The Coming of the Super-preachers

JR., JOHN J. DIIULIO

The Coming of the super-preachers By John J. Dilulio, Jr. From a distance, Rev. Anthony Nathaniel Lucas, 31, could easily be mistaken for one of the 1,500 inner-city black youths, most of them...

...itan New York region—pastors like Lucas who minister to the spiritual and material needs of young people in the most jobless, drug-and-crime-infested urban neighborhoods...
...The seminary boasts a network of over 2,000 pastors in the metropolContributing editor John J. Dilulio, Jr., a Princeton professor, is director of the Partnership for Research on Religion and At-Risk Youth (PRRAY) and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute...
...Dozens of Larson's studies indicate that faith and faith-based interventions are associated with a wide variety of health benefits ranging from less depression to longer life...
...In 1994, the National Journal of Sociology mentioned scores of solid studies showing that most urban black churches are involved in community efforts ranging from housing and health services to preschools and elementary education...
...Several other states are gearing up to do the same...
...Is there any good evidence beyond the anecdotal to suggest that, were black inner-city youth outreach and community development ministries given adequate financial and other support, they could actually turn the tide against youth violence, adult crime, drug addiction, teenage pregnancy, illiteracy, joblessness, and other social ills that remain so heavily concentrated in predominantly black inner-city neighborhoods...
...But the institute is nonetheless committed to a problem-centered rather than an ideology-driven approach to social problems, one that includes even culturally conservative (pro-life, pro-abstinence outside of marriage, and anti-gay marriage) inner-city black preachers like Rivers...
...For this reason alone, churches are clearly the ide-al—indeed, in most cases, the only—mediating institutions in black inner-city neighborhoods...
...Similarly, criminologist Francis T. Cullen's co-authored article in a recent edition of the journal Deviant Behavior opened by admitting that while "criminologists have been generally indifferent or even hostile to the idea that religion inhibits criminal deviance, evidence of a consistent inverse relationship between religion and deviance—including crime and delinquency—has steadily accumulated over the last three decades...
...In Texas, Gov...
...Or, as Rivers has argued, "Forget Durkheim...
...In May, Larson co-authored a study of the impact of Charles Col-son's Prison Fellowship Ministries on recidivism among male felons...
...After years as a member of one of Philadelphia's most violent street gangs, Rivers himself was saved ("both my hide and my soul") through the youth outreach ministry of the legendary Pentecostalist pastor Benjamin "Pops" Smith...
...Rivers and allied ministers have been working on, writing about, and "praying on" this 1,000-church plan for a half-decade...
...Likewise, even large, generally faith-friendly foundations give only for "training" and other secular purposes, passing the funds through intermediary nonprofit organizations that too often siphon away the big dollars and leave the churches with the chump change...
...The real laggards on "getting religion" are big profit-making corporations and philanthropies...
...You had a whole bunch of elites and experts and politicians, black and white, who tried anything but God in the neighborhoods and made black churches into liberal civil-rights-industry props...
...David Larson of the National Institute for Healthcare Research...
...The foundation is dedicated to mobilizing 1,000 black inner-city churches around a 10-point plan for reducing black-on-black youth violence, creating jobs, promoting literacy, and more...
...There are," insists Rivers, "thousands and thousands of black clergy out there, including many younger working-class folks, who love Jesus and aren't hiding out in the suburbs...
...The center's program includes, alphabetically: clothing, counseling, crisis assistance, drugs and alcohol, economic development, education/training, the elderly, family programs, health care, homelessness, housing, job development, leadership development, prison ministry, and youth...
...Rivers believes the story changed by the 1960s...
...As it says in Jeremiah 29:7, "But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare...
...On the right, last year many social conservatives and Republicans championed the Charitable Choice provisions of the welfare bill, a federal law that encourages states to involve churches as providers of welfare services (for example, job-search programs, maternity homes for expectant unmarried minors, drug treatment, and health clinics) while protecting the religious character of participating faith-based organizations...
...Local police, probation, and community leaders have credited the program with driving down youth homicides and other juvenile crimes in Boston...
