not because there’s some, you know, ideological principle of government shouldn’t be doing it, but a a firm belief that the American people will rise to the challenge.

And, you know, I’m not a huge, like, strong man myth believer, but that would be kind of a a good direction if we could find a president who empower people to to do things as opposed to well, Obama’s phrase was the government is the things we do together, which, you know, makes me face palm, of course, just like probably you. I I think the the the one objection, and I wouldn’t even say it’s an objection, but one consideration with what you said there was that we’re not really lifting people out of poverty, we’re creating dependency, is that you have Christians, whether left, right, or just, you know, good intentioned people who aren’t thinking deeply about, you know, step two, step three, step four the way you are, look at that and say, Well, no, look, I can’t solve every problem. I have agency. God’s put it on my heart to donate to this charity or to that charity or to, you know, volunteer in a certain way, and I’m going to help this person, and you know, that’s between them and God as to whether or not they become dependent, or, you know, I’m just following what my heart is, you know, what God is telling me in my heart to do or leading me to, you know, putting in front of my path, and I’m saying yes to it.

You know? And people kinda maybe not everybody, but a lot of people might just shrug off the whole like, well, you know, it’s a systemic problem, of course, but, you know, I can’t change that. But I have money, and I need to give to this poor person who lives near me.

James Whitford: Yeah. Well, I think let’s take panhandling for instance. We know that I think the last study I was looking at was somewhere around 98%, I believe, of folks who were holding a cardboard sign at a corner saying, you know, We’ll work for food, or God bless, or what have you.

Doug Stuart: Yeah, homeless, anything will help, yeah.

James Whitford: Anything will help, right? A lot of that money is actually going to feed some sort of an addiction. And so I think we’ve got to take the responsibility to consider that handing money to somebody on the corner might actually be the same as handing them, you know Another hit. Hit. Yeah.

Right? And so are we really helping people, or are we hurting people? So I think we’ve just got to realize or accept that there is a toxic type of charity, and there’s a truer, more effective type of charity, and we need to wrestle with that. And I don’t think it’s responsible to simply say, Hey, this is not on me. You know, I just, I’ve got something to give I want to give.

Well, I think what we need to do is say, We need to give responsibly. And again, kind of going back to Isaiah 5eight 10, the idea is you’re not just passing a meal across the counter. You’re not just handing cash out at a corner. You’re doing more than that. Apart from relationship, the gospel really isn’t going to be communicated, and the transformation we hope to see in lives isn’t going to happen.

So we’ve got to be willing to develop relationship. And within a relationship that’s healthy, you’re going to see accountability. That’s going to be a part of it. You’re not just going to continue to give in that relationship. It becomes a very unhealthy codependency between someone who’s dependent and someone who’s paternalistic.

So I think as givers, we’ve got to wrestle with those ideas.

Doug Stuart: Your book, I know you were developing it, you know, six, seven years ago when we last talked, or I guess pre COVID, and you said it took a little bit of a hiatus a little bit, and and now it’s now it’s here. Your your ministry really grew, and it expanded in a lot of ways. So then why why a book? Were you encouraged by other people to do it? Was this just something on your heart you wanted to expand to people who aren’t in the trenches with you, so to speak, and and doing that?

James Whitford: I I really I mean, it may sound strange. It was nothing more than just feeling like God was compelling me to do it. I had I had a lot of this kind of almost built up in me that it was trying to come out in some ways, and so I just could feel that, and I felt like God was saying, Ride it. And so I went ahead and did it, but that was really the idea. But it’s doing well.

Seems like it’s being I’m really excited that it’s being taken up by policy leaders across the nation have heard about that. I’m excited about that. Because again, I mean, earlier I think you said something about the government empowering local people. As soon as you said it, I thought, Truth be told, if the government will simply withdraw itself, you’re going to see a natural, like a vacuum for civil society to step in, which we’ve seen. I mean, you can look at the disasters that occurred in Florida with the hurricane season, or you can see like in my own city at Joplin, Missouri in 2011, an F5 tornado came through and rendered 7,000 people homeless immediately.

