The great waves of civil rights legislation and urban policy since the 1960s had successes and some failures. The great success has been the establishment of a much larger and better educated Black middle class. Forget the high profile achievements of the few — two of the last three Secretaries of State, the current President and Attorney General, for example. It is much more important that millions of African Americans all over the country are getting better educations, better jobs and better housing than ever before.
But there have been great failures as well. The deterioration of urban life for those who haven’t made it into the middle class is an ongoing tragedy that fifty years of policy have done little to help. There are reasons to believe that fifty more years of the same approaches will also fail.
I’ve written about some of these obstacles. Progressive social policy makes cities expensive and cumbersome places for the kind of businesses that employ poorly educated, low-skilled workers. Many of our well intentioned urban policies end up steering jobs away from the people who need them most. Municipal labor practices make everything from infrastructure construction to normal urban administration cripplingly expensive, creating an expense structure and a tax burden that basically makes life impossible for many of the small businesses that could offer jobs to low skilled workers.
None of these points has anything to do with race, and if readers will forgive me, I’d like to keep the discussion non-racial for a while.
Don’t worry, the race break won’t take long; we are Americans and one thing that unites us through time and across racial and class lines is a tendency to see every question in racial terms.
From the Moynihan Report on, every discussion of urban issues that looks at factors like illegitimacy and youth violence gets caught up in a racial maelstrom. Some (mostly on the right and usually white) are quick to find fault with “black culture” or seize the opportunity to launch a discussion of IQ scores. From the left and often though by no means exclusively from African Americans comes a chorus alleging the “racism” of those who cruelly want to “blame the victims.”
We should try to come at this from a different angle. As I posted earlier this month, there’s a pattern to urbanization found all over the world among many races and cultures. First generation migrants from the farm still have the social discipline and work attitudes that characterize rural societies. Most young migrants find a foothold in the urban world and move fairly seamlessly from a rural value system to an urban one. Some, however, through bad luck or bad choices, fail to make the transition. They, and their offspring, form what Karl Marx (who was thinking about Europeans when he coined the term) called a lumpenproletariat: deracinated, alienated, largely incapable of bettering their condition either through labor or through political activity.
Let’s make clear that lumpenproletarian is not a synonym for “African American living in the inner city.” Many urban Blacks, including many poor people, are hardworking Americans raising their children, paying their taxes, supporting religious organizations and generally going about their lawful and righteous business in exemplary fashion. And many of the people who do fall into Marx’s category aren’t Black.
Having made those important clarifications, we need to go on and say that some key urban problems are lumpenproletarian problems: the problems of large groups of people who have become disconnected from the habits and institutions through which their lives can be improved. This population, often marked now as in Marx’s time by alcoholism and other forms of addiction, and then as now enmeshed in a culture of violence and crime and crippled by weak family structures, encounters many difficulties and makes life more challenging for those who live in and around it.
In Marx’s day the lumpenproletariat was smaller and less well developed than it is in the twenty first century. Poor public health, the absence of social safety nets and the bad quality of food and water available to the poor meant that the urban migration was a fairly Darwinian process; not a lot of failed migrants survived and reproduced. High mortality rates from violence and the consequences of drug abuse and the astronomical abortion rates among this group today show that some of these conditions still exist, but life expectancy for the urban poor remains much higher than in past centuries.
Much of what we see in our cities today is not a uniquely American problem and certainly not a race problem; it is a problem that will become more serious in the US and elsewhere as this century’s mass migration from the country to the city continues all over the world. In much of East Asia, South Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America, an urban underclass in all the colors of the rainbow is becoming a serious concern.
A child in a Kolkata slum (Flickr | Calcutta Rescue)
It’s important for Americans to look at our urban problems through non-racial lenses from time to time; a fresh perspective can free us all up from stale knee-jerk responses and help us think more clearly about what we can – and can’t – do to help. That can lead to another surprising turn; when it comes to the inner cities, some of the most important limits on what government can do come from liberal rather than conservative ideas about government’s proper role.
While some inner city issues are related to policy, others stem from the social and individual dysfunction that characterizes communities who have lost the structure and stability of rural life but have not acquired the structure and stability of the modern metropolis. The old skills and strengths disappear; they are not replaced with new ways of earning a living, constructing a family and engaging effectively in an urban social and political environment.