...On the other hand, there is among some left-of-center liberals and Democrats a growing openness to rolling back the anti-religious dogma that was first read into the Constitution only a half-century ago...
...Moreover, 86 percent of blacks, versus about 61 percent of all Americans, believe that religion, spirituality, churches, or faith-based organizations can help to solve contemporary social problems...
...Anthony Nathaniel Lucas, 31, could easily be mistaken for one of the 1,500 inner-city black youths, most of them male, who do homework, play basketball, learn martial arts, get medical check-ups, search for summer jobs, catch occasional meals, and pack the pews to pray at his Skekinah Youth Chapel in Southeast Queens, New York...
...A 1990 study of over 2,100 urban black congregations found that about 70 percent of the churches ran or participated directly in community outreach activities—staffing day-care facilities, offering drug- and alcohol-abuse prevention programs, administering food banks, building shelters, serving as safe havens, and more...
...In a study to be released later this year, they will show that churchgoing cuts by 50 percent many of the major crime and other life risks associated with growing up male in predominantly poor, black inner-city neighborhoods...
...In an article for this magazine 18 months ago, I warned of the "Coming of the Super-Predators" Rivers talks about—children of every race and region who are severely abused and neglected and could well grow into the largest cohort of remorseless, conscienceless street criminals and gang members this nation has ever known...
...Many otherwise commendable treatises on the African American Community written by black and white social scientists during the period 19601980 almost completely neglected the Church as an important social institution," wrote Andrew Billings-ley and Cleopatra Howard Caldwell in the National Journal of Sociology...
...It is much too soon to answer that question...
...But what if it did...
...The study found that inmates who received as little as 10 hours of Bible studies a year via Prison Fellowship were rearrested one year after release at the rate of 14 percent, while otherwise comparable (i.e., same offense history, same age) inmates who did not receive the PFM intervention recidivated at three times that rate...
...The only remarkable thing about the fact of urban black church engagement with at-risk youth and community problems is that it has been so long ignored, denied, or trivialized by ostensibly objective researchers...
...Eighty-five percent of black churches in Atlanta, according to one study, are engaged in some type of outreach program beyond religious services to their congregations...
...There is reason to think that Wood-son's mission, like Rivers's mission, should be shared by everyone in America, whether they live near the inner city or not...
...Not a single major corporation, for example, gives money directly to inner-city churches that run youth ministries...
...Rivers and Rev...
...Recently, Larson has tested the findings on faith and young black inner-city males reported in 1985 by Harvard economist Richard Freeman...
...Harold Dean Trulear, 44, is one of Lucas's mentors...
...Even up close, the personable Lucas looks like a late-teen version of Flip Wilson, the 1960s comedy sensation whose signature catchphrase was "The devil made me do it...
...Du Bois explained that black churches had been, and would of necessity continue to be, even with civil rights, the only authentic institutional agents of black social change and real economic progress in deeply racist, segregationist America...
...Seventy-seven percent of the churches, with congregations ranging from 9 to 3,200, administered one or more programs targeted on neighborhood youth...
...Recently, Rivers's organization received a three-year core support grant of $750,000 from the Institute for Civil Society, a left-leaning New England foundation...
...Now it is time to speak of the "Coming of the Super-Preachers" whose mission it is to save the super-predators from themselves—to defuse the demographic time bomb through faith and love...
...I've been at this for over 20 years now, and I know they are out there and ready to move...
...We believe it works spiritually, and that what works spiritually helps socially, especially with our young, and most especially in minority urban neighborhoods that are in social and economic crisis...
...But on this crisp Saturday morning in April, it's the devil who's in trouble as Lucas, dozens of other inner-city clergy, and hundreds of church volunteers crowd together under the auspices of the New York Theological Seminary for a "youth summit" dedicated to thanking Jesus and "finding ways to save our children and solve community problems...
...I had a key to that school, and adult church volunteers worked with those kids, too...
...But are many such black super-preachers "out there," and if so, what, if any, difference might they and their church volunteers really make...
...Robert Woodson of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise in Washington, D.C., is a black Christian conservative who for years has fought such "ridiculous and short-sighted" elite bias against churches and other religious institutions...
