Religious Charities Can’t Do It All

By JOEL SCHWARTZ

Faith-based charities already do much to alleviate poverty and other social ills, and they can be expected to do even more in the future. Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore and Republican candidate George W. Bush both have endorsed the idea of religious charities receiving increasing amounts of government money to provide social services.

But Mr. Gore, Mr. Bush, and many other advocates of faith-based charities are putting too much faith in faith, counting too much on religious charities to solve the nation’s social ills.

Never mind the argument made by most critics of faith-based charities: that funneling government money through faith-based institutions violates the separation of church and state. Plenty of ways exist to keep such violations from occurring.

A bigger concern should be that religious charities are limited in their power to improve society, and that faith alone cannot solve problems like drug abuse, crime, and teenage pregnancy. Encouraging the development of faith-based charities is laudable. But as many others have noted, we still need government and the corporate world working alongside faith-based institutions if we want to solve our most persistent social woes.

For two reasons, faith-based charities should not be viewed as panaceas.

First, faith doesn’t work for everybody. Some people are not receptive to religious teaching, and many are downright hostile to it.

What’s more, not all faith groups promote the attitudes and behaviors that enable people to overcome their failings and weaknesses.

To be sure, it often is faith, and only faith, that enables people to turn their lives around and to overcome such problems as drug or alcohol abuse that prevent them from being productive members of society. But the nature of religiosity limits the ability of faith-based institutions to heal social ills.

The power of faith is limited partly because faith is not universal. It doesn’t appeal to everyone. While faith does indeed move mountains, it nevertheless seems to leave at least some human mountains unmoved.

That problem is reflected in a comment by one of the most prominent advocates of the inner-city poor — the Rev. Eugene Rivers, a black Pentecostal minister who works with young people in the impoverished Boston neighborhood of Dorchester. He estimates that only 40 percent of inner-city blacks go to church.

If Mr. Rivers’s figure is correct, it follows that 60 percent of inner-city blacks do not go to church. And those who do not attend church are unlikely, of course, to be moved by the preaching of Mr. Rivers and his many counterparts — which is to say that their lives are less likely to be transformed for the better by faith.

Perhaps church attendance in poverty-stricken areas can somehow be increased — though it’s at best unclear how that might be done. But raising church attendance would regrettably pose a difficulty of its own.

The difficulty has been noted by Harvard University economist Richard B. Freeman. In 1986 Mr. Freeman was among the first to observe a correlation between churchgoing and upward mobility among young black males in the inner city. But he conceded that the practical upshot of the correlation is unclear. Mr. Freeman asserted that increasing church attendance might not reduce poverty, because putting “a bad kid in church” might not reform him, but might instead “disrupt everything.”

To see the problem that disruption would pose, consider that the effectiveness of public-school education in inner cities is sometimes severely hampered by the presence of violent and abusive kids in class. Kids like those can make it hard for even their studious classmates to learn much.

The same dynamic might well take place in churches and other religious institutions. In some cases the bad kids will hear and adhere to the message; but in many cases the bad kids are just as likely to drown out the message, so that others cannot hear and benefit from it.

Finally, the messages that congregants hear do not invariably promote self-help.

It’s an unfortunate fact that religion doesn’t always promote the prudent behavior that helps people emerge from poverty. Instead, religious belief sometimes fosters a sense of helplessness and low levels of personal aspiration, teaching that we are the playthings of fate rather than the captains of our souls.

Why, for example, has extramarital pregnancy increased so drastically in inner cities? Since both Christianity and Islam preach that marriage must precede conception, one might assume that a decline in religious belief must have accompanied the rise in out-of-wedlock births.

But Elijah Anderson, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, argues that what he calls “fundamentalist” religion — not just indifference to religion or hostility to it — has also undermined efforts to reduce out-of-wedlock pregnancies in the inner city.

In many circles, he notes, young mothers are praised by deeply religious older women as the recipients of a “heavenly gift,” even when their babies are born out of wedlock. Mr. Anderson contends that “such ready social approval works against many efforts to avoid illegitimate births.” In effect, the young mothers are counseled to welcome their destiny — not to alter or improve it by the prudent action of avoiding the pregnancy or having sex only with a marriageable partner.

For those reasons, when proponents of faith-based institutions speak of the power of religion to reduce poverty, crime, and dependency, we are — or at least we should be — speaking in shorthand: acknowledging that religion will not solve everybody’s problems but recognizing that for many people, it is more effective than any other solution.

Joel Schwartz is the author of

Fighting Poverty with Virtue: Moral Reform and America’s Urban Poor, 1825-2000, which has just been published by Indiana University Press. He is an adjunct senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.