CIAO DATE: 05/02

Georgetown Journal of International Affairs

Volume 1, Number 1, Winter/Spring 2000

 

Faith in Development
by Bryant Myers, Alan Whaites & Bruce Wilkinson

 

The modern Western world largely regards spiritual matters as separate from and subordinate to scientific and material realities. For the vast majority of the world’s six billion people, however, religious faith informs every facet of life. Particularly in communities of the developing world, faith is an essential aspect of the relationships between family members, peers, and cultures. For these communities, religion is a powerful source of identity, surpassing even nationality and ethnicity.

Beyond embracing religion as an essential component of identity, faith–based non–governmental organizations (NGOs) regard it as a source of well–being. They believe that the causes of and solutions to poverty include the spiritual as well as the material. Christian NGO activists believe that the separation of the earthly from the spiritual is impoverishing and that people of faith suffer on a spiritual level when they ignore what they perceive as evidence of God at work in the world. The resulting distinct motivations translate into differences in organization, administration, and function from non–faith based NGOs.

Today, faith–based NGOs play a key role in developing regions and are gaining respect in the international community. Both the World Bank and the Canadian International Development Agency have concluded that faith–based NGOs share considerable common ground with bilateral donors and multilateral agencies.

The assumption that the spiritual and physical domains of life are separate and unrelated has permeated development theory and practice. It has reduced poverty to a condition merely reflecting the absence of material possessions such as money, water, food, housing, and the lack of social justice. In turn, development is reduced to a series of material responses designed to overcome these needs.

Faith–based NGOs–such as Catholic Relief Services, Mercy Corps, World Vision, and groups linked to denominations, including the Seventh–day Adventists, Lutherans, and the Orthodox Church–employ many of the same material responses in their work. These organizations, most of them founded by priests and evangelists, are now staffed by public health workers, food security experts, micro–enterprise development specialists, and development professionals. Their programs are nearly identical to those of their secular counterparts, particularly in countries that prohibit the faith to which the agency adheres.

What Makes Faith–based NGOs Distinct? There are a number of characteristics that distinguish faith–based NGOs, particularly Christian, from secular NGOs. Most prominent among those differences is their distinct ethos and development strategy.

Faith–based NGOs are shaped by their respective theologies. Christian NGOs believe that humankind and all human institutions, including the state and the church, exist in reference to God, and that the Bible provides a framework for thinking about human well–being. Indeed, most faiths uphold a variation of the central tenet that, as expressed by the Hindus, “All human activities are part of the sacred pattern of the universe.” At the heart of the Christian faith are teachings regarding charity, compassion, solidarity, and justice. These provide a strong motivational framework for relief and development work.

Virtually all faiths have mechanisms for dispensing charity, starting with local efforts operated from a single temple, mosque, church, or congregation. Like their secular counterparts, faith–based NGOs have varied funding mechanisms, goals, and target audiences. Most faiths also have missionary organizations, some of which provide relief and development assistance in the course of their work. Missionary organizations’ primary goals–evangelism and conversion–distinguish them from faith–based NGOs.

Faith–based NGOs accept comprehensive accountability to the people they serve, to donors, and to God. They regard the poor as individuals with the same rights to dignity and respect, regardless of ethnicity, political, or religious values. Unlike other development agencies, they refrain from thinking of “the poor” in the abstract, a practice that invites well–intentioned people of compassion to speak on behalf of the poor while engaging in the latest fads in social engineering: In the 1970s, it was development as good management; in the 1980s, development as participation; and in the 1990s, development as economics. The poor became the wards of the state, objects of professional study, or a social group waiting to be organized. On the contrary, people of faith find it more difficult to play God in the lives of others because the poor are not an abstraction, but rather, a group of human beings with names, lives, and identities.

Faith–based organizations believe in the spirituality of development. In fact, faith informs the very definition of “development.” Rather than adhere to the Western world’s definition of development on purely economic or quality–of–life criteria, faith–based NGOs look for spiritual and moral progress; the emphasis is on being more, not just having more.

Even secular groups acknowledge that efforts to rigidly divide religion and the development process can be inappropriate and counterproductive. Religious beliefs are important not just to the cultural ties within a community, but as a powerful lens through which individuals perceive and interpret reality. They have a profound impact on how people act and relate. The cultural, moral, spiritual, and religious dimensions of human life should not be separated from the materialistic, economic, and scientific processes employed by development practitioners.

Development work in Senegal, for example, was significantly more successful when the strategies for working with communities incorporated the cultural, religious, and moral dimensions. Until recently, development efforts surrounding the sensitive issues of female genital mutilation and HIV/AIDS awareness achieved only meager results. Development agencies then began targeting their efforts at respected community leaders, most of them religious. Once these leaders understood the dangers their communities faced from AIDS and female genital mutilation, a moral and religious imperative emerged encouraging them to work with their community to effect behavioral changes. These leaders then helped development practitioners to understand the ways and means of approaching the communities to achieve the greatest impact.

