seven - Poverty reduction and financial assistance

Summary

Summary

• Religious organisations have a discourse of economic justice which complements their discourse of social care although it may not be as visible or as effective since they are restricted by government economic policy and globalisation. In this sense, church groups are the leading voices in campaigning against social and economic inequalities.

• There is spiritual poverty and economic or material poverty according to religious groups. The former is concerned with the individual's sense of inner peace, self-knowledge, self-responsibility and virtuous character. The second is concerned with the absence of key material needs such as adequate income, housing, food, clothing and education.

• Religious welfare actors often speak in the language of social exclusion and empowerment when they are referring to poverty, and see themselves as having a direct impact on the alleviation of poverty.

• Religious welfare organisations are engaged in a variety of economic poverty reduction services including credit unions, cash collections and emergency cash assistance, Islamic or ethical banking, soup kitchens, clothing and food banks, international humanitarian relief and being subcontracted to the government’s Work Programme.

• Religious welfare organisations are a supportive, emergency relief resource alongside the formal welfare system in the UK. Their involvement in the Work Programme as subcontractors sees them taking on a highly secularised and professionalised role. But the added ‘benefit’ is that they are better equipped than statutory bodies such as Jobcentre Plus to effectuate psychological renewal in unemployed people to get them ‘ready for work’ and not just ‘in work’, as expressed by the present Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Iain Duncan Smith himself at a Christian Socialist conference.

Introduction

This chapter takes us into the realm of poverty, broadly defined, and economic justice, both of which are discourses of prime concern to religious groups and actors in the UK. It builds on the previous discussion of social care and ethics of justice in Chapter 6. Poverty is the perennial social problem of human society, and the bread and butter of social policy, but how do we define it? Indeed, our definition of it will determine what solutions we are able to find for it.