Our welfare problem is part of a larger crisis in America. Every year, more American blacks are killed in urban violence by other blacks than the total number of blacks who died in service throughout nine years of the Vietnam War. Today, little children can stand at the scene of a homicide calmly eating ice cream cones.
"The crisis now facing black America is more devastating than the combined impact of slavery, racial discrimination, and drugs. For now, the enemy is within," says Pastor Leonidas Young, a liberal Democrat who was formerly mayor of Richmond, Virginia. To continue to focus on racism as the principal enemy of the black community is to travel down a lethal path of self-deception. Our communities are dying from self-inflicted wounds.
And the moral dissolution that is devastating our low-income minority neighborhoods has also begun gnawing away at white, upper-income society. Carroll O’Connor, Gloria Vanderbilt, and other affluent celebrities have lost children to substance abuse or suicide. George McGovern’s daughter died a lonely alcoholic, frozen in the winter snow. Margaux Hemingway was found dead after a long struggle with alcohol and bulimia.
If race and poverty cause social breakdown, then why do we have cases like the Menendez brothers, who gunned down their affluent parents in cold blood? If lack of educational opportunities is the problem, why didn’t authorities assume that a Harvard degree would have prevented the accused Unabomber from plotting murders? Why didn’t prestige and privilege prevent a Nobel laureate from sexually abusing the children he worked with? Why are there so many wealthy people in drug rehab?
Many Americans live in lavish homes that echo with emptiness, and many wealthy children experience the same moral confusion as poor kids. Across society, a spiritual and moral free fall has created fear and unhappiness, and destruction. A majority of Americans say that the nation’s moral problems concern them more than its economic challenges.
The good news is that solutions to our welfare problem, and the larger moral crisis to which it is linked, do exist. But the ultimate answers lie beyond traditional responses like job training, education, subsidized housing, food assistance, or racial reconciliation. To locate solutions to our most dangerous social diseases we must look in some new places.
For there are embers of health and restoration even among the ruins of today’s inner-city neighborhoods. To make use of the hope they offer, we must open ourselves to new kinds of authority and expertise. Some of today’s most promising community healers have come out of our prisons, out of drug addiction, out of dysfunctional families and crime-ridden neighborhoods. Many have themselves fallen into trouble—but then recovered through their faith in God.
Many of these moral healers are helping—with meager resources—persons conventional service-providers have given up on. Yet these healers’ effectiveness eclipses that of conventional professional remedies. For example, a faith-based substance abuse program established in San Antonio, Texas, by a recovered drug addict named Freddie Garcia has freed 13,000 drug abusers and alcoholics from their addictions. It operates at a cost of only $80 per person, per day, yet has a 70 percent success rate, in contrast to conventional therapeutic programs for substance abusers that charge up to $600 a day per client yet have far lower success rates. More.
Why haven’t we heard more about these social healers? Why haven’t we tapped their approaches to address not only the needs of the underclass but also the problems of apathy, despair, and isolation that are wrenching families of every race, ethnicity, and income bracket?
The main reason, simply put, is elitism. The moral and religious approaches emphasized by healers like Pastor Garcia are looked down upon by many in our cultural establishment, who prefer to view the poor as hapless victims waiting to be rescued by experts and monthly checks. After all, the poor are now worth $340 billion in annual allotments made by governments in their name.
Today’s civil rights establishment, the academic and governmental poverty industries, and their political affiliates will not easily relinquish their "ownership" of the problems of race and poverty. That’s why they have fiercely opposed welfare reform, particularly any solutions that compete with their clinical, money-based approach.
But after the failure of last generation’s War on Poverty, some private groups and individuals began exploring less conventional methods of aiding the underclass. In the process they discovered remedies that could potentially salvage our nation. Religious-based healers have successfully addressed problems that everyone agrees are at the core of our meltdown—the moral degeneracy that gets expressed in violence, drug addiction, sexual license, and family disloyalty.
I didn’t discover the power of faith-based remedies through any deep religious convictions of my own. I was simply the founder of a policy institute looking for ways to combat poverty. For two years, I hosted town meetings around the country and invited local leaders to show me strategies of personal and community revitalization that have been effective. I still don’t entirely understand how faith-based organizations reach into the heart of the most severely damaged individuals and transform them. But overwhelming evidence shows they can do just that.
