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International Faith-Based Initiatives: Can They Work?
At a time when many are debating the role of religious communities in the domestic social welfare system of the United States, one often-overlooked reality is that faith-based organizations have played an extensive part in the response to global human needs - in partnership with the U.S. government. What factors have driven this collaboration over the past six decades? What lessons of faith and social engagement can be learned from the global experience? These were among the questions addressed at the Woodstock Forum held February 3 at Georgetown University. Offering perspectives of religion and government were Serge Duss of World Vision, Father William Headley of Catholic Relief Services, and Linda Shovlain of the U.S. Agency for International Development. Here is an edited version of the discussion, which was moderated by Woodstock's John Farina.
INTRODUCTION: GLOBALIZING A DOMESTIC DEBATE
by John Farina
John Farina directs the Woodstock program, Catholicism and Civic Renewal. An attorney and scholar of religion in American culture, his recent writings include works on charitable choice and faith-based initiatives. Last year at this time, we did a Woodstock Forum on domestic faith-based initiatives. And now, we return to this important topic of the relationship between religion and civil society by broadening our scope to the international dimension. We are witnessing in many countries a fresh rethinking of the role of religion and state, whether it's in Iraq, in the former Soviet Union, or in Africa or India. Modern theories of secularization that predict the demise of religion are just not proving true.
The question is not whether religion will play a role in the post-modern state, but what role that will be - and not a privatized therapeutic form of religion, but a robust religion that demands a role in public life. Finding a way to think about these realities presents a number of theoretical and practical challenges. Tonight we have a distinguished panel that will look at both these challenges, with a decided emphasis on the practical.
FAITH ENGAGED: A LONG RECORD OF INTERNATIONAL COLLABORATION
by Serge Duss
Serge Duss is Director of Public Policy and Advocacy, of World Vision. A specialist in Eastern European affairs, he has directed World Vision's development programs in the former Soviet Union and Bosnia, and served as president of the Association of Evangelical Development and Relief Organizations. "International faith-based initiatives: Can they work?" Allow me to answer the question rather bluntly. They can work because they have worked. And in order to answer that question, I'd like to take us back to April 1980, when Congress passed landmark legislation called "The Refugee Act of 1980." This piece of legislation during the last year of the Carter administration provided the first permanent and systematic procedure for admitting and resettling refugees of special humanitarian concern in the United States. This act addressed swells of refugees, hundreds of thousands fleeing Indochina, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, after the Vietnam War.
It was the greatest wave of refugees to the United States since the Eastern European wave after Word War II. And who did the United States government turn to primarily? Faith-based organizations. We weren't called faith-based then; we were just called religious organizations. And who did religious NGOs (non-governmental organizations) turn to? Their own faith communities.
It's estimated that between 1980 and 2001, more than 3 million refugees from throughout the world were resettled in the United States. Three quarters of these were resettled by six faith-based organizations: the U.S. Catholic Conference through its Migration and Refugee Services; World Relief, an arm of the National Association of Evangelicals; the Lutherans; Church World Service, which represented the mainline Protestant denominations; the Episcopal Church; and the Hebrew Immigration Aid Society, which not only resettled Jewish refugees but refugees from other parts of the world as well.
The purpose was to provide comfort and friendship, and to help refugees towards self-sufficiency. It's important to remember that the majority of refugees resettled in the U.S. have come from non-Christian countries, and have been resettled by faith-based organizations. And thus began this partnership between the U.S. government and faith-based NGOs. It was probably successful because there was little attention given to the faith nature of these organizations. They went about the work that they had been doing since the post-World War II period.
Reflecting on the Experience. There were two foundational principles as a result of the experience of refugee resettlement and assistance overseas: First, government and religious NGOs can partner together outside the borders of the U.S, aiding people in distress. Partnership was supported by law and by public resources. Second, religious faith and practice is a legitimate motivation for providing humanitarian and development aid with the support of American taxpayer dollars as long as funding is used for a public service. Since 1980, U.S. government and religious NGOs, as well as secular NGOs, have worked well together as long as both respect each other's authority and purposes.
