Kiva's Christian-associated lenders, tools for sorting Kiva loans

[firecat]

I just made some more loans via http://kiva.org. My "strategy" when lending has been to lend to people in a variety of different countries. But this time around I also decided that I'm not going to make any more loans that are associated with explicitly Christian charities. Personally, I would rather support lenders that don't encourage or require their loan recipients to adopt certain beliefs or behaviors (unrelated to paying back their loan).

I'm sure that not all of the Christian-associated lenders are pushy that way, but some of them, based on the lender descriptions on Kiva, sound like they are. E.g., "Esperanza International Dominican Republic, a partner of HOPE International" includes as part of their lender description:

We define poverty as the condition of the human being as a result of their broken relationships with God, other people, the creation and himself, as a consequence of sin. We expect, then, to assist them in their release from poverty through a transforming development process, which we define as the reconciliation process where the individual is restored to bless and be blessed, becoming an instrument for God’s Kingdom.

I defined "explicitly Christian" as a lender or charity that mentions Christianity in its mission statement.

I did a bunch of this research myself, and afterward I found the following list of Christian-associated lenders. My research agreed with their list. The post and comments also mention some tools that automatically sort Kiva loans in various ways, including exclusion (or inclusion) of religiously affiliated lenders:

http://atheist-monkey.blogspot.com/2009/08/kiva-mfi-checker.html#list

(I am not trying to bash Christianity or tell anyone what to do. This is about my own comfort and beliefs.)

Comments

[zeborah]

Argh. That's such a terrible abuse of power. (And a terrible way to get sincere converts, as opposed to converts who are just pretending in order to get desperately needed money. And un-Christian: Jesus was pretty darn explicit that you help people who need it regardless of their religion. And, and, and, and.... It's just wrong.)

Thanks for the list, I'll keep it handy for my next visit to Kiva, and will pay more attention to the lenders from now on.

I'm terribly afraid

[flarenut]

that the process may well end with sincere converts, for a value of "sincere" that involves traumatic reprogramming. If you're in miserable enough condition and people beat on you hard enough, you'll start believing just to reduce the cognitive dissonance.

And thanks also

Re: I'm terribly afraid

[zeborah]

<nods> That's a useful distinction to make: people need to have the physical/financial and mental and emotional liberty, all three, to be able to judge whether or not Christianity will improve their life. And for lots of people it won't, and the God I believe in is totes cool with that.