Issues Tearing Our Nation's Fabric The Center for Reclaiming America

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Inner-City Renewal
Chapter Thirteen

The plight of the urban centers and inner-city residential complexes of America’s largest cities has become one of the most hotly debated topics of the past three decades. No one disagrees on the problem: high concentrations of poor and poorly educated minority familiesin sub-standard housing—many on welfare or out of work—in an environment rife with crime, dysfunctional families, and domestic violence. The main source of conflict for those who propose to make changes is how best to improve the physical conditions in those areas and how to motivate the residents themselves to action.

Blight, high crime, business deterioration, and white flight have combined to create urban landscapes that look more like war zones than busy metropolitan centers. Office towers that throb with life from 9 to 5 are depopulated and silent by dusk. Because of the potential for crime and vandalism, most businesses have moved out, and no new businesses are coming in. Government programs to stimulate the economy in the inner cities have failed, and stop-gap measures, such as increasing the minimum wage, generally have the opposite effect: rather than pay poorly qualified workers higher wages, they hire better qualified workers, students, or temporary help.

Justifiably, the welfare connection takes most of the blame for these conditions. However, the people who work with the inner-city poor are attempting to get the message across that the greatest problem is not welfare, economics, or urban renewal, but the breakdown of morality and the historical foundations of family unity. Today, hundreds of Christian ministries have developed programs to reach out to the men, women, and children who huddle in the shadows of our cities and towns. Unfortunately, the tendency for government to interfere with faith-based programs and other citizen initiatives often makes it difficult for people who know best how to help, to do the things they need to do.

Stuart Butler, director of economic policy studies for the Heritage Foundation, has analyzed the two leading approaches to inner-city renewal. The first, the plan proposed by the White House, places government and its hired advisers at the center with programs to force local businesses and local governments to take up the slack. It is an example of the classic top-down, tax-funded proposal micro-managed from Washington that helped create the crisis in the first place.

The Clinton plan, promoted as "Enterprise Zones," says that the best way to help depressed neighborhoods is to steer more government programs into the cities. The Republican alternative proposes tax relief for communities and businesses, along with a reduction in bureaucratic regulations and red tape. It offers financial encouragement to intact families, workfare programs, home ownership incentives, and an innovative program of school reform and school choice to give inner-city kids a better set of options. But the plan doesn’t stop there.

The Heart of the Problem

Taking the opposite tack from the policies put forward by the sociologists and social scientists of the past thirty years, the most exciting new plans address the core issues of character, integrity, and moral values. A central tenet of the Saving Our Children bill, as it was introduced in mid-1996, was the view that moral renewal in the inner-city is even more important than financial recovery. Crime, drug abuse, promiscuity, chronic unemployment, and family disintegration are moral problems first and only subsequently become social and economic problems.

Background studies accompanying the Saving Our Children bill documented the power of religion in helping poor families to help themselves. A study by Richard Freeman of Harvard University found that in predominantly black inner-city neighborhoods, boys who attend church regularly are 50 percent less likely to engage in crime than boys who do not attend church; they are 54 percent less likely to experiment with drugs and 47 percent less likely to drop out of school.

Further, various studies showed that boys and girls who attend church regularly are two-thirds less likely to engage in sexual activity in their teens. Inner-city women who attend church regularly are 50 percent less likely to become pregnant out of wedlock. Also, children who attend religious schools are two-thirds (67 percent) less likely to drop out of school than children in public schools.

Even the most entrenched defenders of a so-called "separation of church and state" have been silenced by such a volume of evidence showing the beneficial effects of faith on behavior. No doubt the ACLU and other free-speech libertarians will find plenty of reasons to disagree with these proposals. The fact remains, though, that the religious connection is good for the people, good for the community, good for business, and good for the nation.

The Welfare Connection

Welfare has done more harm than good and has proven to be much more expensive than anyone could have imagined when President Lyndon Johnson launched the "Great Society" thirty years ago. It has had the perverse and crippling consequences of illegitimacy, dependency, voluntary joblessness, family destruction, welfare fraud, and crime. Over the past 32 years government has spent more than $5 trillion fighting poverty, and the result has been multi-generational dependency, an 80 percent illegitimacy rate in the nation’s largest cities, and a level of violence unprecedented in modern times. The costs to society of such pernicious, long-term, pathological indoctrination is incalculable.

In 1993 alone, Americans suffered 43 million criminal victimizations, including 10 million violent crimes, a fourth of them murders, rapes, assaults, armed robberies, and fatal assaults. The National Institute of Justice estimates the hard cost of these crimes, through loss, medical costs, police administration and related expenses in excess of $400 billion per year. But the human cost is beyond measure.