From Native American reservations in New Mexico, to black inner-city neighborhoods, to rural white mining towns, to Hispanic barrios, local residents and leaders have shown me that faith-based approaches work. I’ve talked to people who were in prison, who had infected their own sons with drugs, who were prostitutes, shattered people who experts said were beyond reach but whom I saw transformed. I met a white man who told me that for seven years while he was a police officer he was addicted to violence—against those he arrested, and against his own family. But he found his way to a grassroots ministry and his life was remade. He has now been violence-free for seven years.
Even within the most devastated social terrain, the embers of spiritual renewal are alive in the work of thousands of grassroots moral leaders. If these embers can be nourished by those who have wealth and influence, the flames of revitalization can sweep across the nation like a brushfire, bringing life and hope where there is now only cynicism, confusion, and despair.
Whenever I’m asked to describe my studies of grassroots social ministries and to explain their successes, I recall the New Testament story of the blind man. For years, he had no sight and was a beggar. Then one day he went to Jesus and was healed. The Bible says the scribes and pharisees were skeptical and tried to discredit Jesus and intimidate the man. They asked him, "Do you believe He is the Messiah?" The man replied, "Oh what a marvelous thing! That you great men of wisdom and knowledge would ask me, a poor and humble man, if He is the Messiah! All I can tell you is this: I was blind. And now I see.…"
Robert L. Woodson, Sr. is president of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise (NCNE). This essay is adapted from his forthcoming book, The Triumphs of Joseph.
Faith-based Healing Isn’t Just
for the Underclass
By William Schambra
How can we make grassroots groups that use religious teachings to solve social problems more acceptable to mainstream America?
I consider myself a mainstream kind of guy, and I not only find grassroots groups acceptable, I just can’t hear enough from community leaders like Freddie Garcia, Juan Rivera, Rita Jackson, Carl Hardrick, and Leon Watkins. I’ve been reflecting recently on what it is that draws me again and again to listen to their message.
The last time I saw Pastors Garcia and Rivera was at Victory Fellowship, their substance abuse program in San Antonio. I went up to Juan and described, with some perplexity, the deep refreshment I always took away from his sessions. I told him I sensed it was related to the struggles I faced in my own life—struggles different from his only insofar as they occurred on the streets of more fashionable neighborhoods.
Pastor Rivera, the great minister to addicts, prisoners, and prostitutes, put his hand on my shoulder and said gently, "Hey, you’re one of us."
Me? Addict? Prisoner? Prostitute? You bet. I may never have been addicted to heroin or crack, but hadn’t I, in fact, been enslaved to another legal, so-called acceptable, chemical addiction? Hadn’t I been hopelessly addicted at various points in my life to work, to scholarly credentials, to physical appearances, to professional success, political power, social status? I may have never been a prisoner behind physical bars, but I had been imprisoned within my exaggerated notions of who I am, my false suppositions about who others are. I may never have prostituted my body for money, but how many times have I prostituted my spirit—far worse—to achieve petty goals? I have been an addict, a prisoner, a prostitute.
What Pastor Rivera was offering me that day was an invitation into the community of the broken, of those who have acknowledged and repented for their sins; those who have found forgiveness and redemption in the healing presence of Christ.
That is what I sense whenever I observe grassroots poverty ministries. That’s what sends me back to my office renewed and healed every time.
Now it might seem as if Pastor Rivera’s invitation would be irresistible to everybody, that mainstream America would come flocking. But that is hardly the case. Because the critical first step in accepting that invitation is admitting that we are indeed broken, that there are things wrong within each of us.
When things do go wrong, and we’re finally confronted with irrefutable evidence of brokenness, Americans often rush to the altar of science. Just as we seem to believe there’s no physical malady that can’t be cured through medicine, so many of us think there’s no psychological malady that can’t be cured through social science. With the help of a government willing to buy us enough therapists and social workers, everything can be worked out.
Given our huge investment in this illusion, it’s no wonder the message of faith-based healers isn’t popular. For they don’t talk about dysfunction and pathologies and being "at-risk"—all of which suggest material deficiencies that government or science can remedy. They talk about universal human weaknesses to be guarded against, by individual and society alike.
