This is an article worth reading by Steven Waldman in the Washington Monthly, “The Framers and the Faithful: How modern evangelicals are ignoring their own history.” The article examines the attitudes of many 18th century evangelicals toward government, and specifically with respect to a number of the founding fathers, including Jefferson, Madison, and Patrick Henry.

While the provacative subtitle may be true, it shouldn’t really be all that surprising. After all, Waldman does a good job throughout noting that “each side of our modern culture wars has attempted to appropriate the Founding Fathers for their own purposes,” and that convenient facts are omitted by each group. The article does a good job getting at some of the complexities and diversity of voices in the 1700s, and shows that there isn’t just a single univocal view of the proper relation between church and state. Check it out.

William Easterly, professor of Economics at NYU, has written a new book challenging the prevailing development orthodoxy of increased aid and the “big push” to combat poverty in the Third World. The White Man’s Burden: Why The West’s efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good, published by Penguin is to be released on March 20th.

I have only read a short bit of it so far, but what I have seen is refreshing. He questions the effectiveness of aid, pointing out that aid has been largely ineffective and more of the same is not the answer. In so doing he goes up against politicians such as Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, economists such as Jeffery Sachs, and rock stars such as Bono and Bob Geldof.

Sachs calls for increased aid and Blair speaks of a “big push” to bring about The End of Poverty. (Sach’s book is also v. interesting by the way) Easterly agrees with Sachs that extreme poverty is a tragedy, but while there is a lot of talk about poverty itself, he says there has been very little said

about the other tragedy of the world’s poor. This is the tragedy in which the West spent 2.3 trillion dollars in foreign aid over the last 5 decades and still has not managed to get twelve cent medicines to children to prevent half of all malaria deaths. The West has spent 2.3 trillion and still has not managed to get four-dollar bed nets to poor families

He contrasts the central planning inefficiency of the aid industry to the market’s ability to distribute 9 million copies of the sixth volume of Harry Potter books to the British and American economies in a single day.

There was no Marshall Plan for Harry Potter, no International Financing Facility for books about underage wizards.

Easterly makes the distinction between what he calls planners and searchers. Planners like Jeffery Sachs and Tony Blair advocate large scale attacks on poverty through aid and global initiatives. Planners operate from top-down schemes that are often well intentioned but have not worked. Searchers on the other hand avoid large scale plans and look for entrepreneurial solutions to solve problems that take into account incentives and accountability.

Despite the evidence, why do big plans remain so popular? Well, one reason of course is that planning schemes are inspiring. End poverty by 2025. Grandiose plans often have the support of big name politicians and celebrities and they promise a solution right away. Piecemeal solutions rarely inspire even when they work. Second, no one is accountable when the fail. And when they do fail the answer is do more of the same thing. The One Campaign is a perfect example. But popularity and good intentions are not a substitute for effectiveness.

A third reason is the prevailing allure of utopian schemes. Easterly writes that the planning approach to foreign aid is part of the what Karl Popper calls the “utopian social engineering” approach to problem. This approach has been tried and failed in diverse times and places such as the five year plans of the Soviet Union, the structural adjustment programs of the World Bank in Africa in the 1980s and 90s, and the “shock therapy” used on the transition economies after years of failed planned economies.

Utopianism is nothing new. Eric Voegelin saw Gnosticism and utopianism as the driving force of modern politics, and it appears to be the driving force of aid as well.

Maybe Easterly’s challenge will wake people up to the failures of planning and get them to respect the entrepreneurial capabilities of the people in the developing world. As Hernando de Soto has pointed out in The Mystery of Capital, there is no lack of entrepreneurial spirit in the Third World.

Instead of increasing aid and more top-down plans decrease regulation and barriers to starting businesses, and let local entrepreneurs and the markets find solutions that far away planners have been unable to accomplish.

A recent NBER working paper, “The Effects of Tort Reform on Medical Malpractice Insurers’ Ultimate Losses,” argues that “The long run effects of reforms are greater than insurers’ expected effects, as five year developed losses and ten year developed losses are below the initially reported incurred losses for those years following reform measures.”

A number of the specific changes in the history of tort law are discussed in Ronald Rychlak’s Trial by Fury: Restoring the Common Good in Tort Litigation, part of Acton’s Christian Social Thought Series.

Rychlak argues that in addition to the tangible and significant economic impact of current tort law, the system also “encourages litigation at the expense of forgiveness and understanding. It ignores the role that family members, friends, religious leaders, and others can play in bringing about reconciliation.”

