Foundations Lack Religious Literacy

As the Supreme Court gets ready to issue a major decision on the separation of church and state, figures like Pope Benedict XVI and the Dalai Lama command attention around the world, and the divisions among Muslims and Jews continue to provoke tensions and violence, all can agree that faith is having a high-visibility moment. Yet no matter how public religion becomes, or how religious Americans may be, the topic remains taboo and confused among secular grant makers.

While foundations seek new ways to solve problems and advocate for vital causes, their secular stance neglects the largest untapped resource at their disposal. Religion is pervasive and diverse in American life, and while its transcendent beliefs can be ignored, the social reality cannot. Religious groups are more numerous than any other type of voluntary association and are undoubtedly the most powerful nongovernmental force for social service and change.

Religious groups have built-in leadership, the ability to sustain their operations, and a moral infrastructure. Many secular activists, organizers, and educators have long seen the potential that religious institutions have to both advance particular causes and infuse civil society with religious diversity to build a vibrant democracy. The civil-rights movement and Gandhi’s national organizing are just two examples of how powerful collaboration with religious institutions can be for social activists.

So why is religion such a trouble spot for so many foundations? Many grant makers sense this religion gap but dismiss it, fear it, or recognize that their “religious illiteracy” prohibits effective engagement with faith-oriented organizations.

Just as in other parts of society, many people in the foundation world fail to understand the difference between becoming religious and understanding religion. The latter does not require the former. Secular society can understand and work with religion without being converted. Secular philanthropy will not secularize or marginalize religious groups. But it can help to democratize religious organizations by helping them to become a more central part of civil society.

The lack of understanding of religion’s social role is widespread.

When my secular organization, the Interfaith Center of New York, seeks financial support to build the capacity of religious groups to respond to issues of domestic violence, health care, and immigration, we are often directed toward religious foundations, or donors that support spirituality. We typically explain that our programs are just extensions of many of the programs grant makers already support, but foundations have difficulty seeing how the religious aspect fits in.

Some signs suggest that foundations want to increase their religious literacy. When we at the Interfaith Center talk to grant makers about our programs that educate judges, social workers, and teachers about their local religious institutions to make them better informed and more effective advocates, program officers often express interest in attending for their own education.

That is a good first step in recognizing that understanding faith requires a systematic expertise that foundations lack. The news media focus on conservative or aberrant belief systems, and advocates for atheists debunk religion’s nonrationality, but philanthropists must become literate in the social and moral role that religion plays in the causes they care most about.

To begin with, foundations must understand the important role religious centers play in many neighborhoods. Mosques, synagogues, and Hindu mandirs are locations for after-school programs, blood drives, English-as-a-second-language classes for parents, and health fairs — all of which develop social cohesion.

Everyone knows about soup kitchens, but fewer people understand the way religious locations provide an organic and holistic means of support for their community, and often for the general public.

Many religious centers help recent immigrants maintain their identity and integrate into society. While religious communities help those in need, participation by community members teaches them about local democracy and civic participation.

A study conducted by Sidney Verba, a professor of government at Harvard University, demonstrates that religious centers provide a central way for those with fewer educational and financial opportunities to build the civic skills they need for healthy public participation. This is nothing new: Alexis de Tocqueville and more recently Robert Putnam demonstrate how religious communities also serve as important networks for building trust and social capital, which in turn can build democracy.

Religious literacy also means:

Understanding the role of religious leadership. Religious leaders devise, develop, and steer social programs that their institutions carry out, and they also provide moral guidance for individuals, their congregations, and society. They are trusted individuals whom many people rely upon for legal, family, or psychological guidance — often as the first responder. Religious leaders are brokers who reflect, educate, and mobilize the people they serve, and they can play a powerful role in building support for a foundation’s projects and leading advocacy efforts. What’s more, most of them grew up in the neighborhoods they now lead, and they know what it takes to keep good community projects running and where to get the necessary resources to keep projects sustainable.

Knowing something about the moral teachings embedded within each religion. These moral traditions serve as the rationale for the social programs that religious institutions run. For every issue that foundations focus on, it is possible to find a religious group that is also concerned with the issue and responding to it based on its own social and moral rationale. No religious group is morally monolithic — there is no single way that all Christians or Muslims or Jews think about or respond to social justice or health care. But having a sense of their basic moral teachings, how they apply them to each context, and how those teachings influence religious people’s outlook on public policy and social issues will take foundations a long way.

Learning about religious diversity. It is not just that America is the home of Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, Bahaism, and many other faiths, but that each faith is internally diverse in ways that matter — as Shiite and Sunni differences are teaching us in Iraq. Moreover, new waves of immigrants to the United States are changing these traditions and making them more globally interconnected. That complicates the task of understanding how religious communities, their leadership, and their moral teachings operate. It requires putting real faces on what could otherwise be a far too general picture.

How can understanding these facets of faith and working with religious groups influence the work foundations do? Looking at a few of the central issues that grant makers approach demonstrates both the positive way religion operates and the importance of helping religious organizations get the resources essential to serving those in need. Take immigration. Not all immigrants are religious, but they often get settled with the help of local congregations.

While many good efforts are under way, congregations say they need better skills and expanded resources to do a better job. A Chinese Buddhist monk at an immigration-rights workshop explained it well.

“I am a good monk, and teach meditation well, but my people need advice about green cards, and they trust me,” he said. “I need to know green cards.”

Concern with the justice system provides another good example.

In a survey of 150 religious leaders in New York City, all said they need a better understanding of the justice system. Pentecostals, Buddhists, and Muslims may have different problems, but they are all in need of being more informed, better engaged, and potentially mobilized. Every religious congregation has members who get in trouble with the law or need help dealing with domestic violence, and many serve people who are in prison and their families, as well as people leaving prison.

Educating religious leaders about the justice system will help them help their congregation members, and educating the justice system about religion would be mutually beneficial.

Foundations have many other reasons to work more closely with religious organizations. Religious communities run across every political or cultural spectrum, and can often bring together people who disagree on issues. Religious leaders approach their communities by looking at all their concerns, while many foundations look at specific issues; religious leaders can help grant makers see the broader picture of what is most needed in particular neighborhoods.

Perhaps most important, when foundations can bring together multiple religious communities to work together on social causes they all care about, they will create interfaith partnerships and implicitly foster tolerance, civil society, and democracy.

Foundations need to move toward religious literacy. They should do so in coordination with religious groups themselves. That does not mean ignoring scholars of religion, but rather learning about Islam through Muslim poverty-fighting projects, about Hinduism through Hindu programs for children and elderly people, and about evangelicals through their neighborhood-revitalization projects. This direct approach will instantly combat stereotypes about what religious people believe and do. It will also strengthen communities to become real partners in solving social problems and provide a bit of faith for important secular projects.

Matthew Weiner is the director of program development at the Interfaith Center of New York and a doctoral candidate at Union Theological Seminary, in New York.