It was a horrible disaster. It wasn’t the government who was there. It was compassionate citizenry that stepped in to do rescue, relief, and restoration.

Doug Stuart: Recent hurricane, last year’s hurricane in North Carolina, for sure. Yeah.

James Whitford: Yeah. And so I feel like sometimes we I think as society, we’ve become too dependent on government. We tend to look to the greatest source of power to accomplish something, and yet it’s inappropriate, and it’s failing. I mean, you look back since the got launched under LBJ in 1964, the poverty percentage hasn’t really changed. It’s between 1115% for the last sixty years, but one thing that has changed is we now

Doug Stuart: Far for the course for American wars.

James Whitford: Yeah. Right. Yeah. Should War

Doug Stuart: on this, war on that. Yeah. We’re not making any progress. Sorry, I interrupted you. My bad.

James Whitford: No. No. No. You’re so right. And unfortunately, they’re they’re utilized for political gain far too often.

Know, I mean, we want to be the one who launches a war and has the cause, and the truth is this has been an utter failure. And now we have even more people today in the last, let’s see, since about 1980 or so, we have more people now in deep poverty than we do that are not in deep poverty, which is below 50% of the poverty line. So the poverty percentage hasn’t really been changing, but people who are in poverty are actually getting worse, and so that’s manifesting in the increase in homelessness that we’ve seen in the last So decade or yeah, this whole idea of handouts and government funded welfare is not doing any good. It’s addressing symptoms, but it’s not addressing the source. And I like to tell folks, I think that when we address symptoms only, we actually inflame the underlying pathology, kind of like addressing the symptoms of a diabetic who’s feeling lethargic and thirsty.

We might give them an ice cold Pepsi or Coca Cola, but the truth is that’s gonna do them more harm than good. We’re just addressing the symptoms. Now poverty, if that’s a diagnosis, what are the symptoms? I don’t have cash. I don’t have food.

I don’t have a roof over my head. Well, how are we gonna address those symptoms? Well, we can hand you cash out at the corner. We can hook you up with SNAP, the food stamp program, and we’ll get you into a HUD housing project. That’s addressing symptoms, and I believe it’s actually inflaming the pathology.

It’s making things worse in our nation today, and we’ve gotta stop it.

Doug Stuart: I had a question there that I was about to ask you, and I’m drawing a blank here, so until I remember it, let’s talk about the idea of empowerment, because I think there’s a lot of, I think, oh, it came to my mind, here we go. I would imagine that any far left leaning person sitting here hearing you say exactly what you just said, that we don’t want to create people who are dependent. We want people to be empowered, to take advantage of their own lives, and rise to the challenges that life sets for them, and so that in theory, we don’t need charity, or for that matter handouts. The problem, of course, is there are people advocating for programs that do just that, and it it seems like nobody really wants there to be this idea of dependency. Even people I mean, again, I’m assuming the best of even people who might be on the far left saying, well, we need that.

They don’t want dependency. They just want people to not be destitute, and they don’t want people to be really poor. And so, your book really describes, and sometimes by example, and sometimes by just, you know, citing policies like IRS codes that won’t allow your organization to take money from Feeding America because you can’t do it for exchange of services. Like, just things like that almost are the biggest perversion in this whole landscape than just people wanting other people to be dependent. Because I don’t I don’t I don’t truly believe that anybody wants that.

James Whitford: Yeah, I don’t know that I disagree with you there. I do think that there can be ulterior motives to redistributionist policy, which is to remain in a position of power, But I don’t know that that’s really That would probably be fewer than the majority of left leaning policymakers. I think most of them do have They sense a responsibility for one reason or another to do something. But we’ve got to look at, are the means to the end right, and is the end working? So we need to look at both outcomes as well as is this really the right and biblical means by which this should be done?

Jesus said, Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and I always say, Yeah, but don’t give to him what is not his.

Doug Stuart: Yeah, right.