Henry Stob, the longtime professor of philosophical and moral theology at Calvin Theological Seminary, authored a compendium of articles on various aspects of theological ethics in his 1978 book titled, Ethical Reflections: Essays on Moral Themes (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans). The book is now out of print, but I ran across an excellent section that excellently captures the intent of the work of the Acton Institute.

In Chapter 2, “Theological Foundations for Christian Ethics,” he writes:

Because man does in fact have a horizontal dimension, and because he is in fact tied in with nature, the presence of “conditioning” factors cannot be denied. There is that in man which is amenable to “causal explanation.” Accordingly, the effect upon him, and upon his conduct, of chemical processes, biological instincts, psychological drives and complexes, economic determinants, and social pressures may never be ignored. It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that the natural sciences, or those social sciences which proceed by way of the quantitative analysis of empirical givens, are able really to interpret man and his behavior. The methods employed within these sciences, fashioned as they are for use on the horizontal plane, are simply not fitted to plumb the depths of man.

It is most narrowly the economic aspects of human relationships that the Acton Institute is concerned with, but more broadly other “horizontal” institutions are relevant, including disciplines such as political science and history.

One impressive piece of evidence that suggests that Dr. Stob is right in his analysis of the limits of social sciences is the current flowering of interest in economic theories of “social capital,” for example. These are attempts to get at some of the deeper aspects of human reality. Stob concludes that this is properly the realm of ethics, and this is underscored by Francis Fukuyama’s definition of social capital: “Social capital can be defined simply as the existence of a certain set of informal values or norms shared among members of a group that permit cooperation among them.”

Stob writes that since the horizontal dimensions do not exhaust the causal explanations for human behavior,

Attention must be given, therefore, to another set of answers to the question about man and his behavior. These answers, proclaimed by Christian ethics, arise out of theology and metaphysics, and reflect an apprehension of man’s vertical dimension. Integral to them is the recognition that, though man is undoubtedly tied in with nature, he is even more certainly tied in with God. This being tied to God, it is recognized, is precisely what accounts for man’s humanity. It is this which raises man above mere animality and constitutes him a moral person. It is this, moreover, which enables him to break through the causal nexus and transcend merely natural determinants. Being tied in with God, having a dimension of depth, oriented to some object of ultimate concern, he can rise above the influences playing upon him from the side and exercise a genuine freedom—the freedom to set himself ideals and to aspire after them.

It is in the intersection between the vertical and horizontal dimensions of human existence, specifically as ethics relates to economics, that the Acton Institute works. It is the deeper and more comprehensive view of the human person, particularly as revealed in Holy Scripture, that allows us to evaluate and appropriate elements of study of the “horizontal” planes of human relationships.

Go here for Acton’s new video, “Solutions,” which offers a real starting place for all of us who want to do something about poverty and hunger.

Touting the success of his faith-based initiative last week, President Bush noted that faith-based charities received more than $2 billion last year from the federal government. But even as Bush announced that the Department of Homeland Security would be the 11th agency to establish an office for the faith-based initiative, some groups are finding the money to be a mixed blessing.

An example is The Silver Ring Thing (SRT), which following a settlement between the ACLU and the Department of Health and Human Services, can no longer recieve federal funds under its current program. In this week’s Acton Commentary, “A Golden Opportunity for ‘The Silver Ring Thing’,” I note the temptation facing SRT “to acquiesce to the HHS regulations and attempt to rigorously separate the faith element out of the program.”

I conclude that “the temporary setback of the loss of government funding has the potential to be a long-term opportunity for The Silver Ring Thing,” in the sense that SRT can seek out private sources of funding and evade the strings that are inevitably attached to government funding.

“You can’t be a faith-based program if you don’t practice your faith,” said President Bush. He also said, according to the AP, “It used to be that groups were prohibited from receiving any federal funding whatsoever because they had a cross or a star or a crescent on the wall. And that’s changed, for the better.”

We can hope, however, that the faith element in religious charities is not merely restricted to mere display of a religious symbol, but pervades the charitable work of the organization. It’s this “damaging form of secularization: the kind that separates Christian faith from works,” that The Silver Ring Thing must resist.

David Kuo, a former deputy director of the White House faith-based office, criticized the administration for allowing the initiative to become “a whisper of what was promised.” Acton senior fellow Marvin Olasky, in an interview on NPR’s All Things Considered, expressed disappointment with the lower priority the faith-based initiative from the Bush White House.

But at least part of the difficulty the program faces comes from the problems posed by the enforcement of secularizing regulations by government bureaucracy. When asked about the impediments that governmental regulations put on their charitable work, one non-profit worker responded: “The complexities of the laws affecting part-time workers have made it impossible for us to hire candidates we could afford to pay. We have been amazed to learn that hiring even one part-time employee makes us a ‘pen-pal’ with a complicated array of government agencies.”

