Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, February 14, 1995 TAG: 9502140095
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: William Raspberry
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The frustrating thing about this player (if he's playing for your team) is that he wastes his natural advantage. Guys my size can shoot 15-foot jumpers. The 7-footer who brings the ball down to his chest becomes, in effect, no taller than the 5-10 guard who may smack the ball right out of his hands. Coaches have a phrase for this sort of player. He is, they say, a big man ``playing small.''
I thought of this advantage-wasting giant a short while ago when I had occasion to speak to the annual council of the Episcopal Church in Mississippi. Why? Because it aptly describes the church in America: endlessly involved in things that other agencies might do just as well but neglecting the position it is uniquely qualified to hold - the moral center.
The point is not to criticize churches that run nursery schools or tutorial programs or housing developments, but to caution them that their more important work is the inculcation of moral values - not to talk them out of feeding the hungry or housing the homeless but to remind them of their unique standing to reclaim them.
I know this must seem a strange message from a not particularly religious writer in a secular newspaper, but I am increasingly struck by two phenomena. The first is the growing sense that America's major failings are not political or economic but moral. The second is the discovery that the most successful social programs are those that are driven - even if only tacitly - by moral or religious values.
Evidence of the first phenomenon is available at your neighborhood bookstore, where William Bennett's ``The Book of Virtues'' and James Q. Wilson's ``The Moral Sense'' have been joined by works ranging from Gertrude Himmelfarb's ``The De-Moralization of Society'' to Andrew Young's ``A Way Out of No Way'' to Arianna Huffington's ``The Fourth Instinct: The Call of the Soul.''
What these books have in common is the notion that the cure for what ails America must, in significant measure, be spiritual - or at the very least, moral.
The second phenomenon is so obvious that you wonder how we've missed it all these years: Show me a program that helps people to change their lives (as opposed to merely feeding their physical hunger), and I'll show you a program with a strong element of the spiritual.
Often, this spiritual side is obscured by ``technique'' or ``philosophy,'' as in cases ranging from Afrocentric classrooms to 12-step recovery programs. Sometimes it is so expressly religious that government funders have to walk away.
But - and here's the point I wanted to make to those Mississippi Episcopalians - the church doesn't have to walk away. Government worries, of necessity, about the constitutional issues involved in the public funding of spiritual-based programs. But the Constitution anticipates that the church will be involved in such programs.
And still the church, like a 7-foot-tall basketball player shooting jump shots, persists in playing away from its strength - its potential for spiritual regeneration.
Marvin Olasky, the University of Texas journalism professor, says he recently spent a few nights as a ``homeless'' person on Washington streets. Every shelter he visited plied him with as many sandwiches and soft drinks as he wanted, he told me. But nobody - even at a church-run shelter - asked him the first question about how he became homeless or what he thought might help him toward independent living.
Doesn't the neglect of the spiritual at least help explain the persistence not just of homelessness but also teen pregnancy, substance abuse, school failure and the whole range of problems that we tend to see as stemming primarily from bad economics or racism? Shouldn't organized religion take the lead in doing what the rest of us fear to try?
``We have been looking for cures in all the wrong places," says Robert L. Woodson Sr., head of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise (and a layman). "We don't have a crisis in recreation, or social services, or consumer capacity. Certainly our children need these things, and need jobs too. But these thing have no redemptive quality, and what our young people need above all is to be redeemed.''
- Washington Post Writers Group
by CNB