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Today two competing worldviews and two competing views of persons offer different solutions to our social problems. Naturalists say that nature is all that exists and people are just complex socioeconomic machines—therefore all you have to do to end poverty or correct societal dysfunction is adjust the external environment, modify the economic incentives, and change the educational inputs. Much social policy in the last few decades worked with this assumption. But if historic biblical theism is true, should we not expect social programs combining spiritual and social transformation to work better than either purely secular or nominally religious programs?

President Bush's forming of a White House Office on Faith-Based and Community Initiatives (OFBCI) continues to generate controversy, even in Christian circles, but I believe it gives us an opportunity for a nonviolent reenactment of Elijah's contest with the false prophets.

Let's challenge the secularists to a test. Let's invite our best secular universities to have their top social scientists conduct careful, sophisticated comparative evaluations of at least three types of social-service providers: the secular, the religiously affiliated, and the holistic Christian that combine evangelism, prayer, and dependence on the Holy Spirit with the best of the medical and social sciences. (In fact, why not also include Buddhist and Muslim programs?) The programs could be job training, drug and alcohol rehabilitation—whatever. The only significant variable would be the absence or presence of faith-based components grounded in the biblical belief that people need spiritual as well as socioeconomic renewal.

Ram Cnaan, professor of social work at the University of Pennsylvania, points out in the important new book The Newer Deal: Social Work and Religion in Partnership that government, many in the media, and philanthropic foundations endorse a major expansion of faith-based organizations' role in delivering social services, in struggling against poverty and urban social decay, and in promoting new partnerships between these religious institutions and other sectors of society. The new White House office, with Catholic scholar John J. DiIulio Jr. as its director, is only the most visible example of sweeping societal change.

There are a number of reasons for the growing interest in faith-based organizations.

First, the government has reduced its support for social services during the last two decades; thus other societal sectors have had to fill the gap.

Second, neither the liberal nor conservative solutions tried thus far to solve our enormous social problems have worked adequately. The richest nation in history has persistent, widespread poverty—in 1999, 32.3 million Americans found themselves below the poverty level and 44 million without health insurance. Not all antipoverty government programs have failed, of course. Many, including Social Security, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), and the Women, Infants, and Children nutrition program, succeeded. But poverty, violence, and social disorder still flourish at the hearts of our great cities.

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June 11 2001, Vol. 45, No. 8