Today two competing worldviews and two competing views of persons offer different solutions to our social problems. Naturalists say that nature is all that exists and people are just complex socioeconomic machines—therefore all you have to do to end poverty or correct societal dysfunction is adjust the external environment, modify the economic incentives, and change the educational inputs. Much social policy in the last few decades worked with this assumption. But if historic biblical theism is true, should we not expect social programs combining spiritual and social transformation to work better than either purely secular or nominally religious programs?
President Bush’s forming of a White House Office on Faith-Based and Community Initiatives (OFBCI) continues to generate controversy, even in Christian circles, but I believe it gives us an opportunity for a nonviolent reenactment of Elijah’s contest with the false prophets.
Let’s challenge the secularists to a test. Let’s invite our best secular universities to have their top social scientists conduct careful, sophisticated comparative evaluations of at least three types of social-service providers: the secular, the religiously affiliated, and the holistic Christian that combine evangelism, prayer, and dependence on the Holy Spirit with the best of the medical and social sciences. (In fact, why not also include Buddhist and Muslim programs?) The programs could be job training, drug and alcohol rehabilitation—whatever. The only significant variable would be the absence or presence of faith-based components grounded in the biblical belief that people need spiritual as well as socioeconomic renewal.
Ram Cnaan, professor of social work at the University of Pennsylvania, points out in the important new book The Newer Deal: Social Work and Religion in Partnership that government, many in the media, and philanthropic foundations endorse a major expansion of faith-based organizations’ role in delivering social services, in struggling against poverty and urban social decay, and in promoting new partnerships between these religious institutions and other sectors of society. The new White House office, with Catholic scholar John J. DiIulio Jr. as its director, is only the most visible example of sweeping societal change.
There are a number of reasons for the growing interest in faith-based organizations.
First, the government has reduced its support for social services during the last two decades; thus other societal sectors have had to fill the gap.
Second, neither the liberal nor conservative solutions tried thus far to solve our enormous social problems have worked adequately. The richest nation in history has persistent, widespread poverty—in 1999, 32.3 million Americans found themselves below the poverty level and 44 million without health insurance. Not all antipoverty government programs have failed, of course. Many, including Social Security, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), and the Women, Infants, and Children nutrition program, succeeded. But poverty, violence, and social disorder still flourish at the hearts of our great cities.
“No one has a clue as to what it would take for public policy to be sufficient,” former U.S. Sen. Daniel P. Moynihan acknowledged in a speech at Harvard just a few years ago. Partly out of desperation, policy experts and the public generally began to wonder if religious groups had at least more of the answer. Today, Cnaan says, “the public is ready to have government support the religious community in doing what everyone else has failed to do.”
Third, a growing body of research demonstrates that religion often goes hand in hand with good citizenship and overall health. Scholars as diverse as psychiatrist David Larson, for years a policy analyst at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Patrick F. Fagan at the Heritage Foundation, and Cnaan cite a wide range of studies showing that “religion is strongly associated with good citizenship and improved physical and mental health.” Active participation in a religious group correlates with lower suicide rates, drug use, and criminal behavior; better health; and altruistic behavior. Independent Sector’s 1994 survey found that persons who attend church weekly are about twice as likely to volunteer (and volunteer twice as many hours) as nonchurchgoers. Catholic University of America sociologist Dean R. Hoge recently concluded, “Church attendance and participation in church programs are by far the strongest predictors of volunteering.” In a widely cited study, Harvard economist Richard Freeman found that church attendance was the best predictor of which young inner-city black males were likely to escape the syndrome of gangs, drugs, and prison.
Emerging reports prove that faith-based organizations (FBOs) succeed in combating social problems. Graduates of Teen Challenge have an 85 percent drug rehabilitation success rate, according to a recent Northwestern University study—in contrast with another study’s finding of a 28 percent rate for secular programs. Faith-based mentoring teams seem to have played a crucial role in enabling Ottawa County in Michigan to become the first county in the United States to have nobody on the welfare rolls. Lawndale Community Center’s faith-based health center has helped cause a 60 percent drop in infant mortality rates in a destitute section of Chicago, prompting headlines in local papers and careful exploration by federal health officials.
Too much of the evidence is still anecdotal. We need far more extensive scholarly evaluation of holistic faith-based providers. But there are enough indicators to raise the possibility that holistic FBOs sometimes succeed when almost everything else has failed.
