The Real Power of Faith Based Organizations

The Real Power of Faith Based Organizations
By Michael J. Brown, Director, The Jewish Organizing Initiative, Boston, MA


Our new President wants "faith based organizations" to help solve social
problems.  I direct a "faith based organization ", The Jewish Organizing
Initiative in Boston.  It is dedicated to solving social problems by training
people in our faith to build community organizations and develop leaders to
push for social justice.   I think the President's ideas obscure the role of
government and the misconstrue the role the role that community organizations
can play.

The President seems to be focused only on changing individual behavior -
especially around drugs and family responsibility.  He seems to think that
faith based programs are  more effective than secular programs in doing this.
  This may well be so--at least for some purposes.  But it misses the point of
what government can--and should--do.

The faith-based initiative is based on an assumption is that the problems we
face as a society reside within individuals, and maybe if they would "get
with God" can they right themselves.  In other words, the President seems to
feel that peoples' problems are of their own making, and he wants to have
government dollars help local programs that help people in trouble.  The
intention is good.

But this approach distracts us from the fact that government action (or
inaction) is the fundamental cause of many of the problems that individuals
are facing. The poverty that the President would have faith based program
alleviate is often caused by government policy and action (or lack of action)
on minimum wage, prison reforms, unionization and workers rights, universal
health care, child care, paid family leave, and so forth.  Faith based
program may or may not be more effective in dealing with the individual
problems people face.  But this ignores the bigger picture.

Faith based soup kitchens will not solve the problems of hunger.  Faith based
groups serving homeless people will not solve our housing crisis.
Government has the power to provide "bread" where there is none--or to teach
people to bake.  It isn't enough to say that people "do not live by bread
alone."

Faith-based groups can clean up toxic waste dumps, but they cannot solve the
underlying problems we face in our environment.  If government were to adopt
a truly faith-based attitude toward our planet-- seeing the environment as
belonging to God, not the human "owners" of the property-- then we might make
real progress in eliminating the causes of pollution.  But this is evidently
not what the President is proposing.

* * *

The  Jewish Organizing Initiative develops young adult leaders who understand
how their faith calls them to heal the world.  The methods we use are to
build organizations that will hold government and other authorities
accountable to a higher purpose than individual short-term problem-solving.
True faith based work toward social justice leads us to not only help
individuals with "problems," but also to develop organizations of faith  that
can push for more long term and fundamental solutions.  We think the
solutions to many of our problems lie in the ingenuity of community
organizations that can work with government, business and others to devise
solutions together.  The President wants faith based organizations to pick up
the pieces of our failures, rather than asking how can our faith lead us to
more fundamental change in the conditions that created the problems in the
first place.  Faith can give us hope and meaning.  But if the President is
going to focus only on faith based "programs" to deal with the problems we
have created, then he is only tinkering at the margins and ignoring the real
power of government to bring about justice.

The attention to faith based programs to solve peoples' problems must not be
an excuse for government failing to exercise the power government has to
alleviate poverty.   Our physical needs must be met before our spirit can be
nourished.   The Jewish faith, based on the story of the Exodus, moves us as
a community, not as individuals, from slavery to freedom.  Moses did not set
up faith based job training programs to help the individual slaves get out of
slavery.  He did not set up drug rehab programs to help people get over their
personal addictions.  He brought the people together and demanded of Pharaoh,
"Let my people go!"  People of good faith should demand no less today.






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