Government and bureaucratic institutions can’t do much to fix these problems. Drug and alcohol addictions, the consequences of abandonment or violence in the home, the corrosion of soul and self esteem that comes with years of unemployment, forced recruitment into gangs, a culture of sexual exploitation and violence marked by contempt for women and homosexuals: these are the kinds of evils Jesus spoke of when he told his disciples that some evils are only cast out by fasting and prayer.
The answer is not religious in every case, but when we are talking about uneducated people who have grown up in wasted social landscapes with little exposure to positive role models, little experience with or preparation for employment in the formal economy and for whom hard work at low pay may be the only road forward, the only realistic hope is often the power of faith and the support of a strong and focused religious community.
The kind of faith that historically works for people in these situations is not cool, rational and sophisticated. The Unitarian Church has many merits; helping uneducated, impoverished drug addicts in the inner cities find new meaning and structure in their lives is not one of them. The faith that works in lumpenproletarianized urban areas, not just in the United States but all over the world, is hot religion: above all, Pentecostalism, but also the hotter forms of Islam, some intensely emotional forms of Hindu and Buddhist devotion, charismatic Catholicism and other faiths that offer immediate contact with God, black and white moral teachings that help people regain their bearings and remake their lives, and strong supportive communities who watch over new converts and help neophytes in the faith grow and deepen their faith while welcoming them into a supportive fellowship. Very often, hot religion features authoritative and even authoritarian leadership: preachers or imams who speak with conviction and provide community leadership as well as spiritual guidelines.
Hillsong Church, a Pentecostal church in Sydney, Australia (Wikimedia)
In the past, secular ideologies have sometimes provided the leadership and community that enabled newly arrived urban migrants and their children to build new lives. Nationalism, socialism and fascism alone or in various combinations have played these roles in the past; in some places they may still be capable of doing it today. But in general, the last fifty years have seen the decline in the ability of secular causes to mobilize psychological and community energies among the unlearned and the marginalized. Increasingly it is God or nothing for poor urbanites today.
In some countries, where government and religion are hand in glove, government can act to promote religious revivals, religious education and the presence of religious institutions and orders in poor parts of town. Here that is strictly verboten and rightly so. The city can and should provide police protection for a Billy Graham style revival meeting, but it should not rent the tent or order city employees to attend; public school teachers should certainly not require their classes to go.
The secular nature of our government necessarily limits its ability to do “soul care.” When government steps into roles that churches traditionally play — when, for example “grief counselors” work with schools in the aftermath of a tragic shooting — all the religion has to be carefully and thoroughly purged.
Let me say clearly that I think this is correct. Government and religion should not mix. But the consequence — which many progressives do not fully grasp — is that much of the most important work in the inner city cannot, ever, be accomplished by government programs and government funding.
Let’s look at what may be the core task of rebuilding social cohesion and strength in urban communities in the US and abroad. A young woman who finishes high school and marries before having children is much less likely to be poor than one who drops out and has a child out of wedlock. If she finishes college she is even less likely to be poor – and her marriage is significantly more likely to last. This is true for women of all races; poorly educated single moms in our society do not have an easy time, and neither do their kids.
Reducing poverty in the inner city means creating a situation in which more young women are both willing and able to make the choices that ensure better lives for themselves and their kids. Of course, this also implies some changes among young men.
For one thing, more of the young men in the inner city must be what in the old days people called “the marrying kind.” They must come to see manhood defined as real maturity – a life fulfilled in service to family and community. This is a radically different (though much richer) masculine ideal than the cartoon-like visions of omnipotence that many adolescents and boys have of manhood. Those visions are especially compelling when boys do not live at close quarters with a real man whether a biological father or not.
Government cannot do much under our system to teach boys what being a man really means. It cannot do much to teach girls to value themselves in a hostile and exploitative environment. It cannot give either sex the inner strength to mature under hostile conditions in a confusing environment filled with mixed signals, intense and exciting temptations, and a full service array of the most enticing and dangerous drugs that the world has ever known.