James Whitford: And I think we’ve got to ask, Is this really right to do this? And you’re right. I think that for the most part, don’t want to see people trapped in dependency, but we do need to ask ourselves, What is the flourishing life? Okay, so that’s because everybody, that’s like the opposite. That’s the flip side of that coin.

We don’t want people in dependency. Okay, what do you want? We want people to live a flourishing life. Okay, what is that? Well, for me, the flourishing life has three basic elements.

You’ve got to have freedom, you’ve got to have vision for the future, and you’ve got to have purpose in what you’re doing. And I think, you know, it kind of makes sense if you think about flourishing and the idea of, you know, growth and movement like that, life, a vibrant life, right? Yeah. Well, you’ve got to be free. If you’re not free physically, if you’re not free spiritually or socially, you’re not gonna flourish physically, spiritually, or socially.

You’ve got to have freedom. That’s important. But you also need to have a vision for the future. If you have no vision about where I want to go or a better tomorrow or a hope for the next five years of my life or whatever that might be, well, we know without vision, people perish, And so vision is incredibly important to that as well, but we also need to have a sense of purpose. Purpose being, for me, that’s like the nexus of spiritual formation or my relationship with God, vocation and how I’m serving people, and evangelism, how am I sharing my faith or the transcendent with my family and my community?

So evangelism and spiritual formation and vocation, where those three combined, I think, is like the core of real purpose. So those are the things that I think that are elements of a flourishing life. None of it has to do with handouts or welfare.

Doug Stuart: Yeah, yeah. You know, for for this for this audience, it might be helpful to share some of the specifics on how the government has gotten away. I think the like, I just mentioned the one with Feeding America, but I think there’s these sort of structural things that, like, people just aren’t aware of. There were a handful of them in the in the and I was like, wait. What?

Like, you can’t do something for service or whatever. And, anyway, I don’t know. What what other what other ways in which that people get it? Because it’s easy for this Sure. You know, for me to be like, oh, it’s just the government’s fault, we can sort of blame the government.

That’s easy to do, but, you know, you gotta bring the receipts. Well,

James Whitford: yeah, we need we’ve gotta I mean, the blame is the blame’s on us. We need to be need

Doug Stuart: Well, to fair.

James Whitford: Yeah. I mean, to you know, for the most part, we’ve gotta we’ve gotta take ownership of that. Here’s an example, Doug. In my state, there once was the It was a definition. It was a state definition of employee, okay?

So it was a very simple definition, and it was anybody who exchanges something for what they want or need. So this was or who’s receiving something, yeah, from an employer based on what they give or do. And so was a basic It was a very basic, simple definition of employee. And unfortunately, when we took a turn and started saying, You know what? Rather than just give you this meal again and again and again, rather than just provide this stuff out of our thrift for you again and we want you to earn it.

Are you able to do thirty minutes of stuff in our Worth Shop today? We call it a Worth Shop because we’ve learned work awakens worth in people’s lives. So people will craft goods that go to market, or they’ll with recycling or they’ll do something in our coffee business. They’re going to help a little bit, maybe thirty minutes an hour or two hours, and they earn a voucher that they can then use to trade for something that they need out of our thrift or what have That’s such a I mean, it’s such a great transformation of our ministry that’s respecting the inherent dignity in the person. But before we had the state law changed, we had to pay work comp, work comp insurance on all of those people, even if they were coming in to earn a meal voucher for thirty minutes of exchange of their service.

They were considered employees by state definition, and so there it was costing us money in order to really do something that is healthy and good and esteems the person, and yet it was costly to a nonprofit. So we got that definition changed in our state, so any nonprofit can now enter into basic exchange with people who are in need without being constrained to the formal definition of an employer employee relationship. Now, other states can do that too, but those are the kinds of things that are out there that are restrictive, you might say.

Doug Stuart: I I can imagine somebody objecting to that because now there’s gonna be all these people who aren’t the recipients of the of the, you know, the the recipients that you’re talking about, but are people who are now gonna abuse the system and try to avoid paying taxes. And I I just all all of the unintended consequences, which I’m like, yeah. I don’t really care about that because, like, if somebody’s avoiding paying taxes, that’s a that’s a win win.

