Small Religious Groups Face Tough Time Getting Aid

By John P. Bartkowski

The Bush administration is to be commended for acknowledging in a recent report that

federal agencies unfairly favor big, established religious groups over smaller, less-prominent ones when making grants for faith-based social-service programs. But research that I have conducted with other social scientists in central Mississippi suggests that a pecking order is visible not only at the top of the federal grant-making process but at the grass-roots level, too.

Religious groups that are not on the “official list” of local faith-based organizations — typically poor, nonmainstream, and remote rural congregations, many of them historically black — run the risk of being passed over when grant money is disbursed. Conversely, congregations with access to the right sorts of social networks — those with connections to local universities and those that count government administrators, professional researchers, and nonprofit officials among their members — will likely enjoy a significant advantage when submitting grant proposals to compete for government money.

One reason that poor congregations are at a competitive disadvantage is that they often are run by part-time pastors. These ministers are typically too busy in their day jobs to attend meetings where connections with government and nonprofit social-service officials are made. In localities where black churches are significantly more likely to be led by part-time ministers, such subtle forms of ministerial exclusion reinforce racial marginalization.

At an even more basic level, well-connected congregations have mastered the distinctive jargon and complicated procedures that govern public-private partnerships under recent changes in the welfare laws. For instance, among those in the know, hunger is now called “food insecurity.” Insiders also know that people who receive government assistance are no longer called welfare recipients, or people in need, but rather “clients” — a form of business jargon that is alien to many grass-roots congregations, especially in rural areas.

Such terminology is not simply a matter of linguistic convention. It distinguishes insiders who are intimately familiar with the maze of government financing from those on the outside. Lacking the “right” social connections, in-house expertise, and access to professionals with extensive proposal-writing experience, many outsiders are left to scratch their heads in confusion.

Our research also shows that many congregations, especially the most active, socially engaged churches working on the grass-roots level with the poor, are deeply ambivalent about accepting government money to expand their social-service programs.

Many pastors express concerns about government plans that would require them to use a more secular and bureaucratic model to deliver aid. What’s more, some worry that collecting detailed personal and household data from their aid recipients might put too much distance between their congregations and the poor.

And in some churches, typically evangelical ones, pastors fear that if they form partnerships with the government, they would have to abandon such practices as proselytizing while providing social services and scrutinizing the church-going habits of people who regularly receive aid.

The pervasive fear is that faith-based organizations will be forced to compete on a field that, even if leveled somewhat, is still the “home turf” of the government and familiar terrain to congregations that are most skilled at playing by bureaucratic rules.

To be sure, efforts aimed at leveling the playing field of federally supported social-service programs represent a significant step in the right direction. But the equitable expansion of faith-based programs requires careful attention to the nuances of everyday religious benevolence. The pursuit of local empowerment and the formulation of grass-roots solutions to pressing social problems require nothing less.

John P. Bartkowski is an associate professor of sociology at Mississippi State University.