Abstract
Winston Churchill is alleged to have once quipped, in reference to confusions over English word usage experienced by Allied generals in World War II, that “Britain and America are two countries divided by a common language.” If Churchill did actually make this remark, he likely did so in reference to a confusion that arose between the Allied generals in World War II, in which the British commanders, following the language of Parliamentary tradition, understood the verb form “to table” to mean “to bring something forward for consideration,” while their American counterparts, following common American usage, understood it to mean “to set something aside” (Churchill, 1948, p. 609). (If authentic, Churchill likely derived this observation from Shaw (1906/1930, pp. 208-209), who in turn may have been paraphrasing Wilde (1887/1891, p. 94), which serves to illustrate, if nothing else, the ubiquity of this idea among the intellectual elite of the United Kingdom.)
As a Canadian who has long lived in the United States, I once considered myself fairly bilingual in American and British English. Reading John Mohan and Beth Breeze’s book, The Logic of Charity, though, I found myself empathizing with those Allied generals; namely, having familiar concepts described with similar terminology, but with significantly differing imputed meanings, leading to slight confusion. Take the concept signified by the word charity that frames the discussion of the book, for instance, as indicated by its prominence in the title. In American English, charity has long been associated with the more religious aspects of giving—in particular, the Judeo-Christian religious imperative to give to the poor—while philanthropy was initially employed to describe giving that promoted human aspirations to excellence, and more lately to describe charitable giving as a whole. Mohan and Breeze, by contrast, employ “charity” as their primary term for describing the overall concept of private giving to public purposes. As they themselves confess, though, there is considerable confusion among British subjects on the meaning of this term, as demonstrated by surveys on what meaning they ascribe to the term “charity” (pp. 4-5).
As a self-identitying citizen of the Anglosphere, I found this book a fascinating, though sometimes difficult, read. Books that present a comprehensive picture of charity and the nonprofit sector in the United Kingdom as a whole are still very few and far between, despite the fact that Great Britain constitutes the very oldest civil society among the English-speaking nations, and has in many ways provided the model for their historical development. This lack likely stems from the fact that the comprehensive academic study of charity and the nonprofit sector (or philanthropy and civil society, if you prefer) is relatively new in the United Kingdom, particularly when compared with the United States. That having been said, as this review is for an academic journal, I feel obliged to adopt a somewhat critical stance toward the book, with the hope it will encourage more and greater efforts in this regard.
The primary audience for this book would appear to be public policy makers and decision leaders unfamiliar with the various purposes and dimensions of charity and the nonprofit sector in the United Kingdom. Mohan and Breeze lament the misconceptions of both British policy makers and the general public, who mistakenly tend to perceive the role of “charities” as primarily to benefit the poor, when scholarly research has overwhelmingly demonstrated that the rich are among the principal beneficiaries of the public goods provided by charities (think: symphonies vs. soup kitchens). To counter this common misconception, Mohan and Breeze assemble and analyze much data on the geographic distribution of charitable services in the United Kingdom, pointing to their significantly higher concentrations in wealthier communities and the existence of “charity deserts” in poorer communities (pp. 62-66).
This common misconception—that the primary beneficiaries of “charity” are, or should be, the poor—likely stems from the fact that nonscholars tend to view charity, not incorrectly, within the context of its historical Christian usage, which primarily emphasizes one’s religious obligations to those less fortunate. It might perhaps make more sense in this instance, then, for British researchers to follow the predominant American usage in this regard, and describe giving more generally as “philanthropy.” In any case, while Mohan and Breeze’s focus on addressing common misperceptions of charity may be useful to a more general audience, it makes a somewhat less interesting read for scholars in the field, for whom these questions have long been settled.
Another common misconception Mohan and Breeze spend considerable effort addressing is the notion that charity can make up the difference as government withdraws from directly funding human services in the current climate of fiscal austerity. This misconception is most recently manifested in the “Big Society” political ideology, first coined by the Conservatives during the 2010 election, and reiterated by the Conservative government elected in 2015. Again, language here obscures understanding, though in a somewhat lighter vein, for the phrase “Big Society” tends to bring to mind, at least for most Americans, President Johnson’s massive expansion of the welfare state in the 1960s under the banner of the “Great Society.”
The Big Society idea of the U.K. Conservative Party, by contrast, takes the view that “more can be done to support and encourage voluntary initiative” so as to help provide services defunded by government (p. 17). Underlying this ideology, though, is the grossly mistaken notion, particularly prevalent among certain government officials, that charitable donations can replace government funding, as well as the reciprocal notion that those charities that do receive government funding “should stick to their knitting” by providing services, and not be distracted from this primary task by lobbying government (p. 39). In this regard, then, the U.K. Conservative Party’s Big Society ideology is closely analogous to the Economic Recovery Program implemented by Reagan in the early 1980s, with its challenge to the American nonprofit sector to expand the services it provides through philanthropy (Salamon & Abramson, 1982), even in the face of government cutbacks, in combination with Istook Amendment of the mid-1990s, which also sought to curtail the political speech and lobbying efforts of nonprofits, particularly among those receiving government grants (Carter, 2002).