Read the whole commentary here.

Last Wednesday, I was privileged to attend the Samaritan Awards Gala in Washington, D.C. I have to say up front that Acton’s Effective Compassion events are probably the most enjoyable for me to attend because invariably one comes into contact with a group of very special, very dedicated people who are completely devoted to what our society would term “lost causes,” and having great success.

Ken Ortman

While there were a number of award-winning programs at the Gala this year, I’d like to take some time to focus on the 2005 Samaritan Award Grand Prize Winners, Ken and Sheila Ortman of Lives Under Construction Boys Ranch in Lampe, Missouri. Ken and Sheila were joined in D.C. by their daughter Melissa, who serves as the Development Director for the Ranch, and 7 young men who are currently residents in their program.

Sheila Ortman

Ken, Sheila and Melissa are wonderful people – remarkably kind, decent, and humble – who are doing amazing work with young men who come out of shockingly difficult circumstances. They are hard workers – Ken remarked during a conversation that he couldn’t imagine working at a job like mine, which involves a lot of sitting at a desk – who moved from their South Dakota farm to southwestern Missouri in order to start a new life working with troubled boys. And they are successful – the LUC program has a 92 percent success rate over the last 20 years, turning many young men away from lives of crime and substance abuse and toward a productive life in society. They do so by establishing a structured environment within which the boys can learn respect for God, authority figures, and gain a proper view of themselves as persons.

Melissa Ortman

We had the chance to meet 7 of the young men who live at the ranch, and the transformation in their lives is evident and remarkable. By all outward appearances, these boys were just like any other group of young people touring Washington, D.C. You’d never know that each of them had likely had severe drug or behavioral problems and numerous encounters with the law. They were a group of normal, if somewhat rambunctious teens.

The LUC Bunch on the Mall in Washington, D.C.

It is truly a blessing to meet people like the Ortmans, and it was great as well to watch the boys – many of whom were on their first trip to a large city. As I noted earlier, I always enjoy Acton’s Effective Compassion events, but having these young men along added a spirit and sense of adventure to this trip that will make it unforgettable for me.

If you haven’t done so in the past, I encourage you to check out the many fine charities like LUC Boys Ranch that are in our online Samaritan Guide, which is an excellent resource for anyone looking for effective private charities across the United States. Many of the programs in the guide are very small, but doing amazing work, and are well worth your attention and support.

I had an opportunity to talk with a few of the boys and with Ken, Sheila and Melissa. To hear my conversation with the Ortmans, click here (4 mb mp3 file). To hear from the boys, click here (1.9 mb mp3 file).

A snippet from the upcoming Religion & Liberty:

It is true that democracy is the best of the political systems, in that it guarantees, through universal suffrage, a peaceful changeover of power. But democracy and its instrument, majority rule, is not a method to investigate the truth. –Rafael Termes

The blessings and responsibilities of a peaceful political system: something for a free people to remember on this noteworthy day in March.

Maximilian Pakaluk, associate editor at NRO, examines a recent panel discussion given by the New York Historical Society, which included Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, Akhil Reed Amar, Southmayd Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University, and Benno C. Schmidt Jr., chairman of the Edison Schools and former dean of Columbia Law School. The discussion was entitled “We the People: Active Liberty and the American Constitution.”

Pakaluk observes, “The three speakers, but especially Schmidt and Breyer, agreed that the Constitution is terribly hard to figure out. From the way they spoke of it, you would think it had been written by a group of postmodern philosophers. Who knew that a document of less than 5,000 words, filled mostly with seemingly dry regulations and instructions, could be so perplexing?”

He continues, “Breyer had a metaphor to describe what goes into interpreting the Constitution: It’s a matter of ‘patrolling the boundaries’ of ‘democratic space.’ This sounded like a complicated affair, but the judge graciously shared his secrets. There are, according to Breyer, six ‘tools’ to be used in understanding the Constitution: text, history, tradition, precedent, purpose, and consequences.”

Of those six tools, “Breyer finds it ‘more enlightening’ to dwell mostly on the last two. His explanation of this approach was somewhat unsettling: It involved looking at the ‘values’ expressed in the Constitution, and then figuring out what their consequences are for today.”

When Dutch theologian Herman Witsius (1636-1708) wrote his The Economy of the Covenants Between God and Man in 1693, he described some of his own principles of textual interpretation. These were in part based on preceding examples of the applcation and understanding of government documents from classical sources.

