Trulear on FBOs

One of Bush's advisers on Faith-Based Organizations describes how he hopes to reach his goals

Gene TeSelle reports, and expresses concerns

Check our page listing a variety of discussions of Pres. Bush's initiative on faith-based organizations.

Nashville, TN -- 2-17-01 -- Today the Kelly Miller Smith Institute of Black Church Studies, at Vanderbilt University, sponsored a session on "Church and Public Policy: Partnership Between Church and State" led by the Rev. Dr. Harold Dean Trulear, formerly with Public/Private Ventures of Philadelphia, more recently a researcher at Yale. He is a champion of the Bush administration's proposals for federal funding of faith-based organizations (FBOs) and was one of the advisers in the drafting of the executive order that set up the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. He is intelligent, articulate, and insightful.

His own emphasis is on the difference between "institutions," which are impersonal and concerned with efficiency, and "associations," whose strong point is relationships. The former is what government agencies inevitably turn out to be; the latter is what FBOs at their best ought to be (they can simply ossify into institutions, of course). He commented that social ministry never flourishes without being part of the cultus. (When members of the audience who had never been to seminary looked puzzled, he clarified it -- "worship.") The social gospel, he said, produced only one well-known hymn, "Where Cross the Crowded Ways of Life," and he attributed the decline of the social gospel to its lack of full embedding in worship. (I can think of a number of other hymns produced by the social gospel, and my suspicion is that its decline, just like the later decline of the spirit of the Sixties, was the result of agitation on the part of the powerful, who thought that the churches had no business meddling in social and political issues that were beyond their expertise.)

Clearly he wants government funding to be given to FBOs on terms that will enable them to keep this character.

I heard at least three ways in which he proposes to accomplish this.

First, he wants to be sure that there is research to identify "best practices" and spread the word about them to other FBOs.

Second, he wants government procedures at both the application and the evaluation stage to be modified to allow FBOs to use their own language, including stewardship, ministry, quality of relationship, and so on. The new Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives has been charged with identifying and removing "barriers," finding and educating FBOs so that they can apply for public funds, and giving them technical assistance in carrying out their services.

Third, he stressed the importance of "intermediaries" which can help FBOs retain their character and fulfill their mission.

This is the kind of language that many of us who are involved in grassroots community organizing have been using for a long time. We too want to see activities at the local level encouraged and strengthened by government. Usually our discussions along these lines have ended up sounding like the Catholic principle of subsidiarity, the principle that the "central" authority ought to be an aid, a subsidium, to the more local groups; and specifically this usually means that general guidelines are laid down to ensure equity, but within these the local bodies can decide on priorities and methods. There have been many local initiatives in building economic self-sufficiency through peer lending, community-sponsored enterprises, and so on; but they have had limited support at best from federal agencies.

Such ideas are embedded in the President's executive order, which speaks of "faith-based and other community organizations" and calls upon government agencies to "strengthen their capacity" to meet social needs.

I am plagued by doubt, however, on several scores.

First, I wonder whether large-scale institutions like Catholic Charities, or Lutheran Social Services, or the many evangelical parachurch groups that are already in operation, will out-perform the local, face-to-face operations that are being championed. And if there is not direct competition, they may end up "franchising" their expertise to the local groups on a contract basis. We have been hearing much about the way Catholic hospitals have been gobbling up community hospitals all over the country and reversing their policies on reproductive choice. This could be the way this new administrative initiative gets played out.

Second, our society and our government have a tradition of hostility to grassroots organizing, partly because of a culture of competition, partly because of bureaucratic preferences for expertise and efficiency, partly because of the reluctance of legislative bodies, state or federal, to fund anything that looks like "capacity building" and technical assistance to grassroots groups. The federal and state offices for "faith-based and community initiatives" will definitely be bucking the trend.

Third, if these new proposals should somehow be successful, I wonder whether there will be, especially in the current administrative climate, a preferential option for faith-based as against "other" community organizations. In some cases a religious congregation can be an effective community center; in other cases an interfaith or non-sectarian or neighborhood-based organization is the only viable actor. Given the rhetoric of the Republican Party and the Religious Right, one can only anticipate that the advantage will go to FBOs whose positions in the culture wars of our time are most in accord with those of the new administration. Then we would have a federally funded theocracy rather than respect for and encouragement of "community initiatives." I hope that I will be proved wrong!