James Whitford: Oh, it sounds it sounds like what you’re what you just envisioned to me is is a free market.

Doug Stuart: Yeah. Right. Yeah. I don’t think anybody listening to this conversation is objecting to what you just described.

James Whitford: No. It’s interesting. Never thought about how it could grow into that, but right now, of course, one thing that’s nice for us in this kind of exchange system is that we’re not having, it’s not means tested welfare programs, which are saying, Well, you got to fall below a certain income threshold in order to be a recipient of this. We don’t even need to do that. Look, if you’ve got money and you want to buy something, we’ll sell it.

If you don’t, that’s okay. You can earn it too. And so it naturally kind of self selects to people who are struggling and they are in poverty, but we’re giving them that opportunity to exchange something that they have for something that they need, which is so human. There’s a what is it? Well, the line is reciprocity is at the heart of what it is to be a human being.

So reciprocity is at the heart of what it is to be a human being. It was Pope Benedict in

Doug Stuart: Yep.

James Whitford: 02/2009. So but And if our charity is not calling on reciprocity, if it’s not calling for something from the recipient, then we’re actually dehumanizing the person. And it’s kind of a hard pill to swallow, but sometimes I’ll even go so far as to say to people, You feed your domesticated pet one way every day with no expectation of anything. We should not do that to people. Yeah.

That’s a hard pill, but it’s a truth in my mind.

Doug Stuart: Yeah. You know, that’s probably a good opportunity to kind of segue into the other r word, reciprocity, but relationship. My guess is that people who are giving something, that thirty minutes to an hour of something in exchange for a voucher, you are in your ministry creating relationships with people, not only just through that, but in other ways. Can can you talk a little bit about the the key to a relationship? Because I if I’m not mistaken, I think the line in your book is that most that’s that’s one of the key reasons why people are poor.

It’s not because they don’t have income, it’s because they don’t have friends. Think that was the line in the book.

James Whitford: Yeah. No. That’s true. I mean, and that’s pretty easy to see. If you or I ended up in a really tough time, we’ve got the social capital around us that we can lean on somebody that’s gonna be able to help through the tough time before we land on the streets.

And so relationship becomes incredibly important, building social capital. And there’s been all sorts of great research that’s come out recently about the connections that are made, what we would call bridging social capital, which is a little bit different. You’ve got two types, bonding social capital and bridging social capital. They’re both relational in nature. The bonding social capital is where, you know, we hang out with people that are kind of like us, and they’re in the same socioeconomic strata.

But bridging social capital is when I’m developing relationships with somebody who’s not necessarily like me. Maybe it is a person who’s more affluent or is doing better in business or what have you. And the research is showing that the more those types of connections are made between the poor and those who are not poor, that bridging social capital is developed, the greater their income mobility. So if we really want to see people step into a prosperous way, we need to make sure that there are people who are not poor who are actually developing relationships with those who are. So it is, yeah, it’s an incredibly important

Doug Stuart: So, I mean, to put it in sort of a crude way, in other words, you don’t want Elon Musk writing checks to help the poor. You want him hanging out with those who are poor and helping them No. And having relationship.

James Whitford: That’s exactly right. Or he can write a check to my mission, and we’ll do it. So

Doug Stuart: I understand that.

James Whitford: No, but you’re on it, Doug. That’s exactly right, the ideas. And I think that’s an important point too, I mean, as far as donors. And there’s a chapter in the book for donors to be thinking about, Who am I giving to? What organizations am I giving to?

Am I giving to organizations that are being investigated? Developing real relationship with people. Measuring outcomes. I mean, that’s really important because what we found as a ministry was that when we took a turn and made our charity more developmental in nature, all of these people ended up going somewhere else, and we realized bad charity or toxic charity actually crowds out good, effective charity. And we’ve got to ask ourselves, how is bad charity being funded?

