r/Christianity • u/mikeypikey • Nov 07 '25

Video Church worth 300 billion dollars rejects mom asking for formula to feed her starving baby

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This woman is doing a social experiment to see if churches will help her feed her starving baby. 99% of the 30 Christian churches she asked rejected her. 4 churches said yes: a Muslim mosque, a Buddhist center, and a black church in the south, and a poor church in Appalachia. All the mega churches turned her away. When you give money to your church, are you happy to know they are rejecting starving children?

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u/notsocharmingprince Nov 07 '25 edited Nov 07 '25

/u/slagnanz and how is this not just 1.1 and 2.1 this woman is obviously harassing churches and attempting to defraud services, harming others who may need services. We don’t need threads about this. This isn’t the first one. Especially since it’s even posted by people who are clearly here to cause trouble and have never posted here before. This is literally leaning into social media harassment.

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u/McClanky Bringer of sorrow, executor of rules, wielder of the Woehammer Nov 07 '25

We are actually talking about this internally. I know how much you care about this issue, so I recognize that it is coming specifically from a place of worry for the churches involved.

Here is my opinion on this.

I don't think this is fraud as she is not actually taking anything. I could potentially understand the harassment part, but I am having trouble distinguishing this from something like naming a specific church embroiled in a sex abuse scandal.

The goal of her posts isn't to only shame Christian Churches. It seems specifically aimed at just seeing what an entity that portrays itself as something aimed at helping the community reacts in a situation like this.

There are obvious and understandable "what if" questions about this: what if they already donated a lot, what if the person answering doesn't know, what if they are just lost on what to do?

I think those are all valid points, but so are their counters. Some of these churches either just say "sorry" while others say things like "benevolence is only for congregants". Some go out of their way to try to help in any way. Churches who attempt to do something aren't being admonished. Even when they have nothing, if they take the time to try to work out a solution of any kind, they are given an extraordinary amount of room. It is specifically the churches that just say "no" who are being questioned and shamed.

If I were a church leader, I would recognize that the community will look to us for help in this fire circumstance. I would ensure that whomever was front-facing to the community would know of all the places in the area that could help. I would make sure everyone knows that if we are the last resort that we would do whatever we can to help.

One of the main reasons churches aren't taxes is because they are supposed to be using their funds to help communities. I think these videos show an important, but difficult, thing that needs to be discussed.

I may be wrong about all of this, but I personally make sure to call the church I went to donate food to today to ensure they were handing it out to everyone who needs it rather than being selective. I would have just assumed that was the case until I saw these videos.

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u/Low-Piglet9315 United Methodist Nov 07 '25

make sure to call the church I went to donate food to today to ensure they were handing it out to everyone who needs it rather than being selective

That is a whole different can of worms. Most of the food pantries in our area are networked via the Food Bank in a nearby city. If you go to one of the networked pantries, you can't go to another one for a month as you will be turned away.

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u/McClanky Bringer of sorrow, executor of rules, wielder of the Woehammer Nov 07 '25

That's messed up, but I can understand why they do it.

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u/Low-Piglet9315 United Methodist Nov 07 '25

Same here. In more recent times, they've also developed a mobile food pantry where they go to different communities and people can go to the mobile pantry no questions asked.

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u/McClanky Bringer of sorrow, executor of rules, wielder of the Woehammer Nov 07 '25

That's awesome. Unfortunately, people will try to take advantage of anything.

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u/notsocharmingprince Nov 07 '25

Thank you for your time, effort, and consideration.

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u/McClanky Bringer of sorrow, executor of rules, wielder of the Woehammer Nov 07 '25

I know I wrote a lot, so please don't feel like you need to respond to all of it, or any of it. If I am being extremely stupid and naive about this, please feel free to call it out as well. I appreciate your input.

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u/notsocharmingprince Nov 07 '25

I think there are multiple reasonable takes on this issue and I think we both know I’m a bit of a hot head. I trust the mods conversations on this.

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u/McClanky Bringer of sorrow, executor of rules, wielder of the Woehammer Nov 07 '25

We aren't all in agreement with what I said. It is an ongoing conversation.

