Have y’all seen the website Bolder Giving? It’s all about people who give away lots of money – like, way more of their money than is normally sanctioned by capitalist society. It’s not very explicitly political, but a lot of the profiles are really amazing and radical. Anyway, I participated in a conference call they hosted the other day because I thought it would be interesting to report back for Enough. It was a conversation with Tom Hsieh, a high earning executive who decided with his partner to live at or below the national median household income and give the rest of their family’s income away, which they’ve been doing for years.

There are lots of interesting questions bound up in this story (how do we make decisions about what is “enough”, etc), but one of the things that stuck with me from the call was a moment when we were talking about spirituality. Tom and his partner are religious, and their choice to give away such a large percentage of their income is connected to their faith and their belief in god. Tom talked about his experience of feeling provided for by god even while making the choice to sacrifice a lot of the things that people often think they need to be secure. 

Faith and spirituality are such a crucial part of these conversations for me, not because I believe in god but because I think that any questions about how to live in a just way in such an unjust world are fundamentally spiritual, because they have to do with our beliefs about humanity and what we think is possible and things like justice and hope and goodness. During the call, I was completely identifying with Tom in terms of how faith affects my choices about money and giving, even though our belief systems are probably really different.

When I decided to give away most of the money I inherited, a lot of people around me (family etc) were flipping out because it wasn’t a “responsible” decision and they were really worried about me being safe and secure. I was very unworried, because class privilege and rich family give me a huge safety net (same way that Tom’s high-paying job gives him a huge safety net), no matter what I do with the money I have access to now.

But the other reason why it wasn’t a hard decision to give away that money was because I gave it to support things I believe in so much. I believe in deep, systemic, transformative change. I believe in a world without prisons. I believe in ending violence without relying on systems of policing and incarceration. I believe in a world in which everyone has access to housing, healthy food, ancestral wisdom, safety, community, and human dignity. I believe in those things even though they’re big and intangible and hard to quantify, and even though giving some money to organizations that are working towards that world is (as my dad often reminds me) a small act in terms of measurable impact. I don’t think about giving away money in terms of impact – I just think about it in terms of doing the right thing, the thing that is the most true to my deeply held beliefs.

And I would rather put my faith in that vision – of a world based on liberation, where people share resources freely and everyone has what they need – than put my faith in the much more tangible security of things like a big retirement fund and lots of insurance, even though the latter things are tangible and – for me – fairly easily attainable. On a spiritual level, I don’t think those things provide real security. (Not to say that material security isn’t important and necessary – just that it isn’t necessary at the extreme level that capitalism teaches us to strive for.) I think real security comes from things like community, caretaking, love, and recognizing our interconnectedness with other people. Acting according to those values makes me feel provided for and safe and connected, in a way that felt similar to what Tom was saying about feeling provided for and connected to god.

I’m remembering this old thread on Dean’s livejournal in which many people have brilliant and thought-provoking things to say on this topic. Dean writes:

capitalism is based on or produces a notion that people are fundamentally selfish, greedy, and individual, that it isn’t safe to share because you won’t be taken care of, that private property is innate and natural. i believe that people are fundamentally connected, well-intentioned, generous and caring. i have no solid singular proof of this, it’s too general to prove, it’s a matter of faith. i also believe that capitalism is unsustainable and change will occur, and that change can be less violent and more beneficial if we do key work now to set up community resources, political education, to redistribute wealth and power in ways that allow for new political leadership, etc.

I want to pick this conversation back up – I’m curious about ways that your faith and spirituality and religious traditions are connected to how you think about the work you do for justice and liberation, and the choices you make about money and giving.