The Compassion Gap

Imagine you have faithfully served the Marion County School system for 30 years. You are preparing to retire and enjoy the fruits of your low-wage labors, when suddenly your husband is diagnosed with cancer then dies within three months of the diagnosis.

Additionally, you are left to raise your ten-year-old problem grandson by yourself. He has already demonstrated significant behavior issues, even being expelled from one elementary school to be relocated to another. Now, early in your retirement years, you must take another low-wage job to attempt to provide food, shelter, health insurance, and childcare for yourself, and your grandson. To aggravate this, you also end up caring for another grandson for long stretches of time.

This is exactly the scenario my grandmother, Marion Jean Beck found herself in. And I was that problem child.

She was not alone. In the early 1980’s the crack epidemic was beginning to rage. The Reagan presidency amplified the “war on drugs” with the “just say no” campaign and increased harsh sentencing for non-violent drug offenses. It was also a war on poor people, particularly Black and Brown people. This led to an increase in the prevalence of grandparents raising grandchildren, primarily as an indirect result of parental addiction and incarceration (Minkler & Roe, 1993, Burton, 1992). By the 2000’s, nearly 2.4 million grandparents claimed primary responsibility for a coresident grandchild.

My grandmother was too proud to seek government assistance. Those who sought aid were viewed with skepticism, no-good, lowlifes, seeking to defraud the government out of free money and food. For her generation there was also a deeply shameful stigma around asking for help. So, we lived in poverty, mostly eating fast-food, microwave meals, and canned goods.

After my grandfather’s death I entered more fully into a life of crime with the other parentless children who lived together in a poverty-stricken neighborhood. The Florida judicial system is one of the most merciless in the United States. We “direct file” juveniles, meaning, State law allows prosecutors to charge fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds in adult court for any one of twenty-one specified felonies, and sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds for any felony at all. If you cannot afford legal representation, you will likely languish in detention, guilty until proven innocent, and then be shipped off to adult prison. I know firsthand because for five years of my ministry I went into the local jail to work with these direct file youth. And in my B.C. life I was one of them.  

At fourteen-years-old I got popped with a large amount of marijuana with intent to sell. Essentially, my life would never be the same. Once you are in the system, getting out requires a miracle. Today, I could fill out the appropriate paperwork, get the proper licensing, and set up shop, legally distributing marijuana. I was apparently an innovative entrepreneur, seeking to provide medical marijuana to sick people in need. I was just born twenty years too soon.

The Church

In my life, there was one group of people who showed compassion to my grandmother, my brother, and me. It was the people of St Marks United Methodist Church in Ocala, FL. They put up with my deviant behaviors and accepted me anyway. They nurtured me in a community of love and forgiveness since the moment of my infant baptism. They fed me through their never-ending potlucks, and sometimes I was hungry.

More importantly, they offered my grandmother the gift of community and spiritual support. Before the time when therapy was normalized, and support groups for grandparents were organized, the church was the only source of psychological and social aid. As my cycle of incarcerations and state programs began, they cared for her, walked alongside her, and prayed for her. They gave her a safe place to grieve and vent.

What that little congregation was doing then, and continues to do now, is standing in the “compassion gap” of our compassionless and sin-bent societal systems. And they are standing in a long line of Christians across the hallways of history when they do so.

It was early Christians who took Jesus’s call to be compassionate healers seriously. People like St. Basil of Caesarea who founded the first free hospital for the poor in 369. In fact, through Christian social innovation the church has transformed the world for the better in incalculable ways. The church has gifted the world with hospitals, universities, shelters, and food banks— not to mention movements like abolition, women’s suffrage, civil rights, and so on, each largely pioneered by Christian leaders.

The Compassion Gap

This is partly why I find the “compassion gap” among Christians and our church communities today so troubling. As I noted in a previous post, regular church attendance does not equate with increased social compassion in church members (Lenski, 1961; Glock and Stark, 1965; Allport and Ross, 1967; Rokeach, 1969a, 1969b; Christenson, 1976) Most people who were once involved in a church and now are not report a negative experience with Christians as their reason for disaffiliation.[1] One in three Americans report having experienced religious trauma.[2] Thus, one of the leading causes people report as their reason to disaffiliate from churches is other Christians.

The “compassion gap” has been researched at multiple levels. Block, Korteweg, & Woodward studied the compassion gap in American poverty policy (2006). In 2022 the official poverty rate was 11.5 percent, with 37.9 million people living in poverty. Block et al. describe the compassion gap as a “deep divide between our moral commitments and how we actually treat those in poverty.” They argue that when assistance remains inadequate, welfare critics create a self-fulfilling prophecy and those experiencing poverty turn to breaking rules (Block et al., 2006).

Some have observed the compassion gap among the training of healthcare professionals and hospice workers (Spiridigliozzi, 2022), patients describing a lack of compassion in healthcare services, (Sinclair, Kondejewski, Hack, Boss, & MacInnis, 2022), and the prevalence of compassion fatigue and compassion satisfaction in mental health care (Campbell, 2013). Some researchers have focused their study on the compassion gap in university settings (Waddington, 2016).

To date, I have not been able to find research on the compassion gap among churches and leaders. This is, at least for now, one aspect of my research problem.

What is well documented is the “compassion fatigue” among clergy and other people helping professions. It was C.R. Figley (1955) who first suggested the thesis that there is a cost to caring. Extended over-exposure to trauma can backfire on the caregiver in the form of “caregiving trauma” and “compassion fatigue” (Figley, 2002:3).

Compassion fatigue and burnout while related concepts are categorically different phenomenon. Louw suggests that compassion fatigue entails more than merely emotional or physical exhaustion, but rather describes “a kind of spiritual exhaustion within the interplay between being functions and inappropriate frameworks for meaning of life,” or, “the barrier of spiritual exhaustion and its connection to depleted hope and an inappropriate theological framework of reference” (Louw, 2015: 2).     

Another well document fact is the absence of self-compassion among people helping professionals, which can lead to the increased prevalence of compassion fatigue. Neff describes self-compassion as being kind and understanding toward oneself when faced with personal shortcomings and weaknesses (Neff, 2003a).

I suspect that the church is experiencing a twofold crisis of compassion.

1.      We have failed to form compassionate people (consider extrinsic vs intrinsic religiosity in an earlier post).

2.      Congregations and their leaders are experiencing significant compassion fatigue.

Either of these problems render people unable to care for those under their direct responsibility, themselves, or one another, much less those struggling outside the church in the wider community.

I suspect that this has to do with a failure at the level of organizational wisdom. My PhD mentor, Dr. Monika Ardelt developed the Three-Dimensional Wisdom Scale (3D-WS; Ardelt, 2003). One aspect of the measurement is the affective dimension, or compassion response. Ardelt and Sharma also recently developed an Organizational Wisdom Scale (2023). They suggest that inherent in the stated purpose of most religious organizations is the intention to cultivate human flourishing.

Ardelt and Sharma further posit that the ethical foundation and ultimate purpose of a wise organization is “the intention to contribute to the common good and make the world a better place through its products or services and also by providing a good livelihood to its employees through a workplace that allows the fulfillment of their productive potentials” (Ardelt & Sharma, 2023). Wise organizations are compassionate organizations.

I suspect that the “compassion gap” among denominational iterations of the church is in fact measurable. Focusing on mainline denominations in particular, I am curious to know if we are actually not-so-wise-organizations. I will flesh this out in my next post. Stay tuned!

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[1] Springtide Research, The State of Religion and Young People, 2021.

[2] "Percentage of U.S. Adults Suffering from Religious Trauma: A Sociological Study" Global Center for Religious Research, 2022.