Fourth, there is growing agreement that our social problems have both socioeconomic and moral/religious roots and that therefore moral and spiritual transformation must be a part of the solution. Economists Sheldon Danziger and Peter Gottschalk report a fascinating analysis in their book America Unequal. They ask how much of the growing poverty from 1973 to 1991 is due to economic factors (especially declining wages for low-skilled persons) and how much is due to the rapid growth of single-parent families. Their answer? The two factors are almost equally important. A child who grows up in a single-parent family is 11 times more likely to experience persistent poverty than a child who grows up with both parents. Obviously, structural economic factors have contributed to the decline of two-parent families, but so have changing ethical norms and personal moral choices. Equally obvious is that if we want to reverse the decline of two-parent families, our churches will have to play the leading role.
Fifth, Cnaan says that religious communities are already providing social services for their surrounding communities “to a degree unimagined and unacknowledged in the social work literature.” In his study of six different cities, he found that each congregation provided direct and indirect support for social programs (mostly for persons outside their own congregation) worth over $144,000 per year. If the congregations he studied are typical and his calculations correct, that would mean the nation’s congregations annually contribute about $36 billion for the needy.
Churches offer special strengths. Serving the poor is a central part of many congregations’ self-defined mission; they have a semiorganized pool of volunteers; during the week, they provide physical space; they can raise discretionary funds; they have a place and authority to assemble the community for discussion; they have the potential for political influence; they offer moral authority and evidence that people can leave behind destructive behavior; they provide a sense of family that can substitute for dysfunctional family life; and they have links to a larger community that can offer jobs, resources, and political influence. Finally, they are present—almost everywhere.
One study of four Los Angeles neighborhoods discovered on average 35 religious congregations and 12.5 religiously affiliated nonprofits per square mile. That is more than all the gasoline stations, liquor stores, and supermarkets in these neighborhoods combined. Gallup polls reveal that seven of every ten Americans say they are members of a church or synagogue, and four of ten attend worship at least once a week. Especially in inner-city neighborhoods where almost every other institution has failed or disappeared, the very presence of religious congregations almost everywhere is an enormous strength.
None of this suggests that religious congregations can replace all government programs. If the 325,000 churches, synagogues, and mosques were to replace government funds just for the four basic anti-poverty programs (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, EITC, Supplemental Security Income, and food stamps), each congregation would have to add $289,000 to its annual budget. If congregations included the federal share of Medicaid, the figure would jump to $612,000. That would be difficult since, according to sociologist Mark Chaves, the median annual budget for all congregations is less than $60,000.
Church-State Hurdles and Secular Bias
A complex set of problems clusters around the issues of separation of church and state and religious tolerance. For private foundations, of course, the church-state issue is a pseudoproblem. For governments, I think the charitable- choice legislation and the OFBCI’s policies offer a clear, workable path that the Supreme Court will uphold.But the problem is much deeper. In this highly pluralistic society, there are many different religious groups with divergent beliefs in every community. Do nonreligious funders endorse particular religious doctrines and practices if they fund the social services of such groups? The obvious answer is no. Sometimes, however, people feel otherwise. I remember a pious relative of mine who refused to vote because he thought that would mean a commitment to everything that the politician did. I disagree. Funding, like voting, implies a limited endorsement of specific activities and outcomes.
The core of the problem, however, lies still deeper. Two different worldviews and understandings of persons compete today: historic Christian theism and naturalism.
Many FBOs work self-consciously within the worldview of historic Christian theism. I am just completing a multiyear study of selected churches in the greater Philadelphia area, and it is clear many of them will not accept funds if doing so would lead them to weaken the faith component in their social-service programs.
These agencies seek spiritual transformation in their clients not only as a worthy goal in itself but also as fundamental to achieving social-improvement goals. The faith-based approach of these agencies is grounded in an understanding of persons as free body-soul unities created in the image of God. In this worldview, no area of a person’s life can be considered adequately in isolation from the spiritual. Strong faith introduces and strengthens an ethical framework that discourages destructive social behavior. Personal faith in Christ brings a powerful liberation from enervating feelings of guilt and failure, as well as a supernatural power that transforms believers, enabling them to live differently. Faith in Christ provides an inner energy that goes beyond drug addicts’ ability to say no to drugs and yes to family responsibilities.
Further, the community of believers offers a network of caring friends who provide emotional, spiritual, and material support. For all these reasons, many Christian agencies believe that an integrated, holistic approach that embraces the best of the medical and social sciences but also seeks to nurture people in a right relationship with God yields more effective social services.