In a strong and healthy community, this teaching comes from parents and youth leaders and it is reinforced by role models, strong institutions and clear examples on every side that playing the game “right” pays off reasonably well. In a broken, deracinated third-generation lumpen community, these systems decay from decade to decade.
There is very little, in the US at least, that government can do to change that.
Coming to grips with this is hard for the progressive mind. The substitution of the rational state for irrational and haphazard community institutions is one of the core values of progressive thought. Reducing the private sphere and increasing the public sphere in the name of universal justice, reason and democratic control is what twentieth century progressives saw as a core mission.
But when it comes to this particular case, that model doesn’t work. In another context, Rick Warren once said to me on a visit to Rwanda that if the only way to end poverty in Africa was to employ hundreds of thousands of college trained bureaucrats and experts at six figure salaries — then poverty in Africa would never end. This is as true in our inner cities as it is in the rest of the world. It is not just a matter of money, but of mission and mandate. The inner cities need stronger cures than government is licensed to provide.
To slay the demons that stalk our cities and prey on our youth we are going to have to call on stronger forces than city hall. That won’t be easy and will require deeper commitment and new kinds of resources and partnerships — and no matter what we do, this is hard and slow work. Lives change one by one; hope grows in one heart at a time.
I’ll return to this subject with some thoughts about what a new stage in the history of urban America might look like.
Government is a blunt instrument. It cannot adapt itself to idiosyncratic individuals. It can send you a check if you meet criteria A, B and C. It can’t counsel a person on the ways of personal responsibility and self-respect.
I was a volunteer counselor at a homeless shelter. (All three shelter organizations here in Houston are explicitly Christian.) My two co-counselors and I were relieved when we were assigned a 30-something white woman. We thought her problems would be easier to solve than the single black woman with three children who arrived at about the same time.
We were 100% wrong. Patty strung us along, telling us what she thought we wanted to hear, but all along believing that she shouldn’t have to work and take care of herself. That was the government’s job. Meanwhile, the black woman had a stake in the future (her children) and was thrilled to be getting their lives on a solid footing.
Church members can minister to a lost soul individually. Government can’t.
“A young woman who finishes high school and marries before having children is much less likely to be poor than one who drops out and has a child out of wedlock.” But she deprives herself of the full benefits of the extended female kinship network!
“Government cannot do much under our system to teach boys what being a man really means.” Aren’t we forgetting http://www.fatherhood.gov?
Good luck avoiding the race thing in the comments given how much you discuss it in your essay.
I also hope you’ll address this. And the this. The country has abandoned its religion and religion has abandoned the country. It’s worked well for neither.
The problem is that government policies effectively remove the negative financial aspects of having a baby without the benefit of a committed father. That is demonstrably true by the statistics pre- and post- “war on poverty.” And though attitudes about divorce and single motherhood have changed in society over the years, it is disproportionate in the cities.
One other point, I believe a revival and personal faith (being born again) can do a lot to help the poor cleanse their lives of habits and behaviors that keep them self-oppressed. But when government policies have the above effect on many people, reliance on government money becomes integrated into that faith and becomes (often wrongly) associated with “God’s blessing.”
People must get to a point of aspiring toward economic self-sufficiency before they can ever hope to improve their lot in life. As long as you rely on the “kindness of strangers” to live, you will always be held captive.
PS. As always, I enjoyed your insights!
For Leftists the destruction of family and community is not a bug of the blue model but a feature. Their entire “business model” is to develop a dependent clientele that must vote for them or starve. The best way to do that is to atomize individuals and convince them they are helpless and alone. They don’t actually care for poor people, they ranch them like cattle for political power.
All Leftwing solutions are just pretext for power and money for elite leftists. The last thing they want to do is seriously reduce urban poverty, crime and hopelessness. They just want it cultivate it to a sweet spot in which it is bad enough they can milk it for power but not bad enough that they the people finally rebel in desperation.
They will fight to the death to prevent any influences, religious or otherwise, that “threaten” to make poor people confident, capable, proficient and independent.
Can someone please explain to me this journalistic predication to alternate between black and African American within the same piece? Maybe you can also explain to me the reason Black is capitalized but “whites” is not? Why is “black” then not capitalized later in the piece?