Well, it’s being funded through policy or philanthropy. So we need to educate policy leaders and donors and philanthropists understand the policy and where the dollars flow is incredibly important. Again, I think you and I would say the government shouldn’t be taking money and flowing it anywhere, and as far as private charity, philanthropists need to understand that there are good charities that are gonna do a good job of developing relationships and help people escape poverty, and there are those that aren’t.

Doug Stuart: Yeah. Well, it sounds like your view is very kingdom based.

James Whitford: Yeah, I think so. I mean, you know, I’m a Christian living in the kingdom. I’m living the kingdom life, and all of this makes total sense to me.

Doug Stuart: Yeah. No. I mean, the reason I say that, I said that with a nice big smile, because a lot of the times there is a way of thinking about charity as like, well, it’s one thing we do as a Christian. We help those who either can’t help themselves or those who are just a little bit behind or whatever. Help them up the ladder, to speak, because it’s either out of a sense of Christian duty or compassion or all of those other really good reasons and motivations.

But to have a vision, you talk about, I think it was a visionary versus a utopian. Right. Yeah. You have a vision for seeing something, and you’ve walked through the step by step to kind of work toward that direction as opposed to just saying, oh, you know, it’ll be nice one day in the kingdom when you’re actually working that through. Actually, can you talk about that that contrast, the visionary versus the utopian way of thinking?

James Whitford: I think yeah. And I mean, this is just there are people who spend a lot more time on concepts like this, but for for me, the utopian perspective is, look. I see an end that’s beautiful, and however we can get there, whatever the means are, let’s just do it. And for me, a visionary is someone who actually is thinking about a beautiful vision in the future, but there are steps that you’re going to have to take to get there. And so we’re not trying to do shortcuts.

And in fact, there’s a parable that I put in the book about a short, you know, some government leaders that decide to take a shortcut, and they what they do is they find out in the end of this parable that it didn’t work. There really are no shortcuts to a free society. A beautiful society, there’s no shortcut to that. And the other thing that the parable points out is that there’s a lot of beauty in the journey, And so when we’re relational with people who are struggling in poverty, suddenly the whole feeling of poverty begins to be lost. And one of the things I think I mentioned in the book are the students in our long term residential recovery program who come out and spend a week with me and my wife at our home, you know, and we’ll have a handful of them out, and they’ll spend some time on our property.

We’ll fish together. We’ll work together. We’ll be outside together, you know, around a campfire together, breaking bread together. And when we do that, there’s nobody who’s feeling poor. Even though if we were to look at their income, these guys who’ve come off the streets or out of prison or whatever, yeah, they’re poor.

They’re in poverty by all statistical measure. They’re gonna be in the dataset. But here, during that week of relationship, poverty seems to be completely obliterated. And I just think that’s a really important thing for us to remember. It’s not about a utopian end.

It really is about the love that we can live in in healthy relationship with one another as we move toward a freer society.

Doug Stuart: What let’s wrap up with this. What questions should people be asking when they want to give or for that matter, even maybe volunteer and get involved in certain ministries? You know, you can go online and you can see their financial stewardship and, you know, whether or not they have integrity and transparency and all of that, but beyond that, what are the probably more relevant and harder questions to ask that you can’t quite get in a five minute Google search?

James Whitford: Sure. Absolutely. One thing I would recommend is if you go to truecharity.us members, then you’re going to see our member map there. So you’ll be able to see charities and churches across The United States who are leaning into these ideas of true charity, privately funded, outcome driven, challenge oriented approaches. So that’s one thing to do.

That might give you an idea of where you want to volunteer or maybe where you want to give, you to still ask the questions. I think a good one is, are you receiving any sort of funding or resource that’s tying your hands and not allowing you to practice more relational charity that might adhere to the adage from 1899. It was printed on the back of Charity Organization Society pamphlets way back in the late nineteenth century, and it said, Intelligent giving and intelligent withholding are alike true charity. So if you’re receiving resources, it’s not allowing you to withhold at the right time, because that might be the better, more right and compassionate thing to do, but it’s forcing you to just hand out, hand out, hand out. A donor needs to know that.