This approach contrasts with the naturalistic worldview that has dominated the academic world, media élites, and policy circles for decades. As Carl Sagan and others have argued, nature is all that exists and science is the only avenue to knowledge. Glenn Loury has summarized this view as saying people are “soulless creatures”; therefore, technical, professional knowledge and skills are sufficient to address social problems. The way to eliminate negative social behavior and reduce poverty is to change the environment, modify the economic incentives, or apply a medical or therapeutic treatment regimen. Naturalists maintain that reference to a spiritual dimension is irrelevant to the task of solving social problems. According to Christian fbos, however, such an approach does not address the whole person, and thus can only get at part of the problem.
Alan Wolfe’s study in One Nation After All reveals that Americans tend to interpret any bold public expressions of religion as distasteful impositions on other people’s religious rights. The invitation to saving faith in Jesus Christ issues from an authoritative claim about the uniqueness of Christ that many find restrictive and exclusive. Thus, despite the resurgence of interest in religion, the notion of inviting others to adopt a specific religious belief, especially if it contains an exclusive claim to truth, is countercultural in American society today. Nonreligious funders may overlook a perfunctory prayer to start the day, but they often refuse to support holistic social programs run by Christians who think that encouraging the adoption of a specific religious faith is an essential component of their social program.
Choosing Tolerance and Equity
Tolerance, of course, can be fully compatible with vigorous disagreement. The only genuinely tolerant position welcomes all voices, including those claiming that some other voices are wrong. If they are to be truly tolerant, nonreligious funders can and should fund social-service providers grounded in mutually exclusive worldviews, as long as all providers demonstrate that they are successfully producing the desired public goods and respect the freedom of others, even as they disagree with them.The only way not to discriminate against a religious perspective is to provide equal benefits to all service providers of every and no religious faith, if they can demonstrate that their programs are producing the desired public goods (successful job training, drug rehabilitation, and so on). Nonreligious funders can, of course, fund parts of the programs of deeply religious FBOs without funding their inherently religious activities.
The charitable-choice legislation (recently endorsed by the National Association of Evangelicals) protects both the religious freedom of participants and the religious integrity of FBOs. Section 104 of the 1996 Welfare Bill specifies that government funds not be used for “inherently religious” activities, which it defines as “sectarian worship, instruction, or proselytization.” FBOs, however, can raise private money to fund these inherently religious activities as long as it is clear that government does not sponsor these activities and clients are not required to participate against their will. FBOs should not use government grants to pay for staff time devoted to specifically religious activities. If a staff position commingles religious and nonreligious activities so that making clear distinctions becomes problematic, then the FBO should choose to fund this staff position entirely from private donations, without limiting government funding for the rest of the program.
The Charitable Choice legislation also specifies that agencies not select or reject clients on the basis of religion and that participants must have a secular option, freely choose a religious provider, and be allowed to opt out of the inherently religious activities. These guidelines can be adopted by both governments and private, secular donors as they fund FBOs.
Two-Sided Challenge
Let’s respectfully but confidently and pointedly invite the secular academic world and secular foundations funding social services to a rigorous public test. We need not mention Mt. Carmel. We need only insist that for the sake of pursuing knowledge (so we learn more about what works, what does not work, and why) and for the sake of efficiency in using societal funds to combat social problems, theists and naturalists ought to join together in a grand, thorough, comparative evaluation.We have a few studies like that of Teen Challenge, plus a lot of powerful stories of dramatic transformation. But as DiIulio likes to say, the plural of anecdote is not data. Fortunately, DiIulio has promised to encourage more objective evaluation of all types of programs.
Christians should dare major nonreligious donors to fund a wide range of providers, both religious and secular; insist on careful record-keeping and participation in scholarly studies as part of the grant; and fund the sophisticated sociological studies.
At the same time, evangelicals should be challenged.
Faith-based agencies must be willing to open their programs and records to rigorous analysis and careful record-keeping. Some evangelical organizations hesitate to accept this careful scrutiny. What do we have to fear? Do we secretly doubt the power of the gospel? Or are our records (financial and otherwise) so sloppy that we fear exposure? If the latter, let’s get them in shape.
Fortunately, we have a whole generation of outstanding evangelical scholars who can participate, along with the most hard-nosed academic agnostics, in the necessary evaluations. We need not fear that subtle or hidden secular biases in the methodology will skew the results.
Would it not be stunning if a decade from now we could point to study after study concluding that, other things being equal, holistic faith-based social-service providers combining prayer, Bible study, and sensitive evangelism with the best of the medical and social sciences consistently produced better results than secular or nominally religious providers? Philosophical naturalists would have to rethink their concepts of human nature.
