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The Role of the African-American Church in Inner-City Development
Deep social problems continue to plague inner-city America. Fashioning a response to the scourge of drugs, gangs, violent crime, unemployment, AIDS, failed schools, fatherless families, and early unwed pregnancy is among the most serious domestic policy challenges confronting the nation today. Some attribute these problems solely to structural causes. But a key aspect of the problems is the patterns of behavior that have emerged among young men and women in inner-city communities that limit their ability to seize existing opportunity.
While social analysts agree that these behaviors must change if progress is to occur, they disagree fundamentally about how to accomplish such change. For some, the intensification of pathological behaviors among the urban poor is due to the lack of economic opportunities; for others, it is the result of disincentives created by various welfare programs. Though sharply different in their policy implications, these two positions have something important in common. Each assumes that economic factors ultimately drive the behavioral problems, even behaviors involving sexuality, marriage, childbearing, and parenting, which reflect people's basic understanding of what gives meaning to their lives.
A different view of these matters takes off from the biblical injunction, "man must not live by bread alone." From this perspective, the values, attitudes, and beliefs that govern a person's behaviors are at least partially autonomous, leaving open the prospect that communal agencies of moral and cultural development might change the way individuals conduct their lives. Since religious institutions are primary sources of legitimate moral teaching in our society, this point of view suggests that significant positive change may be possible if innercity churches can reach individuals, engage them in the activities of the church, and thereby help transform their lives.
This suggestion raises interesting issues of theory, of evidence, and of ethics for students of social change. Setting aside appeals to divine intervention, the question arises as to what are the characteristics of religious institutions that, in principle, might make them effective instruments of behavior modification and that are not present in secular settings. Also, what evidence supports the claim that the scope of church involvement in the inner city, and its impact on the behavior of churchgoers, is large enough to potentially...