Which brings us to the post-9/11 era. The issue of Christian NGOs working, particularly in Muslim countries, has been highlighted during the war in Afghanistan and Iraq. And unfortunately, it's been a few NGOs from the community where World Vision is very strong - the evangelical Christian community - that has contributed to this public debate. And that's because of comments made by some, like Franklin Graham of the Southern Baptist Convention, who publicized the fact that while they would provide humanitarian aid in Iraq, they would also engage in evangelism. But I would say this is largely a blip on the screen of humanitarian aid provided by faith-based organizations over the last 50 years.
The faith community has been involved in virtually every country of the world. And we have found that when confronted with suffering because of natural or man-made disasters, people in distress - no matter their religion - welcome aid from all sources as long as it is delivered in a dignified manner. An example is the earthquake in Gujarat, India, in 2000, a horrific disaster in which tens of thousands of people died. World Vision, Catholic Relief Services, and many other faith-based international agencies worked very well, in good cooperation, with Hindu organizations that were providing aid. Because aid was provided properly with a sense of dignity, it was received. There were no complaints, and in fact, we continue working in that part of the country.
Common Ground in Muslim Lands. A significant portion of aid by Christian organizations is delivered in countries that are non-Christian. In some non-Christian countries, Christian identification has enhanced our ability to work with local communities and national governments. Unlike Western society, which separates the spiritual from the physical, Islamic societies particularly, integrate the spiritual into every aspect of their lives in societies. For example, here are five motivating principles shared by both Christians and Muslims in their charitable work:
1) We have a God-centered worldview.
2) We have a holistic worldview that affirms the spiritual as crucial to human life.
3) We have solidarity with the poor, which leads to responsive action and advocacy for the
oppressed4) We believe that charity is a religious imperative.
5) There's a witness of faith through charity that is a way of life and expression of obedience to
GodMost often it is not Christian evangelization that Islamic countries fear, as much as Western secularization where there is no expression of divine in daily life. While most Western foreign policymakers in North America and Europe particularly hold a secular worldview, much of the developing world lives as one of the world's great religions. And it's a reason why many faith-based organizations have carried on good relations with national leaders of countries that are not of the Christian faith and have been invited back to continue our work because of our expertise in health and human services. Faith-based NGOs will continue to play a major role throughout the world because of their motivation to serve, their thirst for justice, and the support they receive from their communities of faith.
FAITH-BASED RELIEF AND THE "VALUE TRANSFER:" A CATHOLIC PERSPECTIVE
by William Headley
William Headley, CSSP, is Deputy Executive Director of Policy and Strategic Issues, of Catholic Relief Services. Co-founder of the African Faith and Justice Network, he has wide experience is grassroots peace-building programs in Kenya, South Africa, Northern Ireland, and the Middle East. CRS was founded in response to post-Word War II relief and reconstruction needs in Western Europe. If I had to say quickly what CRS does today, I would say international relief development and justice and peace. As a humanitarian agency, Catholic Relief Services is a wholly owned subsidiary of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. CRS is in excess of 90 countries. It has over 4,000 employees, mostly nationals and most of those are non-Catholics. Each year we serve directly and indirectly about 64 million people. That's about the size of the Catholic population here in the United States.
Let me say a little about our relationship with host countries overseas. As indicated above, we have staff on the ground in most of these countries. This differentiates us from many agencies like ourselves, Catholic agencies, in Europe, like the Netherlands, Germany, and Holland. They, many times, have people who come overseas but don't live and work overseas as we do. Typically we have country agreements that spell out our status in the country and how we can conduct our programs. Though this gives us some sense of our relationship with countries, both the United States and overseas, it misses one important element. For the Catholic Church, we have an agreement with the local Catholic Church in the countries where we work. And this sometimes is in the form of a letter of invitation from the bishops' conference or an act of agreement of how we're going to work in that particular country.