Does anyone really expect to solve real race problems in this country when we can’t even figure out how to write about it with any consistency?
I agree with half of the thrust of this – the part about government being unable to solve these seemingly intractable problems. My issue with the essay is that I don’t see any evidence from history either here or anywhere in the world that shows religion can solve them either. To the extent that religion provides an individual the moral backbone to improve their life, they’ll typically use it to escape the urban ghetto. Those left behind do not benefit and the cycle continues.
The only way to improve things that I can imagine is to somehow break up the lumpenproletariat itself. In other words create (promote/support) an economic environment that is conducive to business activity occurring into the urban core (think creative types returning to inner-city Detroit, or Harlem, or Washington DC and generating business opportunities to provide for them).
This process was gathering a head of steam on the 2000′s but has come to a grinding halt since the recession/residential property crash hit.
Inevitably it all comes back to economic growth. Create enough wealth, and the conditions for it to be created in inner-cities and all boats will rise. That’s why I vote Republican. Not for any of the social conservatism crap but because I believe low taxes and small government genuinely help society – all of it.
While attitudes have changed about divorce and single motherhood, society is suffering.
It is important not to romanticize the rural life migrants leave behind. Many of the urban dysfunctions described in this article are expressions of phenomena found in rural environments where they are either functional, neutral, less dysfunctional, or expressed their dysfunction differently.
“….we are Americans and one thing that unites us through time and across racial and class lines is a tendency to see every question in racial terms.”
Speak for yourself.
But I digress.
After reading this essay it seems to me that the single most important thing the government could do to improve life in the inner city (and leaving aside for a moment Mr. Dellas’ quite correct point about how gov’t transfer payments are destructive to family structure) would be to completely voucherize public education.
The school is where children between the ages of 5 or 6 through 18 or 19 spend most of their time. In the past traditional values were transmitted by American Public Schools. In the past 40 or 50 years they have instead been used to transmit either radical anti-American anti-traditional values or, possibly worse, no values at all.
Let the money follow the child.
Provide accreditation just as is done at the college level for both religious and secular institutions. Rid us, by the grace of Providence, of the Teachers’ Unions, the $100,000.00 per year custodians, the layers and layers of administrators, the millions squandered in corrupt contract bidding.
Let’s give that plan an equal 5 decades to succeed that we’ve given the current failed one.
I aver the results cannot be worse.
What is this “service to community” you speak of?
“these are the kinds of evils Jesus spoke of when he told his disciples that some evils are only cast out by fasting and prayer.”
You are lying.
The context of the text used regarded a boy who was (deaf/mute) and acting in self-destructive ways, throwing himself into water and fire.
Don’t twist scripture to make your points, use an appropriate verse, or another resource to substantiate your views.
Sorry you object to my use of scripture; is “lying” the word you always use to mean “mistaken”?
The secular nature of our government necessarily limits its ability to do “soul care.” When government steps into roles that churches traditionally play — when, for example “grief counselors” work with schools in the aftermath of a tragic shooting — all the religion has to be carefully and thoroughly purged.
It isn’t just religion that is purged, Government has tilted from “value neutral” to “value averse.” Intentionally or not, this undermines the formation of values in the population served.
In a strong and healthy community, this teaching comes from parents and youth leaders and it is reinforced by role models, strong institutions and clear examples on every side that playing the game “right” pays off reasonably well. In a broken, deracinated third-generation lumpen community, these systems decay from decade to decade.
There is very little, in the US at least, that government can do to change that.
Actually, there is one thing that government can do that would be enormously beneficial, and it requires no extra funding.
Simply have 90% of every education dollar follow the child, make all urban schools independent, and allow for rapid creation of new urban schools.
This necessitates drastically reducing the size and scope of urban school districts (dismantle them), while re-allocating resources to a TRUE “neighborhood school.”
Here is why this would be explosively beneficial.
First, the “teachers and youth leaders” would instantly form effective social networks with newly empowered parents. These networks would revolve around newly independent (and therefore more dynamic) local institutions (the schools).
This would reverse the destruction caused by the massive social entropy plaguing America’s urban centers.
