Leaps of Faith.(faith based charities, religious schools)(Column)

Cutler is a columnist for Nerve.com and Salon.com.

The small upstate New York village I call Bluestone is a geopolitical speck of a place. It's so small, so slow to change, that from its vantage point larger trends sometimes stand out. One memorable week during the previous Bush administration, for instance, we saw a procession of olive-green Army tanks and trucks shipping north on the railroad that runs along the village's length. When the same cargo returned a month later, repainted the colors of desert sand, we knew the Gulf war was about to begin.

This year brings another war story. If it had a title, it might be something like "It Takes a Religious Institution to Raise a Child." (In contrast to that quaint Clintonian conceit, "It Takes a Village.") Like any war story, it's about conflict, albeit closer to home, and it begins with a statistic: the Bluestone youth attrition rate.

Despite the mythic benefits of small-town life for children, 15 of the 20 school-age kids in our community up and disappeared last year. Just down the road from me, five wild children vanished from the aluminum- sided hovel where a family I'll call the Ottermans lived in a fun house of discarded cars, cans and canines. All were taken away one day by some nameless agency of New York state on grounds of "parental neglect," a euphemism for degenerate poverty. A kid who once tried to stick a screwdriver into another boy's neck also moved away, along with his smart-mouthed sister. They fled the shack that their born-again single mother couldn't keep up and flew off to California to live with their more permissive dad.

A couple of houses further along, two motherless, scowling boys who made shooting noises at you (instead of saying hello) left for a larger town; I'm not sure where. Ditto the shopkeepers who penned a big stallion in their small yard. They took with them their two sweet little boys, their sullen daughter and the handsome, brooding teenage son who usually wore a T shirt proclaiming his contempt for men who love men. "There wasn't enough here for kids to do," his folks explained.

A girl who had been rescued from an abusive family by her adoptive parents went temporarily into professional remedial care. Bluestone also lost its highest achiever, a pretty and popular girl whose family came originally from "downstate." She's now at one of those boarding schools that grooms you to run the world.

The handful of kids who remain seem fine, if a bit lonely. Meanwhile, in contrast to the exodus of Bluestone's kids, ...