What Christians Can Learn From (And Bring To) Mutual Aid
October 31, 2021 | By Shayley Martin DC ‘22
Pictured: hands over a table of canned soups and other food
More and more nonprofits are questioning the charity model because it suggests a big power imbalance: wealthy donors versus poor recipients. Since charities rely on donors, they have to guard against valuing donors’ interests more highly than the needs of the people they want to help.
And they don’t always succeed. Some charities produce poverty porn, or promotional material meant to guilt donors with stereotypical images and stories of poor people. Donation models like one-for-one giving often prioritize marketing a particular product to donors more than discerning whether communities need that product. Some charities even offer donors a feel-good experience that harms (or at least doesn’t help) the intended beneficiaries—certain voluntourism programs are well-known examples. In short, charities are doing some soul-searching.
Meanwhile, with everyone’s needs and struggles more public than usual, the pandemic has put a spotlight on a different kind of giving: mutual aid. Mutual aid has a group of people—often neighbors—pooling their different talents and resources to help each other reciprocally, according to individual needs. It’s more than doing occasional favors for a neighbor; it’s knowing the needs of each community member, from food to medical bills to transportation to childcare, and working together to meet them.
This is essentially the system used by the early Christian church, back when it was a persecuted minority in the vast Roman empire. The Mennonites and similar groups still use it today. In the modern U.S., mutual aid is mostly practiced by poor and marginalized communities. As a leading mutual aid coordination website explains, “...the systems we live under are not going to meet our needs [but] we can do it together.” The Black Panthers’ Free Breakfasts for School Children program and New York’s Puerto Rican Young Lords are a few well-known examples, but mutual aid networks can be small and informal too, and they don’t have to be called mutual aid. In my largely poor rural hometown, for example, one-third of people who volunteer at the food bank also benefit from the food bank.
During the pandemic, middle-class Americans began to take an interest in mutual aid as they confronted new needs and limitations. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez even published a guide for neighbors hoping to start a COVID-19 mutual aid group. Participants can help supply each other with money or resources, the guide explains, but they might also give time, talent, or transportation. The guide stresses that everyone’s needs are different, so neighbors must get to know each other, listen to each other, and check in with each other.
Mutual aid generally springs up among the ignored for the sake of the ignored. Power isn’t on their side, so they are on each other’s side. Thus, almost by definition, people with power, wealth and influence rarely practice mutual aid. Now, as more people are getting vaccinated and COVID-19 feels less threatening, the mutual aid craze is fading among the middle class.
But Christians—especially those of us with power and influence, which, if you go to Yale, you have in some form or another—have a lot to learn from the mutual aid tradition as an everyday practice, not just an emergency stopgap. In particular, mutual aid groups do four things that remind me of God’s own approach to inequality.
Listening and observing to understand one another’s concrete needs
While we remember the Good Samaritan for his willingness to help someone who is both a stranger and an “enemy,” he is also practical. He sees the man’s wounds and gives resources, time, and effort to lessen the immediate danger by bandaging them using oil and wine. He then gives up his evening plans to stay with the man in an inn. Finally, when he has urgent business, he enlists the innkeeper’s help and leaves extra money for anything the man might need before he returns (Luke 10:25-37).
Collaboration rather than one side setting the agenda
Sometimes God swoops in with a lavish gift that we are meant to simply receive, but even He likes to work with us and tell us what He’s doing (John 15:15). In the Bible, He rarely sends someone on a solo mission—usually, He makes them dependent on other people. God sends Elijah to stay with a widow and her son during a famine, making him rely on their hospitality. In turn, God raises the widow’s son from the dead through Elijah. The widow and her son needed Elijah, and Elijah needed them, too (1 Kings 17:7-24). Later, Jesus specifically instructs his disciples to carry nothing with them when they travel; they must rely on the residents of whatever town they stop in (Mark 6:8-10).
Relationality (without sentimentality)
In the gospels, Jesus spends his days talking, eating, and traveling with a group of guys who are mostly poor—and that’s not shocking if you read the Hebrew Bible. God constantly reminds the Israelites to take the poor into account as a valuable part of society. Rather than pity them or shoo them away, God told the rest of the Israelites to take up the cause of the poor, defend their rights, and invite them into their fields to work (e.g., Psalm 82, Proverbs 31:9, Leviticus 19:9-10).
Highlighting systemic injustice
Mutual aid efforts exist partly to bridge gaps created by systemic injustice, which of course has a much longer history than the United States. God has various prophets speak against systemic injustice in Israel throughout the Hebrew Bible. Isaiah 58 is the classic example: “Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke?” (Isaiah 58:6). He commands not only interpersonal honesty, but just systems and even periodic debt forgiveness to prevent generational poverty from accumulating (Leviticus 25:8-17).
There’s one hangup. Mutual aid is most compelling if you feel vulnerable—I’ve heard it called “human insurance.” If you feel you have everything you need—or even that you won’t receive as much as you give—what’s your incentive to participate?
Unlike charities, God never promises that helping others will make you feel good.
Instead He gives reasons like, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt to give you the land of Canaan and to be your God” (Leviticus 25:38, with many repetitions throughout the Hebrew Bible). In other words, where do you think your wealth, power, and security came from? Don’t hold onto those things so tightly. As always, God recenters the focus on our relationship with Him—one that strengthens and is strengthened by our active love for others.