Religion, held at arm’s length by sociologists, is attracting more scholarly attention
When Ram A. Cnaan, an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Work, wants to find out whether religion can help save America’s cities, he gets out and talks to people like Danny Cortes.
Mr. Cortes, a Baptist minister in a heavily Hispanic neighborhood of North Philadelphia, is of several minds on that subject. As an officer of Nueva Esperanza, a nonprofit economic-development corporation backed by 60 Hispanic churches, he has ambitious plans for helping the city’s poor. But as a congregant and an interim pastor at the First Spanish Baptist Church, he says that providing services in his low-income neighborhood is a constant struggle.
On a crisp fall day, Mr. Cnaan and Stephanie Boddie, his research director, have ventured out to the Hunting Park neighborhood to grill Mr. Cortes and Pedro Garcia, a fellow pastor at First Spanish Baptist. The 70-year-old church performs a monthly prison ministry, runs a small food pantry, hands out modest scholarships for college, and operates a five-unit apartment building for senior citizens. But it recently shut down its halfway house in the face of liability risks. And Mr. Cortes, his eyes rolling, says his church may have to close a fledgling day-care center because its director cannot meet licensing requirements.
“Congregations are not places where you can just invest and expect things to happen overnight,” he says. With a $120,000 annual budget and only 150 congregants, the church can offer formal programs in very few of the 215 social services about which Mr. Cnaan quizzes the pastors.
By the end of next year, Mr. Cnaan and his research team hope to have conducted similar interviews with clergy at Philadelphia’s 2,000-plus congregations, of all faiths. Their mammoth religious “census” is part of a growing effort in academe to understand the “faith factor” in social services.
Because of ideology and ignorance, some scholars say, social science has generally been indifferent to the social benefits of religious beliefs and institutions. The field is only beginning to seek answers to the questions now crowding its agenda: What are religious groups doing to reduce poverty, substance abuse, teenage pregnancy, juvenile delinquency, and other social ills? Are they more effective than their secular counterparts? Can they take on more responsibility? And is religious faith itself indispensable to their results?
Recent political developments have made questions about the social role of churches, synagogues, mosques, and non-congregational religious groups much more urgent. The welfare reforms of 1996 set a lifetime limit on cash assistance to families with children, assuming that private charities would take up the social safety net. And leading candidates for President from both parties have recently endorsed a closer partnership between government welfare agencies and religious groups.
While policy makers charge ahead, however, scholars are just getting their shoes on.
“There’s so little research, it’s amazing,” says Mr. Cnaan. He attributes that to the way the profession holds religion at arm’s length. “There’s a norm in the social sciences that the two are just not compatible.”
Surveys like Mr. Cnaan’s are useful for measuring one aspect of the faith factor: the ability of religious groups to mobilize money and volunteers for social services. Based on a six-city survey, for instance, Mr. Cnaan has calculated that religious groups provide about a third of day care in this country. And he estimates that faith-based organizations in Philadelphia alone perform social services that would cost at least $1-billion if the government had to replace them.
Some scholars interpret surveys like Mr. Cnaan’s as evidence that congregations already carry a heavy load and are unlikely to shoulder a much larger share of welfare-reform burdens. John D. McCarthy of Pennsylvania State University has done research suggesting that few groups so far have taken advantage of the “charitable choice” provision of the welfare-reform bill, which places religious groups on an equal footing with secular groups in the awarding of government contracts for social work.
“Only a small minority of congregations are doing social-service activities in a substantial way,” says Mark A. Chaves, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Arizona. In his recent national survey of large congregations, he found that they typically find it easier to organize small groups of volunteers around a well-defined, periodic task, like a Habitat for Humanity project or a food drive. Many answer immediate needs for food, clothing, and shelter, but offer little that might transform people’s lives, like drug-abuse treatment or mentors.
Of course, measuring the faith factor can’t be done by looking solely at congregations. Many faith-based approaches to social services occur through networks and coalitions of congregations and through religious non-profit organizations. Indeed, some of the most well-publicized efforts fall into that category, including those of groups like Teen Challenge, which treats young drug addicts around the country; Prison Fellowship, which ministers to convicts; and Boston’s Ten-Point Coalition, which was credited with helping reduce gang-related youth violence in that city. Advocates of the faith factor believe that those groups provide what government cannot and secular non-profit groups will not: personal, moral transformation. But those claims are largely untested.
National surveys of social conditions typically ask, at most, just a few questions about religious attendance and practices. The data do support one point clearly: All else being equal, the faithful are less likely to engage in antisocial or irresponsible behavior. For example, studies have linked religious attendance among adolescents with lower rates of crime, smoking, drinking, and using drugs.
“I’m pretty confident the best studies will show that these organizations make a positive difference, and make a positive difference more cheaply,” says John J. DiIulio, Jr., a criminologist who was recently lured from Princeton University to the University of Pennsylvania to head a new center for the study of religion and social policy.
