In recent years, welfare provision by the governing JDP (Justice and Development Party) has been criticized on the grounds that it relies upon inculcating a “sadaqa culture” among poor people in Turkey. In this paper, I analyze this public debate as a corollary of neoliberal social governance, but in contrast to analyses which conceive of this debate as being about “rights vs. gifts”, I argue that this public debate is instead about the proper form, medium, and objectives of gift in a market economy. The resilience of the gift ethos, therefore, suggests that contrary to expectations about capitalism, it seems that the contemporary neoliberal present is suffused and indeed constituted by institutions, discourses, practices and ethics of social welfare. Moreover, by historically and comparatively situating the case of Turkey between European and Middle Eastern welfare regimes, I show the ways in which the actual political effects of economic liberalization vary, thereby arguing against homogenizing and monolithic accounts of global capitalism, thereby contributing to the scholarly conversation about the relationship between free market principles, welfare ethics and new subjectivities. I advance such an argument through a multi-sited analysis of the uses, criticisms and refractions of the popular motto of “giving fish vs. teaching how to fish” in circuits of civil society in Turkey. More specifically, this paper is based upon a 14 month fieldwork with two prominent non-state organizations working in the area of social service provision: Cagdas Yasam and Deniz Feneri, the former with a secularist-nationalist outlook and the latter with an Islamic-conservative class base. By analyzing the contradictory political languages, ethical practices and cultures of giving endorsed and eschewed by these two organizations through interpretive and ethnographic methods, I show precisely the opposite of the claim that the Cagdas Yasam and Deniz Feneri represent two poles of the spectrum in their articulation of “charity”—or the complex relationship between the responsibility of the state vis-à-vis the political economy of welfare. Partial embracement and slight nuances—instead of clear cut differences—lie at the heart of the recent politicization of questions of charity in Turkey, revealing that neoliberal social governance; is a historically shared milieu shared by secularists and Islamists in Turkey, instead of being a point of contestation which divides them.