In the very first article of his text, Witsius writes,

Whoever attempts to discourse on the subject and design of the Divine Covenants, by which eternal salvation is adjudged to man, on certain conditions equally worthy of God and the rational creature, ought, above all things, to have a sacred and inviolable regard to the heavenly oracles, and neither through prejudice nor passion, intermix any thing which he is not firmly persuaded is contained in the records which hold forth these covenants to the world. For, if Zaleucus made it a condition to be observed by the contentious interpreters of his laws, that “each party should explain the meaning of the lawgiver, in the assembly of the thousand, with halters about their necks: and that what party soever should appear to wrest the sense of the law, should, in the presence of the thousand, end their lives by the halter they wore:” as Polybius, a very grave author, relates in his history, Book xii. c. 7. and if the Jews and Samaritans in Egypt, each disputing about their temple, were admitted to plead before the king and his courtiers on this condition only, that “the advocates of either party, foiled in the dispute, should be punished with death,” according to Josephus, in his Antiquities, Book xiii. c. 6. certainly he must be in greater peril, and liable to sorer destruction, who shall dare to pervert, by rashly wresting the sacred mysteries of the Divine Covenants…

We can see that Witsius argues here that if there were such consequences and restrictions on the interpretations of secular laws, how much more there should be in the interpretation of the sacred texts of Scripture. We can also see that the dominant image for legal interpretation is that of “halters about their necks.” This classical image seems to be rather radically oppposed to Justice Breyer’s (post-modern?) notion of “patrolling the boundaries…of democratic space.”

According to The Church Report, a new resource has been released which offers churches guidelines for keeping their activities and functions within the letter of the law. As non-profit organizations, churches are held to the same standard as registered charities and cannot engage in certain forms of public speech.

A report by The Rutherford Institute, “The Rights of Churches and Political Involvement” (PDF), examines in detail what the restrictions are for churches. There are two main areas: “first, no substantial part of the organization’s activities may consist of carrying on propaganda or otherwise attempting to influence legislation; and second, the organization may not participate in political campaigning in opposition to, or on behalf of, any candidate for public office.” For the purposes of this discussion, I’m going to focus on the former case rather than the latter, since I take it for granted that churches shouldn’t be institutionally involved in campaigning for a specific candidate. For more on this second aspect of the law, see this post on the use of church directories by political parties, passed on by Joe Carter.

In its summary of the first type of restriction, the report states:

In short, only one reported court decision has found a religious organization in violation of section 501(c)(3) by engaging in “substantial” legislative activities. The IRS, however, refuses to abide by any precise standards, such as a percentage rule, to measure when “substantial” legislative activities have occurred. Hence, a church or religious organization seeking to acquire or maintain a tax-exempt status must be aware that there is always some risk that its attempt to influence legislation will prompt the IRS to pursue an audit and perhaps even revoke its tax-exempt status.

It goes on to say that “one risk adverse approach might be for a church to report pending legislation to church members, without proposing, supporting or opposing any legislation.”

The bottom line seems to be this: “Tax exemptions for churches and religious organizations are a privilege and not a constitutional right. In fact, to acquire and maintain this privilege, churches and religious organizations may have to forsake heretofore protected constitutional rights under the First Amendment.”

This means that if it is something that is germane to the proclamation of the gospel, a church must be willing to lose its tax-exempt status. The government could potentially use tax-free status as leverage to keep churches quiet about political activity. If the pastor and consistory feel that the issue is one of religious imperative, something like a status confessionis, the church must resist the temptation to impose restrictions on its own speech in the interest of maintaining a privileged position.

This clearly calls for prudence and wisdom on the part of the church leadership. I’m not suggesting that churches simply cast off their tax-exempt status on a whim. But when the issue comes down to one of keeping silent over clear moral evils or losing their special status, churches must choose the latter. Their ultimate allegiance must be to Christ and not Caesar.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in the context of the enforcement of the Aryan clauses prohibiting pastors of Jewish heritage from ministry in the state churches, writes of the rare instance in which the church must “put a spoke in the wheel itself.” In his essay, “The Church and the Jewish Question,” he says, “Such action would be direct political action, and is only possible and desirable when the church sees the state fail in its function of creating law and order, i.e. when it sees the state unrestrainedly bring about too much or too little law and order. In both these cases it must see the existence of the state, and with it its own existence, threatened.”

He continues to argue that “there would be too little law if any group of subjects were deprived of their rights, too much where the state intervened in the character of the church and its proclamation, e.g. in the forced exclusion of baptised Jews from our Christian congregations or in the prohibition of our mission to the Jews. Here the Christian church would find itself in statu confessionis and here the state would be in the act of negating itself. A state which includes within itself a terrorised church has lost its most faithful servant.”

One such instance of the state making “too much law” and intervening “in the character of the church and its proclamation” would be the criminalization of certain types of speech as hateful or offensive.