As Mohan and Breeze demonstrate in their review of the relevant statistical data, charities in the United Kingdom, as in other parts of the Anglosphere, derive the vast majority of their operational revenues from government contracts and fees-for-service, while a relatively small portion is received as charitable donations. Furthermore, those charities that do primarily serve poorer communities tend to rely more on government support than those in wealthy communities, which enjoy greater degrees of charitable contributions. And finally, drawing on extensive qualitative research—the strongest aspect of the book, in my opinion—Mohan and Breeze show how the subjective interests of donors only infrequently align with public needs “objectively defined” by government policy makers. So the idea that increases in charitable donations will somehow compensate for government spending cuts in a time of fiscal austerity is demonstrated to be clearly erroneous.
While reading the book, though, I found myself wishing the authors had spent more time contemplating some of the potential drawbacks to government funding of charities, beyond their scant mention of the “dysfunctional state” (p. 44). Certainly the (in)competency of government places a strain on their ability to properly fund and manage the nonprofit sector. Mohan and Breeze might have also considered some of the other drawbacks inherent to this asymmetrical relationship, though, such as the potential for political actors to employ government patronage and regulation of charities as a means of garnering political support, and punishing political opponents, and the abuse to which this situation naturally leads.
Mohan and Breeze’s discussion of government policy is also sometimes lost in translation for non-British readers unfamiliar with the United Kingdom’s nonprofit tax environment. “Gift Aid,” for instance, is an element of tax policy ushered in under the Blair government to encourage greater charitable donations (pp. 6, 16-17). However, the book does not provide sufficient information for the reader to understand how, exactly, these charitable tax advantages work, in the absence of prior knowledge.
The most serious lack of translatability in the book, though, occurs in the data on U.K. charities and charitable contributions. Most of the data presented is composed of one or, at best, two data points in time. This is likely a reflection of the fact that the academic study of charity and the nonprofit sector in the United Kingdom is relatively new, and thus lacks much of the baseline historical data that American (and even to some degree Canadian) scholars now take almost for granted. This lack of historical context might have been easily compensated for by comparing the situation in the United Kingdom with that of other countries, particularly English-speaking ones with which it shares a close history. As an aside, I also found myself wishing that Mohan and Breeze would have spent more time tracing the history of the legal framework of British charities and their purposes, beyond their brief mentions of the 1601 Statute of Charitable Uses and the 2006 Charities Act (pp. 7-8).
Most of the data Mohan and Breeze present on British charities and donors is drawn from a range of prior studies, and is primarily configured to advance their main arguments regarding public misconceptions of the charitable sector, the existence of inequality via charity deserts, and the (in)ability of charity to assume large-scale responsibility for functions currently funded by government. As a result, the data they present is often incommensurable with more general surveys of philanthropy and the nonprofit sector conducted in other countries. One of the rare exceptions to this incommensurability is a brief reference to data showing that the proportion of household income given to charity in the United Kingdom typically equates to around 0.5% (p. 31). To provide needed context for this figure, in the absence of data on historical trends, the authors might have pointed to the equivalent proportions for the United States and Canada, which stand at 1.43% and 0.61% respectively (Giving USA Foundation AAFRC Trust for Philanthropy, 2009; Lammam, MacIntyre, & Ren, 2014).
The question of religious giving is also somewhat neglected by Mohan and Breeze, although it is particularly important to their argument for a number of reasons. As the data they do present illustrates, religious congregations received £1.42 billion of the total income derived from fund-raising in England and Wales in 2009-2010, making them the second largest recipient of charitable donations, close behind Social Services at £1.44 billion (p. 25f.). By my reckoning, then, religious congregations in the United Kingdom received approximately 17.6% of the £8.18 billion in charitable contributions made in 2009-2010.
What this figure doesn’t show, of course, is the many significant changes and long-term trends that have occurred in religious giving to congregations in the United Kingdom over the past half century. It might be supposed that religious giving used to be much higher in the United Kingdom, given the share of charitable donations currently received by congregations in Canada (Can$4.26 billion, constituting 40% of all charitable contributions; Turcotte, 2012, p. 26) and the United States (US$106 billion, constituting 35% of contributions; Giving USA Foundation AAFRC Trust for Philanthropy, 2009, p. 4). Religious giving has also declined as a relative share of charitable contributions in the United States over the past couple decades, and more recently has declined in both absolute and relative terms in Canada (ibid.).
This larger historical and international context becomes particularly important for Mohan and Breeze’s argument, given their general observation that, when comparing recent birth cohorts with their older predecessors, there are suggestions of general reductions in participation rates of charitable giving; a downward trend that has been balanced only by the increased amounts being given by those who do still donate (p. 116). This declining trend in religious identification and civic participation among younger as compared with older cohorts is also consistent with U.S. data (cf. Smith & Cooperman, 2016; Wilhelm, Brown, Rooney, & Steinberg, 2008; Wilhelm, Rooney, & Tempel, 2007).
As is well known among scholars of philanthropy, religious participation is the single largest positive indicator of whether and how much a person donates to both religious and secular charities (Jansen, 2011). Given current trends in other parts of the Anglosphere, then, there are compelling reasons to be fearful for the future of charity in the United Kingdom, notwithstanding the efforts of the British government to increase charitable contributions through policy tools, such as tax incentives. This is a subject that will, one may hope, be dealt with at greater length in the future research of Mohan and Breeze, along with other scholarly research inspired by this groundbreaking work on the state of charity and the nonprofit sector in the United Kingdom.