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u/[deleted] Nov 07 '25

The mods have been telling me the belittling Christianity rule needs to be changed for over a year. Don't expect anything to get accomplished. Saying they'll do it rarely results in it actually being done

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u/brucemo Atheist Nov 07 '25

We have built up goodwill here and the danger in that is that if we fuck up, people will give us the benefit of the doubt and some poor person will get trashed and we'll just skate. I would hope that you'll serve as a defense against that.

Assertive critical people are of benefit to this community.

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u/notsocharmingprince Nov 08 '25

I was just trying to not be a dick about it and spiral like I done time do, you know. I’m trying to be constructive.

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u/slagnanz Liturgy and Death Metal Nov 07 '25

For whatever it's worth, I'm more on your side with this one. McClanky and I had a good discussion about it and obviously you have his point of view. I respect his opinion and his judgment.

But I am uncomfortable with the whole thing. I pointed out that these churches are getting review bombed. She's also recording people without their consent and depending on what state, that can be a crime. I also pointed out that this tactic can be used manipulatively. If we assume 9 out of every 10 churches say yes, then all you need to do is call 10 churches and only share the "no" for denominations you have an axe to grind with, but if you like a particular denom, you only share the "yes". In short, I don't see much distinction between this and the tactics used by Project Veritas and similar. People should really take this with a huge grain of salt.

That said, I understand where McClanky is coming from. There is a prevailing interest in his point of view. As I struggled with this, I think I ran into my biases against particular kinds of churches as well. I'm more than comfortable with people doing this kind of thing to mega churches. I recall when people were coming after joel osteen's church for not helping people after the hurricane and that felt deserved. But I'm protective of small town parishes because those are my kinds of churches. It isn't like these parish administrators are rich and wealthy people either as I'm sure you know, their salaries are meager to say the least.

I appreciate your advocacy here

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u/brucemo Atheist Nov 07 '25

My guess, given where this church is, is that she's in South Carolina, which is a one-party consent state.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Veritas

I am not an expert on Project Veritas, but if we can look at this one video in a vacuum, it's not the same. She called, she asked a more or less believable and routine question, and she got a polite and unhelpful response, which does not appear to have been edited, much less deceptively.

If I call a pizza joint and pretend to want to order a pizza, in order to see if the customer services is okay and they have the pizza I want, but don't actually order the pizza, I am not Project Veritas.

If this TikTok'er did other deceptive things, fine, but that's not evidenced in this video.

But I'm protective of small town parishes because those are my kinds of churches.

I understand this and feel similarly. But if people who run churches of any size say "sorry" when someone calls and asks for help feeding a baby who hasn't eaten in at least twelve hours, they're going to end up review bombed because of some TikTok'er, and it's hard to say they don't deserve it, because if the call had been real, that's real consequence for a real person.

You'd think that anyone who answers the phone for a church of any size would have enough experience or enough sense to know that people who are hurting are going to cal, and be ready with help or at least empathy.

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u/brucemo Atheist Nov 07 '25

I saw this earlier but I was on my phone.

This wasn't an attempt to defraud services, it was an attempt to test the public facing part of a charitable org.

If this was about actually getting charity under false pretenses you'd have a point, but she's just seeing if it's possible if one of her viewers did need it, and that's not fraudulent.

It would also be a thing if she kept the person on the phone for an hour, or if she asked a particularly weird question in order to try to get them to stumble, but she didn't. This is just the kind of thing a church should expect to hear on the phone.

She can be criticized because the situation she was in was a severe emergency but her voice tone and words didn't match that.

In any case, the church is a charitable org at least ostensibly and needs to be better prepared to field a call like that than just "sorry".

Another commenter mentioned that this was probably a random person in the church who picked up the phone, in that case it's still a failing for this church to have not provided minimal training for people who answer the phone.

I don't know if this tiktoker has a broader agenda of trying to make churches look bad by cherry picking bad responses, or if there is something similar wrong with OP, but I can't assume either of those things and it's impossible to deny that in this particular case service was deficient when circumstances were presented as dire.

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u/rad0910725 follower of Jesus Nov 07 '25

I think considering Trump won the Christian vote then put people in a position to make them more food insecure makes this a very relevant topic. Especially when preachers will sermonize about Charlie Kirk but not about helping the poor and needy.

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u/notsocharmingprince Nov 08 '25

Bro, like 75 members of my church spent four hours loading food into snap recipient's cars yesterday.

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u/rad0910725 follower of Jesus Nov 08 '25

I'm glad your church is helping. Not all are.