Even scholars who believe in the faith factor, though, concede that there is scant research on the effectiveness of particular programs. Byron Johnson, a criminologist at Vanderbilt University, can point to anecdotal evidence that Muslim and Christian prison ministries improve inmate behavior and reduce recidivism. But he acknowledges the barriers to demonstrating that particular programs work. In 1997, he evaluated the efforts in four New York prisons of Prison Fellowship, an evangelical Christian ministry founded by Watergate felon Charles Colson. He concluded that prisoners deeply involved in the ministry’s brand of Bible study and other programs behaved better while behind bars and were less likely to be re-arrested within a year of parole. But Mr. Johnson won’t generalize from his own results. Hispanic inmates, who have lower recidivism rates anyway, were overrepresented, and one year is not long enough to judge behavioral transformation, he says.
Some scholars are interested in studying how religious groups improve their communities through political action, not in how they transform individual behavior. Christopher Winship, a sociologist at Harvard University, has written several papers about the Ten-Point Coalition, a network of churches that gained national prominence for helping to reduce youth violence in Boston. He asserts that the coalition’s success had less to do with its tough-minded religious ministry to gang members than with its political collaboration with the city’s unpopular police department. Long distrustful of city cops, black neighborhoods embraced community policing only after the coalition’s black clergy gave police officers an “umbrella of legitimacy.”
If active churches remedy social ills, says Omar McRoberts, one of Mr. Winship’s doctoral students, it is less because they bring about religious conversions than because they help bring order in chaotic neighborhoods and, in some cases, mobilize residents on behalf of social causes.
Inquiry into the power of moral transformation, he says, implies “that ‘inner city’ people are somehow more depraved than other people, and that the church is the answer to that. This gets back to the argument that poor people are poor because they lack fortitude or a Protestant work ethic.”
Why do scholars know so little? Researchers in the field offer a variety of reasons. Chief among their criticisms is bias on the part of social scientists.
“There’s an intellectual conceit that became de rigueur in the late 1950s and early 1960s,” says Mr. DiIulio, “that at the end of the day, we have moved on from God and religion, that there’s nothing we can learn from them.”
As a consequence, say scholars, religion has generally been absent from university curricula and scholarship, except in seminaries, divinity schools, and departments of religion.
Even today, graduate students in the social sciences believe they can harm their job prospects by choosing to focus on religion. Mr. McRoberts says, “I could market myself as a sociologist of religion, but I would be shooting myself in the foot.”
Before social scientists can paint a more complete picture of the role faith plays in social change, they will have to overcome a number of serious obstacles to research. For one thing, say scholars, the major private financers of research have historically been squeamish about religion. Penn’s Mr. Cnaan says he has proposed an unprecedented study that would compare the results of every drug-treatment program in an entire county, but he has been unable to interest foundations in supporting it.
Moreover, many conclusions about the correlation between faith and social behavior still rest on simplistic measures of religious belief, such as church attendance. With a few exceptions, such as the Gallup polls, surveys about social behavior rarely ask questions about religion any more sophisticated than “Do you attend church?”
Another obstacle is the reluctance on the part of religious groups themselves to participate in research. “Many faith-based programs have been skeptical of academic researchers -- I would even say paranoid,” says Vanderbilt’s Mr. Johnson. Religious groups either don’t understand the value of research or suspect academics of trying to debunk their efforts. Their own evaluations lack analytic rigor.
Mr. Cortes, the Philadelphia minister and a former program officer at the Pew Charitable Trusts, welcomes social-science research. But he understands why other religious leaders are skittish. “The vested interests of the researcher affect the final product,” he says.
Even Mr. DiIulio, an advocate of faith-based social services, has encountered skepticism from the groups he wants to evaluate. “There’s a feeling by some people that it is sinful to test the worldly efficiency of these programs,” he says. He also finds that some groups resent being evaluated while government programs continue for decades in spite of evidence that they are ineffective.
There are signs that academe is becoming more open to studying religion’s role in social change, as scholars respond to a growing disenchantment among politicians with government solutions. Academic conferences are likelier to include panels on the role of religious faith in public policy. Groups such as the Lilly Endowment and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation are beginning to put up big money for research. Pew, based in Philadelphia, not only is financing Mr. Cnaan’s project and Mr. DiIulio’s center, but has also helped start research centers for the study of religion and society at Yale and Princeton.
Over the next few years, Mr. DiIulio hopes his center will investigate the crucial question of whether those programs work. Even with those answers, “We’re still left with the analytical puzzle of ‘why?’ What is it about the faith factor that makes these programs effective?” he says. But his hunch is that it has something to do with a one-on-one commitment to personal transformation. A member of a faith ministry, he says, can say to someone in pain, “You’re not ugly, you’re a child of God.”
“I have seen hardened prisoners break down and weep,” he says. “When they see the real deal, it’s powerful.” Yet he’s quick to invoke an old social-science quip: “The plural of anecdote is not data.”
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