Let me confess, before someone out there who knows the history does, we don't always get it right. The most celebrated failure was powerfully noted by Michael Novak in the National Catholic Reporter several decades ago, about our over-identification with the U.S. government in Vietnam, causing the agency to be written off by many Catholic anti-war people from the left at that time. We missed apartheid. But also, sometimes we have our successes, where we get it quite right. We feel that assisting the starving in Nigeria was quite right. We worked together with our partners of World Vision last year in drawing together a coalition of NGOs that responded to food shortages on the east coast of Africa and in the Horn.
In Iraq, we thought we took the right stand when we did not accept anticipatory aid agreements with the U.S. government in order to be faithful to the stand that the U.S. bishops' conference took with regard to that conflict. My sense is, being part of the left that felt alienated from the agency in the 1980's, that CRS is much more discerning in its relationship with governments today.
The Faith-and-Justice Factor. I would like to discuss three potential benefits I think we offer to social welfare. One is our faith base itself. The second is our institutional capacity, and third is our transnational connectivity.
First we believe that the transfer of economic resources to deal with human concerns is necessary but not a sufficient means. There needs to be a value engagement, a value transfer that should be conscious without being proselytizing, that concerns itself with what enhances life and the dignity of the person, the option for the poor and vulnerable, care for God's creation, and other such justice themes. We have turned to Catholic social teaching in an effort to reinforce and to guide our efforts such as social analysis and advocacy, liberation theology, and the option for the poor. We now have the opportunity to apply the church's rich social teaching to peace-building. And I mean here the fuller range of activities designed to reduce violence, serve justice, and build a sustainable peace. Key to this is the inclusion of indigenous peace people not only at the highest levels of a country, but also at the very grassroots. The local, I'm saying, is the epicenter.
There's another benefit, and I've called it institutional capacity. These days we have been understandably offended and angered by the problems caused by our religions whether that would be the Islamic threat as it's sometimes called, the pedophilia scandal, or the violence we see in religious-based identity problems in Israel-Palestine. In all of this we can forget that the principal agents of human development in the world have been or continue to be faith-based organizations. In the U.S., the Catholic Church is the largest non-public provider of human services to poor families. One-third of all AIDS patients in the world are served through the auspices of the Catholic Church. Come with me to any African country. Gather the president and his ministers together, ask where he or his or her children are educated. You need not worry about what the individual's religion is. You will find that an inordinate number of them have been educated in Protestant and Catholic schools.
Let me draw this institutional capacity out again by applying it to peace-building. In a simple sociological model, we have at the top of the country a very few people who are its leaders - economic, political, social. In the middle we have the entrepreneurs and the educators and those who work for government. In the bottom, we have the mass of people, the grassroots if you will. It took a creative Mennonite to point out the importance of an obvious advantage of the Catholic Church in peace-building. It's what he calls its verticality. The Church can relate to an influence at the very top of the pyramid while staying in touch with the broader base.
Ever so briefly, let me situate CRS in this pyramid. It is located and has its partnerships at the grassroots level. In the post-Rwanda genocide period, CRS began to work on peace-building and this work has steadily increased. And we have over 100 peace-building projects in various parts of the world. They touch not only the conflict situation, but the pre-conflict situation and the post-conflict situation.
What's happening now is that because of this experience and the trust that we're gaining, bishops and others are calling us to address conflicts at other levels. And so we had the wonderful experience recently of bringing bishops and experts from Latin America and Africa together to discuss the experiences of conflict in their different continents and countries. We're right now providing some technical support to the Bishops Conference of South Africa as it designs an institute that will serve not only its own country but other African countries in conflict. I will spend next week back in Haiti, where the bishops conference is similarly trying to build a peace institute.