Faith–based groups often function in the same manner as other NGOs, but for different reasons. Both faith–based NGOs and many other aid agencies share common goals, including poverty reduction and sustainable development. Where those interests intersect, the parties work together. Faith–based NGOs frequently conduct programs in cooperation with the World Bank, various UN agencies, and bilateral donors such as the United States Agency for International Development.

Additional shared objectives include economic growth, modern medical care, improved agriculture, and water management. To faith–based NGOs, the technologies that support these objectives are merely tools. Only when they are used sensitively and appropriately can these technologies enhance life and make people more productive. But when separated from the spiritual, they cannot improve the whole of the human condition. By themselves, markets, water supplies, sanitation facilities, and health care systems are not sustainable. Relationships, on the other hand, are sustainable and can ensure improvements in the lives of families and communities.

Hence, many faith–based organizations are involved in the search for a new paradigm for economic development that rates values such as solidarity and cooperation as highly as it does wealth. Development that focuses only on the economic or the material is inadequate. Rather, development must include the cultural, social, spiritual, and political spheres, echoing the Hebrew tradition: “Where there is no bread, there is no Torah, and where there is no Torah, there is no bread.”

Faith–based NGOs are conscious of the importance of value change. All development agencies must have both a theory to account for the cause of poverty and a set of beliefs and values which derive from it. Without such a theory, a development agency becomes a charity that dispenses welfare to relieve the more visible symptoms of poverty, but does little to combat its causes. In fact, its efforts can sometimes inadvertently reinforce the conditions of suffering and injustice.

Development agencies have beliefs and values which they promote, explicitly or implicitly: the role of the market, respect for human rights, protection of the environment, democracy, or the role of women. Values change when development workers convince rural residents to use latrines or persuade parents that education is as important for their daughters as for their sons.

Religion is an important part of cultural values, both good and bad. As the previous example showed, female genital mutilation is difficult to combat because, as a purely cultural practice, it is often defended on religious grounds by Christians, Muslims, and animists, although it is not mentioned in any of their sacred books. Value change must be informed not only by medical reasons or on grounds of gender equity, but on a theological basis.

Faith–based NGOs do not accord the state the final say. Rather, they assert that people are accountable to each other and their communities–and to their chosen God. The state is just another institution that must fulfill its mission appropriately or be subject to correction. Faith–based NGOs will not accept state policies that devalue the life of individuals or their communities. They view the state as just one of many actors in the development process, not as the supreme actor.

This conception of political power drives people of faith to challenge systems and power structures. In Europe, churches and faith–based organizations have led advocacy efforts on such issues as child labor (Christian Aid is a leader of these efforts) and ethical consumerism. Caritas, Christian Aid, and other faith–based groups have been at the forefront of Jubilee 2000, a movement dominated by churches and faith–based organizations seeking global debt relief for poor countries. At the 1999 meeting of the G7 in Birmingham, England, some 70,000 people joined hands to form a human chain in protest against Third World debt.

Faith compels its followers to seek peace and justice. The role of faith in peacemaking is evident through many modern examples. Men of faith–Mahatma Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Archbishop Desmond Tutu–led some of the twentieth century’s greatest movements for peaceful change. Menachem Begin and Anwar el–Sadat were willing to take great personal risks for peace because of their religious convictions. “Each of the principals at Camp David recognized peace to be both a gift from God and a preeminent human obligation,” noted former President Jimmy Carter. “To have overlooked the importance of religion for both Sadat and Begin would have resulted in a failure to understand these two men. Such a failure could have had a pervasive and incalculable impact.”

In recent decades, the vast majority of wars have been intra–state conflicts. Here, too, the church and other faith–based institutions are important actors. The role of the churches is considered central, if not critical, to a relatively peaceful transition to multi–ethnic democracy in South Africa. The Quakers have been active in conciliation and peace efforts in the Biafran war, Nicaragua, and elsewhere. In Biafra, the Quakers were seen as trustworthy by both sides in the conflict. Asked whether the Quakers were regarded as religious or secular actors, then Secretary–General of the British Commonwealth Arnold Smith replied, “I think people who knew them understood that their motivation was spiritual. But spiritual is not an opposite of secular; it’s an attitude of values, of how one deals in secular matters.”

The Future of Faith–based NGOs. Faith–based organizations must view developing countries not only as recipients of aid, but also as equal partners. For World Vision, this led to a risky move toward partnership with entities in the industrialized and the developing world, each locally governed and legally autonomous. The resulting international board is composed of representatives from nineteen countries and seven regions, nine of whom are from developing countries. The only glue that unites these partners is a common mission, core values, and a covenant.

Faith–based organizations believe that development is a means to an end, not an end in itself. The true goal is transformation. The focus is not on transferring resources, building capacity, or increasing choices. It is on changing people. At the heart of all the major faiths is the aim of personal transformation–to draw nearer to the divine, to gain a true understanding of the meaning of life, and to reach inner peace and contentment. Isaiah writes that when the poor hear the good news and receive freedom, they become “oaks of righteousness . . . that rebuild the ancient ruins and restore the places long devastated.” People, not programs, restore their worlds.

World Vision is an international Christian relief and development organization. It currently supports more than 3,400 projects in nearly 100 countries worldwide.