Bureaucratizing Faith – Stephen Eide

Faith-based organizations (FBOs) loom large in conservative thinking about poverty and related ills. It’s widely believed that we could restore social health by reining in big government and expanding private religious programs. George W. Bush’s compassionate conservatism laid out the standard expansion plan. It called for giving religious nonprofits a better shot at government contracts. That framework has also been endorsed by Donald Trump. In a February 2025 executive order, Trump stated, “The executive branch wants faith-based entities, community organizations, and houses of worship, to the fullest extent permitted by law, to compete on a level playing field for grants, contracts, programs, and other Federal funding opportunities.” In other words, the plan is to slot FBOs into the NGO state. This merits rethinking.

America’s welfare state relies on a vast network of private nonprofit contractors to enact social policy. From one perspective, that model seems conducive to building a larger FBO sector. From another, it seems designed to tempt FBOs into overlooking how reliance on public financing makes it harder for a program to keep the faith. Temptation is a concept to which one would expect FBO champions, of all people, to appreciate. Ill-advised expansions threaten FBOs’ integrity as religious organizations offering a meaningful alternative to the social services status quo.

Setting FBOs up for success means creating programs that outperform government in boosting school performance, sobriety and employment, and/or that which promote values to which government programs are indifferent or hostile. Without a strong sense of FBOs’ distinctive virtues and the distinctive pressures they face in a secularized culture, policymakers who encourage expansion are setting faith-based leaders up for failure.

Even the most casual reader of Scripture will find his attention constantly drawn to the poorest of the poor, the miserable, the chronically ill and disabled, convicts, and others living openly sinful lives. Out of such stones cast away (Acts 4:8-12), the church will be built. Scripture shows not only Jesus’ sympathy for the wretched of the earth but his extensive personal contact with them. That example instructs that, as Pope Benedict XVI once explained to Peter Seewald, “Giving can never mean primarily giving money … you must give of yourselves.” This notion of giving of yourself is distinctive to modern faith-based organizations, which stretch thin resources through marshalling volunteer labor.

Those without any personal contact with the poor are susceptible to panaceas and utilitarian theories, such as “effective altruism,” that fetishize efficiency. Mother Teresa took constant heat from critics for failing to operate on sound business principles. Straightforward redistribution with minimal overhead will often appear as the most efficient anti-poverty policy. But redistribution will never enact the kind of behavioral change so obviously necessary to anyone who has witnessed firsthand low-income dysfunction. Giving of yourself is also less individualistic than giving of your resources. Paying taxes that go towards Medicaid, Food Stamps, etc., is part of a social contract—a deal made between the free, rights-bearing individual and the government. A redistribution-centered policy promotes a sterile, transactional conception of social work that will always seem unsatisfying to those most moved to heal society.

More than secular programs, FBOs tend to care about behavioral transformation. Aiming for behavioral transformation can yield high failure rates, but that may be defensible. Graduation from a treatment program that everyone graduates from sends a weaker message than graduation from one that most people fail out of. Conservatives sometimes argue that FBOs’ excellence consists in their ability to outperform the secular welfare state. But it may be more accurate to say that their performance can’t be compared, as they often embrace standards of success that are both different from, and higher than, secular programs’ standards.

Those concerned about anti-Christian bias often frame the FBO question as a religious liberty matter. That framing only clarifies whether religious groups can contract with government. It’s less helpful in determining whether they should. In general, an organization spiritually motivated to serve the poor may take public money to do so, as long as it doesn’t discriminate based on sect and doesn’t use taxpayer dollars to evangelize. But evangelism is precisely how FBOs reach some people failed by secular programs. Take addicts. People in recovery often fail to stick the landing because they lack something or someone to recover for. Family and friends can serve that purpose, but addicts often lack healthy social ties. Indeed, one of the standard best practices of recovery is to avoid the “people, places, and things” associated with one’s old, using ways. Building new relationships—a new life, really—takes time, leaving the typical man in recovery feeling that the only person he has to recover for is himself, which is a lonely state of affairs. But religion is always there—to provide structure, guidance, and cause for persisting in one’s sobriety. If recovery is like conversion, maybe it should be conversion.

Evangelistic work is tough sledding with poor people leading complex lives. All at the same time, they’re trying to get their kids out of foster care, obtain their high school equivalency and some form of professional certification, maintain sobriety, and secure reliable transportation and stable housing. Amidst such chaos, it’s tempting to conclude that evangelization needs to wait. On the other hand, that waiting can wind up taking forever. A crisis can present special evangelical potential. People in recovery often testify that they became sober the same day that they became a Christian and that, moreover, they’d never have made it without their faith. Reflecting on testimonies like that will naturally lead to further reflections on whether similarly situated individuals are positively harmed when social programs eschew evangelizing.

The orthodox tend to bristle when religion is pitched as a life hack for staying sober. But the argument is more dialectical than utilitarian. A recovering addict will be a better Christian if he’s sober. Further, good works have a strong evangelistic upside. In The Rise of Christianity (1996), sociologist Rodney Stark credits first-century health and human service ministries with the early church’s survival. He quotes Tertullian: “It is our care of the helpless, our practice of loving kindness that brands us in the eyes of many of our opponents. ‘Only look,’ they say, ‘look how they love one another!’” Performing good works obviously holds evangelistic potential for the performers, too. Chuck Colson, Watergate con and founder of Prison Fellowship, once wrote: “The richest spiritual experiences I have known have not been in vaulted cathedrals surrounded by stained-glass windows but in the filthiest prison cells. Christians will miss the greatest blessings if they isolate themselves from the reality of the world in which God lives.”

