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COPYRIGHT 2006 The Institute Inc.
Introduction
The efficacy of faith-based organizations in addressing social problems is currently itself an article of faith. Legitimized in federal policy during the Clinton years when Charitable Choice was added to the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), more widely known as "welfare reform," further attention was given to faith-based participation in state-funded social service provision when one of Bush's earliest acts upon taking office in January 2001 was to announce the creation of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. (1)
Using faith-based organizations for this purpose fits well with current popular discourse and beliefs about the causes and solutions of social problems. The oft-quoted core idea of Alexis de Tocqueville that "the network of voluntary institutions and activities constitute a principal source of America's distinctiveness and strength" (cited in the National Commission on Civic Renewal 1998) fits the common sense belief that the loss of volunteerism and civil participation is producing social breakdown. This idea is embedded in and reinforced by the currently popular and influential writing on social capital by political scientist turned "public intellectual" Robert Putnam (2000). In his conception, U.S. social problems are produced and exacerbated by the decline of social capital generated by participation in the non-state voluntary structures of civil society, including the church. Reviving the role of faith-based structures becomes a key social solution in this discourse (e.g., Call to Renewal, "a national network of churches, faith-based organizations, and individuals working to overcome poverty in America" [http://www.calltorenewal.org/index.cfm] or the publications of the Council on Civil Society 1998). Such ideas for a "post-welfare" society resemble an idealized recollection of a 19th century, pre-welfare state reliance on voluntary charity heavily laden with the moral reform of the poor (Katz 1986).
Such a recollection of the past is superficial. Neoliberal common sense, which dominates the present moment, may appear to resemble that of earlier periods of social reform (by emphasizing individual blame and uplift through personal responsibility and entrepreneurship), and may appear to converge with traditional religious attention to moral and spiritual revitalization. In fact, the post-welfare reinvention of such beliefs is not a simple reproduction of old beliefs but is itself a rejection of Keynesian social provisioning based on a different logic of relationships between political economy and the state and between private accumulation and the public good. Neoliberal cultural beliefs focus on the efficacy of the unfettered free market as a mechanism for solving social problems by reforming individuals into entrepreneurs and consumers. The new relationship between the economy and state (public) institutions produces a withdrawal of state-funded social provisioning in favor of the market. As the state is withdrawn from social services, tax revenues are diverted toward the subsidization of private enterprise through public-private partnerships and publicly funded subcontracting to the private sector of social services (e.g., education, health care, housing, and incarceration). Private companies are run for profit according to market logic that takes priority over any notion of public good. This has changed the way in which individuals, communities, and organizations make political demands (Goode and Maskovsky 2001).
As the space of civil society becomes more entangled with both the state and market, Tocqueville's vision of a civil society, which features entities independently operated by virtuous, civic volunteers, fails to represent today's structural relations. Faith-based interventions operate within new structural linkages and constraints from the state (funding, surveillance, and regulation), as well as through linkages to the market. Their activities are embedded in a milieu of professionalized medical and corporate discourses which reflect the political, economic, and cultural environment in which we live.
Assumptions About Faith-Based Organizations
Cnaan (1999) and others view faith-based organizations as ideal social service providers. Church programs are envisioned as working at two levels: (1) they reform individuals into successful worker citizens through spiritual and psychic renewal, and (2) they build "communities" or collective social capital through urban ministries. As one local minister expressed it to me: "We have a special knack for galvanizing people and communities." Most public criticism of charitable choice does not question this presumed fit; rather, it focuses on the breach in the wall between church and state, especially with regard to employment discrimination against non-coreligionists and proselytizing among recipients of services. An unintended consequence of neoliberal ideology is that many conservative religious organizations find themselves opposed to the new federal faith-based initiatives. They have discovered that the weight of bureaucratic procedures and constraints on their programs may offset the potential value of easier access to federal funds.
The question of the practices and efficacy of faith-based organizations is not itself the subject of systematic empirical research. For example, Ram Cnaan's THE NEWER DEAL (1999), a central text advocating faith-based social services, merely catalogues official church-run programs. He uses simple measures of financial investment rather than providing an in-depth analysis of processes and outcomes. We learn nothing about what programs do and how well they work. His information comes from clergy and administrators, thus reflecting the biases and assumptions of those who define and promote the programs. In contrast to Cnaan's position, quantitative evaluations fail to support President Bush's opinion that faith-based groups are more effective than their secular counterparts (Hutcheson 2006). Moreover, discussions which treat faith-based organizations as if they were uniform ignore significant variations like scale and sponsorship (e.g., mainline mega-church-sponsored inner city ministries or independent storefronts) and theological underpinnings (e.g., Christian churches or Islamic mosques).
In this article, I will demonstrate such variation and argue for specific attention to the critical salience of differences produced by the linkages between faith-based organizations and the state and market. In the current neoliberal moment, such linkages produce contradictions to the popular assumption that such organizations are removed from the "moral weaknesses" of politics and commerce. New relationships and their connected discourses raise concerns about more than the mere efficacy of service delivery. The very nature of solidarity and political activism for social change which formerly characterized the faith-based organizations discussed herein has been transformed.
Faith-Based Organizations in Philadelphia
Faith-based initiatives in Philadelphia are embedded in a variety of different networks that vary in their links to external systems of power and sources of funding. These links produce different forms of patronage which can transform organizational missions, governance, internal hierarchy, bureaucracy, and ideology. These transformations can, in turn, significantly affect relationships with local constituents.
Following an overview of two major citywide networks, I look closely at the social and cultural processes of one congregation-sponsored program to document the ways in which its organization (social composition, board, staff, community consumers, and its relationship to external political economic structures) shaped the beliefs and actions of the organization. I demonstrate the ways in which missions, structures, and practices are shaped through time by critical moments of choice related to external pressures on resources (funds and volunteers), as well as critical events related to misunderstandings of race and class.
Philadelphia has played a key role in the development of faith-based social service initiatives. Churches in Philadelphia have often been cited as the models for these efforts. John DiIulio, the first head of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, based his work on the transformative role of churches on his experiences growing up and living in Philadelphia (DiIulio 1997). Cnaan's survey also used Philadelphia as a special focus. Both DiIulio and Cnaan helped found the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Pennsylvania, from which emerges significant local outreach. The Philadelphia-based Pew Foundation has recently made religion and society one of its major program areas. (2)
Church Activism and the Politics of Social Justice
During the civil rights and welfare rights/War on Poverty eras of the 1960s, and into the neighborhoods movement of the 1970s, clerical and congregational networks in Philadelphia were centers of political action in which strong moral claims were made for social justice. In a city evenly divided demographically between white and black (with 10% new immigrant populations added in recent years), a core coalition of progressive black clergy joined the emerging black political class in the struggle against structural racism. In the process, they created a political action network that brought blacks into city government and onto the national and global stage. (3) Progressive white clergy and congregations joined this coalition to fight for integrated communities and schools. (4) Civil rights rhetoric linked job access to political economic structure and advocated for changes in access to both skills and cultural capital through educational opportunity. (5)
Clergy representing their local congregations also were major players during the 1970s and 1980s in the place- and class-based neighborhoods movement, which fought dislocation by...
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