I have no anxiety about the outcome if the contest occurs. What frightens me is that the invitation may arrive and Christians will fail to show.
In a real sense, the basic invitation has been sent already. The policy élites have already acknowledged that the secular solutions tried before have not been adequate. They have already invited faith-based agencies to play an expanded, central role. The OFBCI may soon announce a massive rollout of mentoring programs already begun by DiIulio in Philadelphia. To answer that call, we will need millions of Christian volunteers and billions of dollars in additional donations—because the government dare not fund the specifically religious activities that are so central to holistic FBOs.
Do enough Christians care? Or has materialism so hardened our hearts that most Christians will sleep through one of the most amazing opportunities in our history?
Let’s be very clear. The present window of opportunity will not remain open for long. If in five years large numbers of Christians have not stepped forward to answer the call for expanded faith-based programs solving our toughest social problems, policy élites will say “Been there, done that.” They will turn elsewhere for solutions, concluding that Christians did not even care enough to test their own claim that people need both Jesus and a job.
Perhaps the real test will be not whether historic theism works better than naturalism, but whether Christians practice what Jesus teaches about the poor.
Ronald J. Sider is president of Evangelicals for Social Action, professor of theology and culture at Eastern Seminary, and author of Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger (InterVarsity, 1977, and Word, 1997) and Just Generosity: A New Vision for Overcoming Poverty in America (Baker, 1999).
Copyright © 2001 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.
Related Elsewhere
Ron Sider also interviewed OFBCI head John DiIulio for Christianity Today.Speaking to a meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors yesterday, President Bush promised minor concessions in his faith-based initiative.
1 Kings 18 tells of Elijah’s challenge to the worshipers of Baal atop Mt. Carmel.
CNN reported House Speaker Dennis Hastert wanted to fast track faith-based intiatives into the House by the end of June. House subcommittees debated the bill on June 14 following a hearing in the Senate. Amid buzz on possible changes, the initiative heads for the House floor.
The official White House site has President Bush’s foreword and executive order forming the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. The Washington Post also has the full transcript of Bush’s public announcement.
The Washington Postprofiled OFBCI head John DiIulio in February. (Christianity Todayprofiled him in 1999.)
The Center for Public Justice Web site offers reams of information on charitable choice plans past and present.
The Washington Post explained issues at the heart of the faith initiative and why it receives criticism. However, the administration made it clear that criticism did not make them rethink the proposal.
The Republican National Committee has a good round-up of what the OFBCI is.
Teen Challenge World Wide Network has basic information, a current press release on the faith-based issue, and a prayer room.
Gospelcom’s Apologetics Index has a site to track news and reactions to the controversial faith-based program.
The Pew Research Center found as religion plays a more prominent role in public life, sharp divisions of opinion about the mixing of church and state are apparent.
Amazon.com has Alan Wolfe’s One Nation After All and Ram Cnaan’s The Newer Deal.
Ron Sider’s Evangelicals for Social Action site offers moreonhisviews of charitable choice.
Christianity Today‘s earlier coverage of DiIulio and Bush’s faith-based initiatives includes:
DiIulio Keeps Explaining, But Is Anyone Listening? | At a media luncheon in Washington about Bush’s faith-based initiatives, answered questions get asked one more time. (Apr. 9, 2001)
DiIulio Pitches Charitable Choice to Cautious NAE Delegates | Meanwhile, group suggests religious broadcasters reconsider severing ties. (Mar. 21, 2001)
Editorial: No More Excuses | Bush’s faith-based initiative should reinvigorate our mission of service. (Mar. 15, 2001)
Charitable Choice Dance Begins | Faith-based organizations cautious but eager for government aid. (Mar. 15, 2001)
Should Charities Take Washington’s Money? | Churches and ministries grapple with the ramifications of accepting federal funding. (Feb. 13, 2001)
The Bush Agenda | Will the White House be user-friendly for religious organizations? (Jan. 8, 2001)
Bush’s Call to Prayer | After Al Gore’s concession, evangelical leaders unify around faith-based initiatives, morality, and prayer as the incoming Bush administration gears up. (Dec. 14, 2000)
A Presidential Hopeful’s Progress | The spiritual journey of George W. Bush starts in hardscrabble west Texas. Will the White House be his next stop? (Sept. 5, 2000)
Bush’s Faith-Based Plans (Oct. 25, 1999)