From Verticality to Transnationality: The third benefit I see here is transnational connectivity. John Paul Lederach, the Mennonite I referred to above, is intrigued by the Church's verticality, Father Bryan Hehir, an eminent social ethicist, speaks often of transnationality. In this he builds on the simple notion that the Catholic Church is worldwide, and he highlights how globalization has heightened this collectivity.
I again apply it to conflict and peace-building. This Christmas I was in Burundi days after the assassination of Archbishop Michael Courtney, the Nuncio there. His papal colleague came from Uganda to take over his site. Our peace-building team was coming there from the United States. A substitute has now been assigned, an archbishop from Ireland. In November we had a Caritas International training and peace-building for Catholic Charities and CRS staff here in the United States. The manual was prepared by an international team from all over the world. Trainings have taken place in nine different parts of the world. Our training, when it took place in Chicago, was conducted by a Peruvian woman teaching at a university here in the states, a Congolese layman who is based in Nairobi, and an Irish priest with experience in Sierra Leone - great example of this transnationality at work.
I want to say something in closing about the challenges or lessons we face. I'd like to offer just two for U.S. policymakers. First, search for ways that faith-based organizations can help heighten a values approach to humanitarian aid while restraining offensive proselytization. And second, in an age of globalization happening side by side with national fragmentation in many countries needing humanitarian aid, do not ignore the linking potential of the local churches.
And let me give two simple words of advice to ourselves, if I may, to religious leaders and particularly NGOs. Be humble. I'm not talking about a sackcloth-and-ashes type of humility. Rather, a humility that knows where one fits into the social scheme of things. We did a paper at CRS making the point that the proper role of the state in the developing world has been subject to enormous debate since the end of World War II. Debate has been book-ended. From the strong development state with the centrally planned economy to the World Bank's state which governs least. In the era of economic globalization, the strength and legitimacy of many states in the developing world is being undermined, not only from above, but also from below -- through the shift in donor policy in favor of civil society and the NGOs. And here's the real danger. Many of the social services once provided by the state are no longer being provided or being provided with less effectiveness. So I suggest that we be humble, particularly in reference to the state in the developing country.
A VIEW FROM STATE: REACHING THE NEEDIEST THROUGH RELIGIOUS CHANNELS
by Linda Shovlain
Linda Shovlain is Deputy Director of the Center for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives of the State Department's U.S. Agency for International Development. She holds an S.T.L. degree in theology from the Angelicum in Rome. As most of you know, the faith-based initiative was one of the first initiatives that President Bush started in his presidency, and it can be summarized in one simple statement. Our job is to level the playing field so that faith-based organizations can compete equally with non-faith-based organizations. The second part is to do outreach and to talk to these little apostles who are out doing good work and let them know that there are funds available for their various projects and how you go about working with the federal government because a lot of them have never partnered with the government before.
There are seven centers for the faith-based initiative: in the Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Education, the Department of Justice, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Labor, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the United States Agency for International Development. In the domestic realm of the federal government, there were lots of legislation and rules and even court rulings that said faith-based organizations were not allowed to receive government funds. So if you were a faith-based organization and you did want to partner with the government, you'd have to take down any religious symbols that you had, and you couldn't have religious persons on your board of directors. You had to really take away your religious identity in many cases in order to receive that funding.
And President Bush said: You know, a lot of these people are doing really great work in the arena of social services, why not allow them to partner with the government under appropriate circumstances? So what we do in our centers, and what I do specifically at USAID is look for obstacles or barriers within the agency itself to faith-based participation. We're lucky at USAID because as Serge mentioned, USAID has been partnering successfully with faith-based organizations for decades. So when we arrived, we were not anticipating big struggles that some of the other agencies did encounter. We have, though, found a few obstacles and barriers that we're working to remove.