How will we ever calculate the great loss to society of the millions of lives lost, broken, or damaged beyond repair by the institutionalized assault on the Christian faith condoned by the state? Writing in the August 1996 issue of First Things, Prof. John DiIulio says:

Given the fact that there will be about thirty-five million males age seventeen or under in the population by the year 2010—roughly five million more than there were in 1990, and a larger fraction of boys than ever before growing up as the abused and neglected sons of fatherless, godless, and jobless homes and neighborhoods—the worst is most definitely yet to come.

Time is running out on the welfare option, he says. But the good news is that we still have choices.

Especially with respect to the acute dilemma of black youth crime, we must choose both incarceration and salvation: incarceration, to restrain the deviant, delinquent, and criminal element that is already upon us from inflicting further harm against life, liberty, and property; salvation via faith-based, church-centered approaches, to save young souls and lives before it is too late.

The Christian Alternative

In his best-selling book, The Tragedy of American Compassion, Dr. Marvin Olasky provides documentary evidence for the failure of the welfare state, but suggests that the hope for future generations is that the utter collapse of the socialist ideology has brought renewed attention and vigor to the faith-based charities and church-centered programs designed to build up the broken and abused in our midst.

Sen. Dan Coats of Indiana and Sen. John Ashcroft of Missouri, along with Rep. J. C. Watts of Oklahoma, Rep. Jim Talent of Mississippi, and Rep. John Kasich of Ohio are leaders of a group in Congress who call themselves the Renewal Alliance. "It’s real clear," Congressman Talent told the Washington Post, "that what the liberals have done in cities not only hasn’t worked but has, in many cases, been destructive."

While acknowledging there are some things government can do well, the members of the Renewal Alliance, with broad backing from many segments of the population, are convinced there are "outposts" of genuine healing within the local communities that can do a better job with issues such as out-of-wedlock pregnancy, joblessness, youth crime, drug abuse, and school drop-outs. The real failure of the last thirty years is that government insisted on expensive and impersonal programs to deal with problems that community organizations and faith-based charities could have handled better in the first place.

"Look at what’s happening in the streets of our cities," Dr. Alan Keyes declared in 1995 at a Republican presidential candidates forum in New Hampshire:

Look at what’s happening in our families today. Do you think that the decline of marriage and the moral dissolution of the family is a money problem, or do you think it’s a problem that comes from putting the self first, from deciding that there are no obligations that have to be respected, and at the end of the day, freedom is just another kind of empty licentiousness?

We know better, and our Founders knew better, and it’s time we get back to the truth. They did not tell us that freedom would be an easy road. They offered us a true vision of the future of America. It was not a vision of licentious freedom and stupid self-indulgence. It was a vision of freedom based upon the fear of God and respect for law.

What You Can Do

When Lessie Handy first moved to Milwaukee she was disappointed to find so few prospective employees for her company with employable secretarial skills. She prayed that God would send someone to help, but before long it was clear that God wanted her to be that someone. She set up a program to train inner-city women and teach them basic office skills. In the process, she helped 200 of them find good jobs, and fully 150 of those were able to break free of the welfare trap.

In 1970, Wayne Gordon felt the Lord had called him to work with black people in the inner-city. Growing up in Iowa, he’d never seen an inner-city, and very few black people, for that matter. But he obeyed the call, completed his seminary training—and moved to Chicago’s Lawndale community to begin a ministry.

Gordon’s book, Real Hope in Chicago, tells what happened, how God transformed his own heart and life, and how he was able to help bring the love of God to many people in that city who might have ended up as statistics except for that loving intervention. Over the last twenty years he has established a dynamic church, helped renovate 100 area apartments, helped produce 50 college graduates, and opened a neighborhood business that employs 25 people.

These are two people who decided they could help, and did! For those who really care about the future of America, there are hundreds of ways to get involved. Check out the ministries listed in this book and see if you can find a place; examine the organizations in the books listed below, or check with your local church about places where you can help. Every life is a treasure in God’s eyes, and each of us is called to share His love with those in need.

You can contact this organization:

National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise
1424 16th St., N.W., Suite 300
Washington, D.C. 20036
(202) 518-6500

For further reading:

On the World Wide Web:

IUGM: http://www.iugm.org/links/index.html

Saving Our Children: http://www.house.gov/talent/crp/crpress01.html

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Copyright 1997, Coral Ridge Ministries. All rights reserved.