First, government centralization destroyed the old “neighborhood school,” model, and replaced with increasingly ineffective and expensive “government schools” run centrally.
With each successive failure, these school gain more funding for bureaucrats, but continue to fail in higher numbers. In the meantime, the output of these schools need ever-increasing amounts of programs to feed, manage, or imprison them.
Fully funded school choice would very quickly and effectively reverse this cycle of social entropy.
In closing, individualizing the welfare state (vouchers, HSAs, Retirement accounts) are imperfect. They are so much more effective than any alternative, however, that arguing against them intellectually unsound.
Thanks for another provocative essay.
You write:
“The faith that works in lumpenproletarianized urban areas, not just in the United States but all over the world, is hot religion: above all, Pentecostalism, but also the hotter forms of Islam.”
Radical Islam has, indeed, found a home in the inner cities. Mainstream Christianity, of course, also has tremendous power in Black areas.
The difference between the positive impact of Christ and the negative impact from Mohammed is this:
In Christianity, God died as a martyr to save us.
In Islam, God asks us to die as martyrs for him.
That basic difference is the problem with radical, hot Islam everywhere.
“Rick Warren once said to me on a visit to Rwanda that if the only way to end poverty in Africa was to employ hundreds of thousands of college trained bureaucrats and experts at six figure salaries — then poverty in Africa would never end.” (Walter Russell Mead)
I’m not sure what Professor Mead thinks his discussion with Rick Warren is supposed to prove; Warren’s comment is little more than a non-sequitur; there have never been hundreds of thousands of college educated bureaucrats earning six figure salaries trying to save Africa. In fact, there have never been tens of thousands or even thousands. What there has been is underpaid and overworked employees of international NGOs, Peace Corp workers who are essentially volunteers and religious missionaries who don’t get paid much if anything either.
Using the standards that Professor Mead chooses to apply to everything else, we would have to blame the failure of Africa to catch up with the newly emerging nations in Asia and South America on the people who have actually been working there. That would be the aid workers, the volunteers and the missionaries. If we followed the logic that Professor Mead frequently utilizes, we would have no choice but to conclude that the time has finally come to try the one thing we haven’t actually tried yet; bringing in legions of highly paid bureaucrats.
While I highly respect Professor Mead, it is disconcerting to find him so unwilling to critically analyze his own ideas. Before we conclude that the only solution to the problems of the American lumpenproliteriat is a healthy dose of that old-time religion, perhaps Professor Mead can explain how the overwhelmingly secular societies in Europe and the relatively secular society of Canada have managed to avoid the worst problems plaguing the American inner city. Certainly these societies have difficult urban problems and Muslim immigration has exacerbated these difficulties especially in European cities. But the inner cities of the United States face far more severe problems than the inner cities of Europe and Canada (or the suburbs of Paris), yet if anything, religious observance is much more common in American urban areas than in Europe or Canada. Unless Professor Mead can explain this, his argument literally falls apart.
My second problem with Mead’s thesis is that he boldly asserts that religion, in particular “hot” religion may be an important part of the answer in alleviating urban ills. But one searches in vain in this post (or in his other posts on the subject) for any data which suggests that his thesis has merit. Actually, it’s worse than that; Mead doesn’t even present any anecdotal examples. All we have is Professor Mead’s assertion presented as if (excuse the pun) it is gospel truth.
Mead is certainly right that religion, especially what he calls “hot” religion is on the march from the slums of Gaza to the slums of Rio. But is there any actual evidence that the rise of “hot” religion is improving anyone’s prosperity as Mead suggests it should?
Two excellent books on the subject are Philip Jenkins’, “The New Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity” or even better, Eliza Griswold’s, “The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam” (both books are available for the Kindle). Each of these books describes in gripping and sometimes horrifying detail how devout religious practices are becoming ubiquitous in various peasant and inner city neighborhoods in poor nations around the world. Neither present any evidence that the waxing of religious beliefs is making the believers less destitute. My question to Professor Mead is, if “hot” religion isn’t improving the lives of impoverished people in other nations, why do you believe it will improve the prosperity of poor people in the United States?
