Most arguments asserting that "charity" is a private matter (i.e., not a public or government matter) point to the impacts of the Great Depression and the New Deal. As many (especially religious) arguments go, the government "robbed" churches and private charities of their rightful duties and responsibilities when it began providing federal relief. What these arguments conveniently leave out, however, is that private relief never remotely lived up to the hype of its supposed duties and responsibilities. The federal government stepped in with the New Deal at a time when the rhetorical veneer of sole private charity was peeled back to reveal that private charities (which were almost entirely regional and membership-based) were overwhelmed and could no longer sustain themselves and their own, let alone anyone else.
Historically, churches and private charities have never provided for the country's destitute en masse. In almost all cases, churches and private charities have provided only for their own members. In these cases, help was and has always been highly local and extremely uneven. Relief patterns mirrored urban density, denominational strength, and class wealth. Cities with large endowed charities and vigorous mutual-aid networks fared better, but relief was often extremely discriminatory. Rural regions, such as in the Jim Crow South, had extremely sparse coverage and deeply entrenched exclusions. Fraternal networks and parish relief varied by ethnicity and region.
Those advancing the cause of private charities against government relief invoke common platitudes that have historically served at least two moral and political functions: (1) delegitimizing government aid in policing the concept of "charity," and (2) framing recipients of government relief as lazy and irresponsible dependents of the state. The need for "personal responsibility/accountability" largely emerged from Protestant moral reform, holding that an individual's poverty or destitution were caused by a wide range of possible immoralities. The assumption was that if you primarily worked to change a person's particular immorality, they would begin working and providing for themselves. Other platitudes, like "Charity must be freely given, not taxed," play on the echoes of liberal voluntarism and, in religious idiom, subsidiarity (although Catholic encyclicals also affirm a fundamental public role when lower orders can't cope, so the record is more mixed than the platitude suggests). Finally, the idea that the "state 'robbed' the churches of their divine mission" became en vogue in response to the federal government's actions toward the Great Depression. The sheer scale of need forced a federal solution. What is always absent from this argument is that the New Deal relief did not extinguish religious or private charity at all and, in many cases, actually partnered with preexisting local/regional charity groups to administer relief.
Churches in the United States have distanced themselves from the rhetoric of responsibility toward the poor, absolving themselves of any universal imperative to alleviate poverty or vulnerability. Rather, churches have moved to participate at whatever levels of "humanitarianism" or "charity" they deem fit without being burdened by the broader institutional responsibility to systematically address poverty, marginalization, and vulnerability.