Secularizing pressures, in the world of twenty-first-century social services, are unrelenting. One pressure point is staff. Should an organization desire to integrate Christian teaching throughout its work, success will depend on what kind of personnel they can hire in an age of diminished church attendance. In 2023, the bishop of Toronto gave an interview to The Pillar in which he lamented the impracticality of finding 40,000 teachers who are “fervently Catholic” to staff the parochial education system he oversees. Should religious charter schools get off the ground, they would in short order face a similarly impossible dilemma. The big organizations (Catholic Charities; Lutheran Services in America) are those most functionally indistinguishable from the secular welfare state. That may be due not only to compromised leadership but staffing exigencies.

Downstream of personnel concerns are those of leadership transition. Many FBOs are now led by a founder or CEO who took charge two to three decades ago and is now personally out of step with the twenty-first century’s more casually secular standards. What happens when that person dies or steps down? At bare minimum, a faith-based leader should be a churchgoer. Diminished church attendance, societywide, means that the pool of potential faith-based leaders is smaller than it was thirty years ago. In principle, leadership transition creates the opportunity for revival. And yet, in my years of experience interviewing and meeting with faith-based groups, mainly homeless service providers, I have found revival to be rare. Many new leaders come in promising continuity with their predecessors in terms of religious intensity. Many come in promising fiscal discipline, a sharper focus on “outcomes,” an expanded donor base, and enticing capital improvements. It doesn’t happen very much that a new leader comes in promising spiritual renewal and pretty much just that.

The compassionate conservative theory of FBOs was premised on pluralism, in both the social services and American religious life. Earlier in the twentieth century, it had been maintained that, without strict church-state separation, the Protestant majority would exercise unjust dominion. Religious pluralism dissipated those fears. Parallel to that, as a legacy of the Great Society’s insistence on “community action,” America adopted a highly decentralized, “nonprofit industrial complex” style approach to fighting poverty. President Bush was impressed by sociological studies directed by Catholic political scientist John Dilulio that had documented that low-income neighborhoods were dense with scrappy Christian groups doing vital work in youth mentoring, child welfare, crime prevention, and addiction. These groups were seen as being discriminated against by government funding norms, forcing them to, as Bush put it in a July 1999 campaign speech, “make bricks without straw.”

Compassionate conservatism lost support after 9/11, when Bush’s attention shifted towards foreign policy. But not everyone was sad to see it fade. Author Marvin Olasky said that “compassionate conservatism mutated into a program to help local groups apply for money in Washington and learn how to work the bureaucracy.” There is indeed an essential grubbiness associated with the scramble for government contracts that carries great reputational risks for the faith-based sector. But the deeper problem is that pushing more FBOs into a reliance on government funding will give government leverage over them. Risks associated with that leverage have intensified in the era of “pen and phone” policymaking, which President Obama developed and his successors have continued. Any faith-based leader interested in contracting with government must be able to trust that he will not thereby sacrifice his organization’s integrity. That trust can’t take root amidst fears that the next presidential administration will renege on the deal. As the old saying has it, “with government shekels come government shackles.”

The steelman case for taking public money stems from need. It seems to be the case that private resources available to an FBO don’t grow at the same rate as the need in its host community grows. Many charitable organizations are philanthropically tapped out in their community; others could raise more private resources, but only via conforming to big philanthropy’s dubious whims. What faith-based social services guru Robert Lupton calls “toxic charity” possesses no moral superiority over mediocre government programs. Staying small is a recipe for barebones service offerings, which some FBOs might be content with, but many won’t. The hardest cases’ complex needs (“comorbidity”) necessitate an equally complex array of services. A modest-sized FBO may not be in a position to hire its own master’s level social worker, psychiatrist, clinical psychologists, nurse practitioners, job training and educational specialists. If you lead a good social program (who would want to lead a bad one?), it’s natural to want to help more people, or at least do a better job helping those to whom you’re already committed.

The best approach to expansion uses partnerships with government agencies as opposed to direct funding. Partnerships can facilitate access to more specialized services. In the best kind of partnership, government effectively makes an in-kind donation to an FBO. A shelter for single men hosts onsite detox services from an outside healthcare provider. The best partnerships are settled on the faith-based provider’s terms, not the government’s. A useful model is the San Antonio-based Haven for Hope, which boasts dozens of partnerships with government and other outside service providers. The federal government could play a role by urging more states and counties to, in exchange for funding, articulate how they’re actively exploring partnering with faith-based providers.

But proceed with caution. In rightwing circles, “O’Sullivan’s Law” stipulates that institutions that are not identifiably conservative become liberal over time. Consult, for example, the sad history of Catholic colleges (at least one of which currently offers a certificate in “Cannabis Studies”). Sullivan’s law most certainly applies to faith-based social service providers. Government funding can easily catalyze organizational drift from offering a distinct choice against the secular welfare state into serving as an echo of it.