As Professor Mead knows perfectly well, amongst charismatic and Pentecostal Christians in the United States, one of the fastest growing traditions is so-called “prosperity theology.” Supposedly the movement has tens of millions of adherents. In fact, so prevalent is the belief that “Jesus blesses believers with riches” that some, including journalist Hanna Rosin, have actually argued that the “prosperity gospel” was an important factor in creating the recent housing bubble.
Regardless of whether that is true or not, is there any actual evidence that adherents of “prosperity theology” climb out of poverty faster than anyone else? Is there evidence that Pentecostals in the United States have fewer out of wedlock children or that their divorce rate is lower? Is there evidence that those with “hot” religious convictions in the United States have children who suffer from fewer truancy problems or that they are less likely to need welfare for long periods of time?
Professor Mead, you have been entirely clear on what you think. Unfortunately you seem loathe to present any evidence that suggests that your convictions about the state of “blue” America or the problems of America’s inner cities are based on anything other than faith.
Scott M:
Please see Prof. Mead’s previous essay called “Black & Blue” (note at the bottom) for why Black is capitalized sometimes and other times not. I think you will find he *is* being consistent and not just haphazardly throwing terms around as you seem to be suggesting.
Shannon Love nails it.
Leftists operate on an oppression model of human interaction. If A is less well off than B, it must be because B is, somehow, “oppressing” A. Thus, there is asserted to be a basis for the leftist insistence on expropriating B for the alleged benefit of A. A non-trivial population of “wretched of the Earth” types is, therefore, essential or leftist political philosophy loses its coherence and reason for being.
It is noteworthy that the continued existence of populations of the intractably poor and dysfunctional is not required to maintain the coherence of conservative or libertarian political philosophy. Both belief systems, in fact, would benefit from the poor all becoming non-poor – there would be nothing remaining for the lefties to beat them up about.
Keep that in mind. Ending poverty is equivalent to ending their main political enemies to conservatives and libertarians. To leftists, ending poverty is equivalent to ending themselves.
Wanna save cities? Eliminate zoning.
Shannon,
Plain old corruption has more to do with it. The essence of the blue state model is government spending. You should look at government spending as an income stream which can be tapped en route by the politically connected who will then share with deserving elected officials. It really doesn’t matter where, or who at, the income stream is directed as long as as the stream exists.
With the happy side effect that demands for accountability result in a larger oversight bureaucracy who will happily feast on the income stream, and share with deserving elected officials, etc.
This is also known as a “self-licking ice cream cone”, though some call it “the blue state model”.
Wigwag,
Some suggestive data on the benefits of churchgoing for urban minorities and family formation is located at http://www.americanvalues.org/pdfs/researchbrief5.pdf
I’m pretty sure the research is clear that effective family formation lessens other forms of social dysfunction, so the argument using those premises is obvious.
As for the original post, I’ve been researching housing law and whether it negatively impacts the formation of church-centered neighborhoods. For instance, it appears to be illegal to mention that a house or apartment for rent or sale is near a church or place of worship or even a religious school. (The dubious reasoning is that it it signals intent to discriminate)
My sole policy recommendation is to allow this information to be included in advertisements. This would make it slightly more likely that prospective churchgoers would move near a church and be more likely to go to church and benefit from it.
It would also facilitate volunteerism.
The effects of changing this housing law may be marginal, but even marginal gains are real.
We have declared “war” on “certain” neighborhoods. And we are surprised at the result? It will take several generations to work this out of the system. Once we start.
What do we need to do to end this farce? Equal enforcement in all neighborhoods. White people wouldn’t stand for it.
Johnny busted for pot? A mere youthful indiscretion. Jamal? Obviously a sign of a future life of crime. Make it so.
And one other thing. You can buy an awful lot of votes with other people’s money. Until you run out.
One might also wish to look into how urban churches benefit from the Drug War by offering “rehabilitation services” to those who fall afoul of the law. A very sweet deal. Except for those who would rather not live in a war zone.
Some more questions for Professor Mead…
If religion, especially of the hyper-devout variety, is a valuable tool to help believers escape from poverty and other urban ills, how does Professor Mead explain that in communities that are already inhabited by large numbers of believers poverty is frequently worse than in more secular oriented communities?
