Appropriate because a couple of days ago my friend Peter - I would say something like, 'Who has a conflicted relationship with the Church', but who doesn't - posted on LiberFaciorum a link to a story about a young woman in the US calling various churches to find out 'if they would help a starving baby', and discovering that quite a lot allegedly wouldn't. Cue all Peter's atheist friends weighing in to say how disgusting it was. I thought the article was quite thin: it didn't quote what Nikalie Monroe was actually saying to the churches she called, what information she gave them, or what their actual response was in any detail. I decided rashly to comment that, if I'd had such a contact out of the blue my first response would be to ask where the caller was: if they were local, I would visit and take it from there, and if not direct another church (and perhaps whatever other agencies were available) in that locality. Such a situation has certainly never happened to me and I have to say were it to my first thought would be how odd it was. The response to my reflections was not thoughtful, and reinforced what one should always remember, that hardly anyone ever engages in this kind of discussion to learn anything, genuinely to exchange ideas, or have their minds changed. It was very clear that the atheists felt the Church should respond to such a request in a way they would not dream of doing themselves. OK, it's appropriate for individuals to behave differently from organisations, but I can tell you absolutely that secular agencies and charities would not respond to unsolicited and uninvestigated requests any more than a church would. In fact I would guess churches are probably more likely to.
At Swanvale Halt church we're talking about setting up a hardship fund: a member of the congregation has a significant amount of money available and thought that might be a useful way of employing some of it. But if I think of the times I as an individual have ended up giving support to people it's almost always ended badly. I have given what must be many hundreds of pounds to Mad Trevor to tide him over crises, always with the assurance that he would reimburse me one day: when he got his substantial payout from the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority last year, there was no talk of me getting a penny of it. Not that I ever expected it, I mention it only to make the point that this is what charity is like. I have subsidised people I should not have: one case I recall I finally called a halt to after about a week during which I was giving him up to £40 a day, with the result that he screamed at me in the street: 'What the fuck am I supposed to do now? Call yourself a Christian?' a line I knew was coming. What I was doing, I later realised, was merely supporting him in his addictions, and the people I really needed to apologise to were the local community, not him. Years later he wrote to me from prison to say sorry. And there have been others.
But the only case remotely like that of Nikalie Monroe's experiment that has ever come my way was a woman who I'd come across through yet another hard case - someone my contact had herself given money to and had it all go wrong. This woman called me one Sunday night saying she didn't want money, but had literally nothing in the house to feed her children - could I spare some groceries? I dug everything I could spare out of my cupboards and gave it to her in a bag when she called round. She was, I suppose understandably, awkward and taciturn and tried not to catch my eye. Though I may have seen her about, I might not recognise her, and to my knowledge I have never interacted with her again.
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