...is pleased but not surprised by such good research news on religion...
...As Gallup reports, black Americans "of all faiths are in many ways the most religious people in America...
...As a researcher," Larson observes, "I don't see why public policy scholars shouldn't follow public health and medical researchers in taking religion seriously by systematically investigating the relationships, if any, between churchgoing or spirituality, on the one side, and social and economic outcomes, on the other...
...Our ministers and volunteers," he says, "do everything from latchkey ministries for youngsters in Harlem and the Bronx and elsewhere to prison ministries at Sing Sing and other prisons...
...Joined by Trulear, Rev...
...Eugene F. Rivers III, pastor of Boston's Azusa Christian Community, could not agree more...
...Of course, neither inspiring testimony nor mountains of empirical evidence will be enough to get some intellectual, media, financial, and political elites to acknowledge and support the black inner-city ministers who are doing such good works...
...Over the past decade, he has quietly revolutionized how major medical-school researchers in America and abroad view the evidence on religion in relation to physical and mental health outcomes...
...On the left, God is (still) dead, and among libertarians, churches are fine if they can do it all alone, but not if a penny of public support, direct or indirect, is required...
...They are willing to work for real with our most at-risk kids, including the potential super-predators, getting paid for maybe 20 hours but giving 80 hours and literally falling asleep in their clothes...
...The money and the help didn't reach" the inner city, and "with rare exceptions, it still doesn't...
...Some 82 percent of blacks are church members, and the same number say that religion is very important in their everyday lives (compared with 58 percent of all Americans...
...New York Theological Seminary president Rev...
...The real money and support, public and private, political and philanthropic, never reached the black churches or the streets, not even during the crack cocaine crisis...
...Larson and crimi-nologist Byron Johnson are now finding that Freeman was probably even more right than he knew...
...But there is a growing body of empirical evidence suggesting that, other things being equal, at-risk children, substance abusers, and even convicted criminals whose lives are influenced by religion are less likely to get into trouble with the law, remain addicted, or be repeat felons...
...Such intellectual hostility toward religion is a bit puzzling because, at least since the days of pioneering sociologist Emile Durkheim, modern social theorists have speculated that self- and other-destructive behavior varies inversely with the strength of religious ties...
...Go back to W. E. B. Du Bois...
...Freeman found that churchgoing substantially increased the chances that young black males would escape poverty, crime, drug abuse, and failure in school...
...But in today's Hollywood culture—in today's elite culture generally, I suppose—anything is less controversial or more acceptable than acknowledging the power of God and the good works of those who minister and solve social problems in His name...
...Likewise, a recent study of the hundreds of predominantly black churches affiliated with the Center for Urban Resources in Philadelphia reveals that almost all the churches serve both children and adults, including many who are not churchgoing congregants...
...In the movie about Clark, they kept in the bat but left out the Bible," Trulear says of the 1989 hit Lean on Me...
...Jeffrey Brown lead a 43-church community-development and youth-outreach ministry in Boston's impoverished Dorchester neighborhood...
...It is organizations like Woodson's and the hundreds of black pastors that are slowly but surely resurrecting the civil society of inner-city America, even as the foundations look elsewhere...
...Kevin Cosby of Louisville, Kentucky, and other black clergy from across the country, Rivers announced the establishment of a national "leadership foundation" earlier this year...
...George W. Bush has taken dramatic first steps to engage churches as agents of positive social change...
...Carrying out this mission among young black inner-city males could prove especially crucial because no at-risk youth population is more likely to suffer or inflict violent crime, father illegitimate children, mature without basic job skills, or end up in an early grave or a high-security prison...
...M. William Howard Jr...
...Trulear's youth ministry in Paterson, N.J., was the untold story behind Joe Clark, the bat-wielding black principal who stopped violence and brought a sense of community to the city's worst public high school in the mid 1980s...
...Consider the work produced by just one researcher, Dr...
...He puts it piquantly: "They cared more about saving the whales than they did about saving black kids...

Vol. 2 • June 1997 • No. 40


 
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