In Israel, the segment of the population that practices the “hottest” form of Judaism, the ultraorthodox community, is also one of the poorest and most dysfunctional segments of the Israeli population. The community is impoverished, they receive all forms of public assistance far more often than other population groups in Israel and they are both unable and unwilling to participate in Israeli society as a whole; for example their children frequently don’t serve in the Israeli Defense Forces.
Is it different in Islamic nations? Not really. In Pakistan for example aren’t the most religiously devout communities often the most impoverished? Certainly a “hot” form of Islam is flourishing in the Northwest Frontier Provinces. Is there any evidence to back up Professor Mead’s thesis that as religious practice becomes more widespread the symptoms of poverty in this area are diminishing? What about Mogadishu; what has hot religion done to reduce poverty in that city?
In the Christian world as the Pentecostal world view spreads at the expense of Roman Catholicism in places like Brazil are the newly devout escaping poverty at a faster rate than their more secular colleagues? Is it devout Pentecostals who are driving Brazil’s economic success or is it their more secular neighbors who should be credited with turning Brazil into a modern economic powerhouse?
I am not convinced that religion in general and “hot” religion in particular does not have a role to play in the United States in helping to alleviate the ills of the inner city. But before Professor Mead trumpets hot religion either as a panacea or even a positive force, shouldn’t he provide some evidence that it has worked elsewhere?
If he can’t, why should we believe that religion will help solve the problem of America’s inner cities?
WRM, using Marx as reference contrasts world views perhaps no longer germane but I must concur on the impersonal process by which capitalism creates wittingly or unwittingly grounds for on-going lumpemproletariat (this is not a value judgment on capitalism just an observation). Because at bottom what we are discussing is a class issue all over the world (urban areas), the question for me is can capitalism in its many guises envelope profitably this seething crisis both domestically and globally? You have summarized lumpenproletariat existence (gangs, illegitimacy, thieves, prostitutes, crime, and down-and-outers) in many urban areas. Objectively, this being America, incontestable facts will be subjectively interpreted and perhaps categorized depending on where “one sits.” However, despite our political alignments (right, left, center, etc.) or in spite of them we can agree that most of us are wearied by urban chaos and breakdown. Now, how to combat it realistically in an analyst perspective shorn of rightist, leftist, centrist denotations requires sober focus on fact that U.S. is poorly run as accumulation of social/economic problems attest. Is this a consequence of political neglect (institutional problem) or citizen neglect (community problem)?
Identification by Right of New Deal social legislation/regulation and by Left of capitalism/free enterprise as one of causes for urban ills identified by lumpenproletariat label may be misplaced – causes may lie elsewhere and may require analysis of middle class canons vis-a-vis self image of responsibility. This is not a New Deal Socialism versus Free Enterprise problem but an recognition of “dead ends” left in the wake of constantly transforming large capital (ownership). A social system that pits its citizens competitively against each other and makes property ownership (Big Property not houses) the price of the ticket in avoiding societal risks needs a closer look by its citizens experiencing discomfort laid at the feet of WRM’s lumpenproletariat.
I think it is morally justifiable for citizenry to feel politically and culturally weary from urban decay as cited. Yet,to respond to problem rationally takes analysis and program adoption (mission and mandate) determined by involved Americans for human answers: one life at a time, one block at a time, one neighborhood at a time. WRM is correct souls need to be addressed; but the answers also reside in our hearts as we contend with societal elements percieved as squeezing our existence/comfort. So, to begin confronting WRM’s litany we have to be forthright in both our analysis and prescriptions as the interests of the broad U.S. public lie beyond left, right, and center labels vis-a-vis American cities.
So, to begin confronting WRM’s litany we have to be forthright in both our analysis and prescriptions as the interests of the broad U.S. public lie beyond left, right, and center labels vis-a-vis American cities.
So how much OPM (Other People’s Money) are you going to need?
Public policy entails cost; not OPM but TPM (tax payer money). There has been much discussion of the problems facing America’s cities. The TMI (the money issue) responds to public investment decisions inherent in societal governance. Public investment decision making is not easy in practice; benefits are not always quantifiable and may be intangible by nature. However, the simple mechanics of capital evaluation infer (present debt ceiling contretemps aside) concluding social value to country of viable cities and citizens then determining ability fiscally to make it happen based on fiscal resources. Of course, public finance is never so simple in democracy.