We travel all over the country and have traveled internationally to talk to faith-based organizations about the possibility of partnering with the federal government to receive funding so that they can continue the good work that often times they've already started. And it's a very humbling experience to go to these conferences. You go and there are about 1,500 people and most of them are mom and pops or small churches that were moved by human need. Somebody went to Africa or Central America or the former Soviet Union. And they saw people starving; they saw people dying; they saw people whose lives were in desperate need. And they were so moved by that that they sold all that they had and went out to help these people. I met one man who was a very successful manufacturer. He went on a safari trip to Africa, and started to see the dire need of these people who were starving to death. And he went back and has slowly sold off all seven of his factories, using the money to feed people in Africa, and has come up with his own little dried food packages.
It seems to me as a layperson walking into the government, walking into USAID, that the whole argument over the separation of church and state, has really not applied to this agency. And I'm not really sure if it's because the work is done outside of the borders in other countries where that really hasn't been a discussion or if it's that nobody was really paying attention to our international development and relief work.
In Every Village and Hamlet. Why does USAID work with faith-based organizations? As Serge touched upon, because they're usually the people on the front lines of need and human assistance. They go there motivated purely out of love for their human brothers and sisters. And when a disaster strikes or if somebody is in need, they're already on the ground. Churches, parishes, and I'm not that familiar with Islam, but maybe the mosques as well, are usually located in the most remote villages. So they're an ideal source of implementation when you're trying to get things like anti-retro-viral drugs to people who are way out in the bush. The faith-based mechanism is a lot of times the easiest mechanism for the government to use to reach those people who are not usually reached, and, therefore, more in need.
I was having a meeting recently with somebody who works in USAID on HIV-AIDS, and he said to me literally with consternation in his face: "We had no idea that the faith-based community was doing so much in the area of HIV-AIDS, that they were being so compassionate to these people dying of this disease." Because I think they had come with the pre-conceived notion that people of faith are often condemning and, therefore, would not be out extending a hand to people dying of something that was considered a morally charged disease. And he was really moved by the heart of love that they serve their brothers and sisters. That helps explain why USAID is committed to ramping up its partnership with faith-based organizations.
NO FAITH IN LIBERAL DEMOCRACY? A PROBE FROM THE MODERATOR
John Farina: Bill, there are many contemporary theorists who complain about the role of religion in civil society precisely in the area of values. You talked about the advantage of the transfer of values and the whole justice perspective that a faith base can bring. But these critics would say: The problem with a faith-based organization is that they claim to have a monopoly on certain values. They claim that their values trump the others. And by definition, civil society in the liberal democratic model is a society in which no one value trumps the others. No one's in charge. And that is in one sense what defines civil society, and therefore the entrance of these religious NGOs into that debate distorts it in some way. Can you respond to that critique?
Bill Headley: I would say in some sense, it's really true, John, and it's something Serge mentioned. That as we go out into other countries and experience other religions and other societies, there is a presumption that there is a value base and many times those values are based on a religion. It's we who, in our culture, approach these things as the assumption of separation. Many cultures come at it just the opposite. They assume that you have values and what they want you to do is to state those values to be clear about those. We, as an overseas Catholic agency, realize that many times the society itself embodies many of the same values we have. So it's already there before we get there.
Linda Shovlain: Here's one perspective. In our Europe and Eurasia bureau, our staff works a lot with the former Soviet Union. And they have actually incorporated values as a strategic objective. Because they recognize that democracy cannot truly take root with no value system in place. And so they have actually made it a strategic objective to start implementing values programs so that we can teach these people who were stripped of their values during communism, and so they can start to build an ethical system on which democracy can rest.
Serge Duss: I'll comment on the difference between the government's purposes and those of faith-based organizations, particularly Christian organizations: we're not so much interested in democratization, we're interested in human transformation. And there are many ways to do that. In some cases, supporting democratization can be helpful. But our priorities are how we respond to the full spectrum of human need - the physical, material, and spiritual - because humans are the most important part of society.