We don’t want to fund organizations that are under those types of constraints. I think another one is what outcomes are you measuring? And listen to what the leader says, because if they start talking about how much food they gave away or how many nights of shelter they provided or how much cash they distributed, those are outputs. They’re not outcomes. And I think the donor has an opportunity to educate and maybe assist.

Point them to truecharity.us, because we’d love for them to join our network where we can help equip to become more effective in what they’re doing. But the whole idea of looking at outcomes like building social capital, advancing education, helping people into independent housing, long term job stability. I mean, these are things that we should be looking at in our charity work, and a donor should ask that question. And then sometimes I would even say, Can you show me how you measure this stuff? I’m interested in seeing that, and that can be very helpful to understand what the organization is doing in a way of capturing data that’s important to help them modify the organizational practice as it goes on.

Now, that’s kind of advanced. I mean, when you’re talking about the soup kitchen or the food pantry, that’s going to be something that would seem unreachable, but we have developed an outcomes toolkit, and a lot of organizations and churches are utilizing it to develop outcomes for their organization, so it’s possible to do. But I think that asking if they’re getting any resource that’s tying their hands, asking if they’re measuring outcomes. And maybe the last one would be, what your expectations of your clients? What are the expectations of the recipients of your charity?

And find out if they have any expectations. And always remember that expectations are not bad, they’re great, because an expectation communicates, I believe in you, and no expectations communicate, I don’t believe in you. So if we really want to erase the whole us and them thing, let’s bring people into the marketplace of exchange and realize, I’ve got something, but you do too. Let’s figure out how we can swap. And we’re going to esteem people and elevate human dignity when we do it.

Doug Stuart: James, you talked about True Charity. Is it truecharity.us?

James Whitford: Truecharity.us.

Doug Stuart: Dotus. Okay. Is there anywhere else people can find you online? I I really appreciate what you’ve created, the book that you’ve created, that you’ve written. It it is definitely right up the alley of what the Libertarian Christian Institute is doing in terms of not actual poverty relief, but in terms of the type of message and the type of mindset that people ought to be ought to be in.

So I I really appreciate that. If if do you are you on social media? If so, go ahead and share with our listeners where they can find you.

James Whitford: Yeah. Well, I’m not a big social media guy. I have a LinkedIn account, and honestly, Doug, I don’t even know my handle. Okay. But you can find me on LinkedIn, and that would be great.

And then the book is trueturity.us/crisis is an easy way to get to that. Okay. And then we also create a mentoring tool for people at lifedeck.us, so that’s another website. If you want to get into a relationship over a forty week period with somebody that may not be like you, LifeDeck is a tool that can help you just step into that very easily. So lifedeck.us is helpful.

Doug Stuart: Okay. Excellent. Well, James, thank you again for coming on here. I really appreciate this conversation. I appreciate your contribution, and, hopefully, I’ll chat with you again a little more soon than we did the last

James Whitford: time between time and Doug and I want you to know I appreciate your guys’ work so much and and so thankful for your voice in the space. So glad to be with you today.

Doug Stuart: Yeah. Well, thanks for the encouragement. Appreciate it. You bet.

Norman Horn: Thank you for listening to another episode of the Libertarian Christian podcast. If you like today’s episode, we encourage you to rate us on Apple Podcasts to help expand our audience. If you want to reach out to us, email us at podcast@LibertarianChristians.com. You can also reach us at LCI Official on Twitter. And of course, we are on Facebook and have an active group.

You are welcome to join. Thanks for listening, and we’ll you next time.

Catherine Williams: The Libertarian Christian Podcast is a project of the Libertarian Christian Institute, a registered five zero one c three nonprofit. If you’d like to find out more about LCI, visit us on the web at libertarianchristians.com. The voice overs are by Matt Bellis and Catherine Williams. As of episode one fifteen, our audio production is provided by Podsworth Media. Check them out at podsworth.com.

LCI uses automated transcripts from various sources. If you see a significant error, please let us know.