October 30, 2003 | Read Time: 5 minutes
Anyone who has watched the struggles of the Bush administration to channel government money to faith-based groups knows that the president’s plan has been rife with controversy.
The fire erupts at the “wall of separation of church and state,” Thomas Jefferson’s metaphor in an 1802 letter. Those words appear nowhere in the First Amendment, nor did they have any legal significance until they were cited in a spate of court decisions beginning in 1947. But the metaphor is increasingly interpreted — against the intentions of the founders — as justification for eradicating all manifestations of faith from the public square.
Faith-based organizations provide results with clear civic value. And whether one understands or agrees with their methods, the results are expressed in decreased recidivism of criminal offenders, reduced drug addiction, successful transition from welfare to work, decreased disciplinary infractions of at-risk youth, and fewer teenage pregnancies. These are the tangible fruits of faith, and they are improving the quality of life throughout the country.
If the government can foster these fruits in a way appropriate to its mission to serve the common good, using money it has already decided to spend, it should. The administration is removing the obstacles for faith-based groups to apply for federal contracts to provide social services. For those who qualify, and whose mission is consistent with this approach, godspeed.
But many faith-based organizations are not candidates for this kind of federal support because they don’t want the entanglement with government. Some are too small to handle the burden of compliance, and others cannot segment their mission into religious and secular components.
Purists warn that, over time, the lure of federal dollars will result in “mission creep” and dependency on government financing. Because federal dollars cannot be used for overtly religious content, organizations must separate the sacred from the secular. It’s an onerous task, and in some cases philosophically impossible. If faith is not only the motivation but also the method, how do you divide the mission?
Add to all that a deeper issue: When faith-based groups receive federal money, they make a Faustian bargain. They are muzzled in speaking about the source of their faith. Preaching and praying may not be done on the federal dollar. What remains is the delivery of social services, which have value, but can become decoupled from their spiritual origin. If you take the faith out of faith-based programs, you remove their distinguishing characteristic and, many contend, their source of effectiveness in changing lives. It takes a rock-solid mission to avoid secularization.
The question remains, both for groups that do receive some government funds and for the majority that do not: Who should finance the faith in faith-based work? The obvious answer is private sources.
Foundations, corporations, and individuals are all free to give in their own communities, seeking out people doing good works. Unfortunately, corporations and some foundations have behaved as if they were prohibited from making grants for faith-based work, although there are no legal constraints. Individuals and private foundations, more than any other source of funds, can maneuver freely with their giving. If faith-based groups provide work with a clear civic value, they are worthy of support.
Equally important is the debate about what the people of faith can do to revitalize a rapidly decaying culture from the inside out.
As our nation shifted the care of the poor from the civic space, where actions were personal, to the public space, where they are not, the American soul shriveled. The glue that held this society together for as long as it flourished was found in personal, face-to face relationships. This is where civil society grows. To the extent that we have lost these face-to-face relationships to care for those in need, we have lost an important part of what made America personal, warm, even luminescent. We need to nurture this part of the American soul.
For too long, many Americans have been living a lukewarm faith with only tepid conviction. Part of the reason to serve the poor is to meet not only their needs, but also our own. What we need is a change of heart. As Americans, we hold in our hands the threads of our tattered civil society. Reweaving those threads through face-to-face encounters in our communities can be joyous and fulfilling. The antidote to so much of the modern malady is right there, contained in the fragile strings of relationships.
Abandoned children in the inner city, blasé baby boomers, isolated elderly people, and disenchanted Gen Xers are all yearning for a better way of living. And yet we do not connect the threads. Only in the corners of our communities where “street saints” are quietly knitting up relationships is the fabric of our country being renewed.
One thing the government cannot do is love. Until our culture demonstrates the virtue of agape — unconditional love for our neighbors — it will not move to help its forgotten. Until we do so as individuals, we will never know the joy that comes in serving others.
Whether or not we respond may determine the very survival of our civilization. America received a rich intellectual and spiritual inheritance and the gift of freedom to develop with an unparalleled dynamism. A remarkable outpouring of generosity in charity and the warmth of human engagement have flowed through armies of compassion on our streets. Trust and cooperation flourished in a way that we almost took for granted, but that surprised 19th-century visitors like the French statesman Alexis de Tocqueville and newcomers from other shores.
We had a nation that was not only strong, but also gentle and good. But the soul of America is in peril now. The question is whether we will heed the call to renew it.
Barbara J. Elliott is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a think tank in Indianapolis; a philanthropic adviser with the Legacy Group, in Brookfield, Wis.; and founder of the Center for Renewal, an organization in Houston that provides services to faith-based groups. This article is adapted from her forthcoming book, Street Saints: Renewing America’s Soul (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company).