When Pastor Garcia tells thousands in a Houston auditorium, after a group of his former addicts have performed his play The Junkie, "Listen to me, folks. The miracle that took place in our lives didn’t happen because we called upon the name of Socrates, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, or Sigmund Freud. This transformation in our lives took place when we called upon the name of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ," you can imagine what that does to those of us who have spent our lives worshipfully studying Socrates, Darwin, Marx, and Freud. Yet the fact remains: Garcia speaks the truth.
Fresh signs give me hope that faith-based poverty activists may be listened to more attentively. Americans are becoming aware that something really is fundamentally wrong with our nation today—something that forces its way through the walls of denial, something well beyond the curative powers of public policy or science. You hear more and more discussion about the moral and spiritual exhaustion of the culture, about a national sickness of the soul. This sickness doesn’t dwell solely in the inner city, although it is more visible there because poor people don’t have the material resources to hide the effects of disastrous spiritual diseases that rich people have.
Many Americans sense that the way to fight back against spiritual sickness is to revitalize the family, churches, neighborhood organizations, and voluntary associations—the institutions that once gave form and substance to our deepest moral convictions. In Pastor Rivera’s words, Americans are yearning for communion among repentant children of God.
Some of the Americans who would like to experience that sort of community don’t think it’s possible anymore. They’re full of despair and resignation. They look at the dry, scattered bones of our communities and say, "No one can breathe life back into these lifeless bones." Tell that to Freddie Garcia, Leon Watkins, Carl Hardrick. Tell that to the grassroots folks I’ve met in Milwaukee—Deacon Bill Locke, Lessie Handy, Cordelia Taylor.
Every day, these men and women take the broken bodies of addicts, prisoners, and prostitutes and breathe the life of Christ back into them. They take boarded-up homes and build joyful temples of worship. They take abandoned stores and build diners. They take run-down corner taverns and build senior citizen facilities and daycare centers. Don’t tell these folks that we can’t revive our civic institutions, because they have experienced decay and death, and now know how to generate personal and civic resurrection under the least hospitable circumstances imaginable.
I’ve spoken with businessmen and professionals who have been wonderfully successful at what they do and made a lot of money. Suddenly, they arrive at middle age and realize something fundamental is missing. These people come to feel that they’re called to offer their wealth and skills in the service of some higher purpose. Yet they know that getting involved with big, top-down private charities will not suffice, because those kinds of organizations don’t fight poverty any more effectively than they create wealth. So they’re searching for something else.
I have also spoken with young people who tell me they want to devote themselves to a cause, to an undertaking that will give their lives real purpose. All the great secular movements that in previous decades might have spoken to these youthful yearnings have dried up and collapsed. They proved to be gods that failed. So these young people are searching for something else.
And I have spoken with quietly faithful Christians who, at some point or another, end up living the experience of Jacob. Like Jacob, they find themselves alone in their tent one night, in the dark night of the soul, wrestling with God. For some, it is an addiction or alcohol dependency. For others, the tragic death of a loved one, or losing a job, or a divorce. With the grace of God, they outlast those struggles, sometimes even feeling blessed like Jacob. But like Jacob who was smitten on the thigh, they will forever walk with a limp. No longer are they interested in personal façades. They are searching for other people who, like themselves, have reached a new appreciation of life’s meaning, and who now walk with a limp.
Let all of these searchers after servanthood bring their wealth, their professional skills, their dedication, their energy, their humble and open hearts, and offer them as gifts to our faith-based attack on poverty. This can begin today. None of it depends on passing laws, or winning elections, or raising or lowering taxes, or persuading some stubborn government bureaucrat to cooperate. This is civil society, using its own spiritual and moral resources to heal itself.
If we take up these efforts, not only will our low-income communities revive, but more and more mainstream Americans will experience the kind of permanent transformation that only comes from within. For myself, I can report that I still draw sustenance from that moment when Pastor Rivera put his hand on my shoulder and said simply, "Hey, you’re one of us."
This is adapted from a speech delivered by William Schambra, a director at the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation of Milwaukee and a former scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
"Government and the faith-based" DEBATE
See 'con' misgivings expressed Jewish perspective - pro and con
See 'pro' American Enterprise Institute - for Public Policy Research [Conservative "Thinktank"]
See 'con' Groups on record - in defense of the First Amendment
See 'con' The Interfaith Alliance [TIA] - promoting the positive and healing role of religion
See 'pro' Role of faith-based groups : in Crime Prevention and Justice