The United States is likely to pay a stiff price for the many excesses of the Bush Administration. Although discredited, those who designed and supported these disastrous policies will not go away, nor will they be repentant. We will also learn just how entrenched bad ideas and policies become and how difficult it is to get rid of them.
In the top tier of such concerns are the hollowing out of our economy, the extraordinary inequality that is now the hallmark of American society, our tattered Constitution and the calamitous decline in our position in the world. Also in tier one is the disastrous $2 trillion war in Iraq, a war with an end nowhere in sight and with consequences that will be with us for a long time.
There is also a second tier of bad things that will not come to an end on Jan. 21, 2009. One of these is the Bush Administration's "faith-based-initiative," the funneling of federal tax dollars to religious organizations on a preferential basis. This toxic undertaking will not go away because its beneficiaries will press to remain at the trough, and those who understand that fact will not have the political courage to seek its termination.
There is a useful parallel here to the neutering of opposition to the war in Iraq in its heady early days. To oppose the war was to be unpatriotic, a wimp, un-American, French or a surrender monkey. Those who propose to dismantle the policies that have preferentially funded religious groups will be attacked — by the same people — as being anti-religious, or more accurately, anti-Christian. These attacks will come most specifically from those strains of American Christianity and their media allies that have turned their backs on the poor, have a punitive response to virtually all problems and have supported the use of torture. Those proposing to dismantle this fraud will also be labeled "secular," a term of opprobrium similar to being called a "liberal."
In speaking to a clergy group, Hillary Clinton — not George W. Bush — asked, "Who is more likely to go out into the street to save some poor, at-risk child than someone who believes in the divinity of every person, who sees God at work in the lives of even the most left-behind of our children? And that is why we need to not have a false division or debate about the role of faith-based institutions. We need to just do it …."
Clinton's question was clearly rhetorical, but should not have been. Having been around these service areas for more than 30 years, I am quite certain that I know a lot more about it than she or her speechwriters do. I have two answers to her question: The first is that it is not that simple. And the second is that those who are most likely to go out into the street to help the "most left-behind" are workers in public agencies who are doing their jobs. In most instances, whether they are from the immediate community, believe in the divinity of every person or even believe in God, rests somewhere between being secondary and irrelevant.
What is critical is that this person going out into the street — whether faith-driven or not — knows what they are doing, has critical diagnostic and other skills, has solid and mature judgment and has the organizational support needed to take effective action.
Here is why it is not as simple as Clinton made it. An organization that combines competence with a strong moral sense and a culture of caring will almost always outperform one that does not combine these qualities. But "faith-based" and moral and "caring" are hardly synonymous. As a Roman Catholic (and a former altar boy), I grew up in a "faith-based" organization that demonstrated few of the qualities that Clinton, as well as the president and his cheerleaders, keep repeating. This lack of "compassion" was especially visible when it came to "others," defined as anyone who wasn't Catholic — and, especially, anyone who wasn't Catholic and was different in some way.
This quality of exclusion — the antithesis of Jesus' teachings — seems to be one of the dominant features of the religious-based organizations most favored by the Bush Administration. These organizations make up much of the so-called "religious right." They often pride themselves on their homogeneity and purity of thought. And they often wear moral blinders that allow them to believe, without reflection, that they possess the Truth, and that they are inevitably on the moral high road because — being who they are — what other road could they possibly be on?
These are dangerous qualities for any organization of any kind. They produce insularity and an absence of questioning. Diversity's greatest value is that it helps protect organizations from making big mistakes and blindly going down the wrong path. In a recent discussion, a Catholic bishop stated that "our job is not to seek the truth." He continued, "We have the truth. Our job is to communicate it to others." Along with other things, it is this mode of thinking that produced the pedophile scandal that has brought the church to its knees. It is a way of thinking that is also common to right-wing Christians in this country and religious extremists everywhere.
Truth and certainty easily become substitutes for competence, skills and solid judgment. In the gray world of real-life crises and problems, certainty leads to black-and-white solutions that are often not helpful and can produce real damage. For the morally judgmental, these bad consequences are almost always someone else's fault, or God's will.
Organizationally, if you are certain of your own moral superiority, there is little need for the safeguards and checks and balances that are normally considered to be essential. We can see the results of this perspective everywhere. By not putting these safeguards and checks in place, faith-based organizations create a world of temptation — what we as Catholics used to refer to as "occasions of sin." The result is the scandals, both large and small, that are inevitable when ordinary humans are faced with temptation. Whether they have accepted Jesus as their personal savior or not, a certain number are going to succumb, and the greater the temptation, the more will fall. In this respect, the "faith-based" label is not only not a safeguard against scandal, it is a source of it.
Short of scandal, organizations that assume their own moral superiority tend to produce cultures that are unhealthy. It sounds perverse, but these negative norms generally fall under the heading "Un-Christian." They include meanness, backstabbing, rumor mongering and character assassination, all negative qualities familiar to those who have worked within religious organizations.
There is another corrosive effect that the "faith-based" project has fed, if not created. There is nothing new about religious organizations delivering social and other services. In New York City, the human services landscape is dominated by Catholic, Jewish and Protestant organizations. These organizations view their religious identity as a moral premise and an obligation, not as a funding strategy. They and their counterparts around the country were serving the poor, oppressed and suffering when some of the "faith" entities now cashing in on the Bush initiative either did not exist or, in the case of Southern churches, were doing their best to sustain poverty, oppression and suffering, especially of the least among us.
The religious federations and charities in New York compete for public dollars on an equal basis. They are held to account on the same basis as secular entities. They deliver services that are generally of a high quality. But — and it is a huge but — even they are subject to the patterns, rules and cycles that affect all organizations. And in general the more arrogant and insular they are, the more they are subject to the same decay that has brought down car companies, f
inancial-services businesses and others. A moral sense and a commitment is a foundation. It does not equal success in serving people in need.
Calvary Hospital is an extraordinary institution in New York City. It is a Catholic hospital serving advanced cancer patients. Almost all of the patients who check into Calvary die there. To enter the hospital is to experience sadness and grief. But it is not sadness or grief that dominate the culture at Calvary. It is caring and love, pervasive faith-based values that extend from janitors to the medical director. While these values flow from Catholic faith, they have been made an ongoing reality by hospital leadership and management that are confronted on a daily basis with all of the financial and organizational challenges that face managers anywhere. Their enormous accomplishment has been to sustain over the decades the extraordinary norms and behaviors that make this such a special place.
Faith is a part of the equation. But it is leadership and management of a high order that have sustained and nurtured this culture, even as the hospital's staff and patients and their families have become more and more diverse and now include large numbers of Protestants, Muslims and Jews.
There are other Calvarys doing different work in many places. In most cases, the people who make good things happen do not wear their faith — if they have one — on their sleeves. They just do what they feel must be done.
It is this second part of the equation that Clinton either doesn't grasp or didn't feel it politically expedient to state. Without the translation of values at ground level and solid execution of strategies and programs, the faith-based mantra — whether repeated from the usual 40,000-foot perspective of our fly-over elected officials, or from heaven via clergymen and television religious pitchmen — does not work. It certainly cannot demonstrate the positive results that President Bush claims and Clinton implied in her speech.
Editor's note: Frank Schneiger is the president of Human Services Management Institute, a management consulting firm that focuses on organizational change. Much of his current work is in the area of problems of execution and implementing rapid changes as responses to operational problems.