An excellent read related to the subject in this post, particularly the relationship between the USFG and religious groups, can be found in Robert Wuthnow’s “Saving America.” http://press.princeton.edu/titles/7703.html
But what happens when there is a strong religious presence in urban or poor rural neighborhoods, yet the churches themselves are engaged in promoting government dependency and exploiting government resources?
I submit that this is the status quo among most denominations, including large ones, that serve the poor.
In urban cities like Atlanta, Chicago, and Baltimore, evangelical and Baptist church leaders are among the most corrupted and politically destructive “spokespeople” for the worst parts of the status quo. They’re always available to take a payback at election time, and they line their pockets from every conceivable social program going — jobs training, prisoner “re-entry,” community redevelopment.
When I was writing grants in Atlanta, it was well-known that you needed certain signatures on an application to pass muster, and those signatures were not free.
Then there is the larger issue of churches as paid service providers for case management of federal programs such as WIC, Medicaid, Section 8, and refugee and immigrant resettlement and aid. This is a huge revenue stream for religious groups. Catholic Charities is the largest example but not the only one. And despite the positive behavior and ethics standards these institutions uphold and promote, they’re often oddly silent on the subject of demanding such standards from their client groups — standards relating to marriage and two-parent households, for example.
I don’t disagree that strong religious institutions are the answer to many social problems. The problem is that they’re also already a big part of the problem.
I agree with most of what you say about the problem but I think our Government has become agressive in its desire to separate religion from government. Since this country was founded on Judeo-Christian values you must foster them in general to raise well grounded youths. If your desire is to run all aspects of human existence from a national perspective you don’t have a chance of developing prposeful youths in purposeful communities because we need to solve most of the problems we face on a local level where the people who know the problem know the people they are trying to serve with their solutions.
If states and national governments are hostile to family life and the importance of children in that equation then you struggle to teach the young to value the very starting point of any culture, that is the family. If the government is going to foster an atmosphere in which the values needed to help the youth are respected they must begin by being personally truthful about the things they say and the policies and laws they make. Touching one soul at a time begins with integrity which is based in truth. There is way too much manipulation of our youth in this country to get them to do what we want even when what we want is good for them. We need to put our values up front in any proposed policy to help the youth.
Dr. Mead,
I heartily recommend that you take a look at the “Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church”, which is a clear and profound expression of a century’s worth of Christian thought on many of the issues you sight. Concepts like ‘participation’, and ‘subsidiarity’ with ‘intermediate social groupings’ are well articulated and researched. They would go a long way in helping to show how a conservative political position is profoundly ethical and would help to broaden the case beyond the typical, albeit very important, issues of personal responsibility and private property. A robust society with many voluntary social structures is more conducive to human flourishing than a bipolar State-citizen arrangement that progressives are always pushing.
Warm regards,
Matthew Book
Solving poverty is all about changing people from the inside out, and churches are part of the equation. But a trap both government and private charities often fall into is equating “feeding the poor” with “helping the poor.”
Agencies that unconditionally dispense food, clothing, housing, toys, etc. unwittingly reinforce the destructive notion — already enthroned in the minds of many impoverished citizens — that they are unable to take care of themselves. As long as people believe this, they will act helpless.
There needs to be more strings attached to assistance — such as active participation (versus mere enrollment) in job training programs, remedial education courses, etc. We should assist only those who show serious intent by making progress towards specified goals.
Current social policy is crazy. We are crazy. We do the same things over again while expecting a different result. We pay people to act poor, and then we act surprised when they excel at it.
“Government cannot do much under our system to teach boys what being a man really means.”
Well, apart from stopping all the things it currently does to drive them away from paternal investment in society.
Wait. . .actually, then, it could do a lot.
And unless and until it does, good luck getting young men to sign on for the existing fustuarium.
And Walter, if you aren’t aware how much it really is like that for our young men, you are so grotesquely ignorant about modern isues that you should not be attempting to write authoritatively on them.