Over at Patheos’ Black, White and Gray blog, where a group of Christian sociologists “share our observations and research and reflect on its meaning for Christian faith and practice,” Margarita A. Mooney writes about “Faith-Based Social Services: An Essential Part of American Civil Society.”
Many of the points she raises echo the principles of effective compassion that have long animated the Acton Institute’s engagement with welfare reform and social service. Be sure to check out the Hope Award program sponsored by WORLD magazine and the American Bible Society, which carries on this legacy of emphasizing effective compassion carried out by private faith-based organizations.
Mooney points out that long before the last few decades of welfare reform and faith-based initiatives at the federal level, faith-based social services were alive and vigorously engaged in charitable activity. As Mooney writes of the 1996 and 2002 federal efforts, “most research shows that these initiatives did little to change the size or focus on faith-based social services. Why? Because most of these faith-based social services existed long before recent federal programs, and because some of what religious organizations do best in social services focuses on deep personal transformations, goals best pursued without government support.”
She quotes Robert Wuthnow on the faith-based social service organization’s vision of the human person. For religious organizations, the human person is more than just a material being with material needs. As Marvin Olasky notes, this older model knew that “true philanthropy must take into account spiritual as well as physical needs.” On this, writes Wuthnow,
…the research that has been conducted among faith-based organizations, although quite sparse, suggests that it is probably their ability to forge encompassing whole-person, personally transforming relationships with clients that accounts for any special success they may have.
Mooney goes on to examine some compelling particular instances. All of this leads to the key question: “Aren’t there ways to allow government support for large faith-based organizations that neither lead to government support for proselytizing nor impede religious organizations from carrying out their missions as they define it?”
On this question, be sure to check out the review essay by David A. Wagner on Lew Daly’s book, God’s Economy: Faith-Based Initiatives and the Caring State, which appears in the latest issue of the Journal of Markets & Morality, “A Liberal ‘Welfare Conservative’ Boldly Explains Why Nineteenth-Century Popes Are Relevant to Twenty-First-Century Welfare Reform.”