http://www.georgewbushcenter.com/site/c.rvI2IaNVJyE/b.5572881/k.F1FA/Institute.htmGuided by the principles of freedom, opportunity, responsibility and compassion, the George W. Bush Institute is committed to serious, independent research aimed at generating practical solutions to important public policy problems. The Institute will attract world-class scholars and provide an important voice in policy discussion and development. It will draw upon the resources of Southern Methodist University, the wealth of research material catalogued in the archives, and the unique ability of a former President and First Lady to convene, spotlight and inspire. Often working with partners from non-profit private institutions, businesses and government agencies, the Institute will transform ideas into action.
http://georgewbushinstitute.com/Action Items: The Bush Institute Blog
Surprise: Nicholas Kristof defends faith-based aid for Africa
A very surprised Nick Kristof, writing as a liberal to liberals, offers a welcome corrective to an oversimplified view of Evangelical and other faith-based aid activity in Africa:
“For most of the last century, save-the-worlders were primarily Democrats and liberals. In contrast, many Republicans and religious conservatives denounced government aid programs, with Senator Jesse Helms calling them ‘money down a rat hole.’
Over the last decade, however, that divide has dissolved, in ways that many Americans haven’t noticed or appreciated. Evangelicals have become the new internationalists, pushing successfully for new American programs against AIDS and malaria, and doing superb work on issues from human trafficking in India to mass rape in Congo.”
Of course, Kristof’s chronology is oversimplified in a way that flatters liberals. Dissenting Christians - Evangelicals in particular – were the first bleeding-heart do-gooders, liberals in the modern sense avant la lettre, not merely in the age of Wilberforce but continuing through the entire nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. Only the American victory in WWII brought the U.S. government, and the New Deal liberals who dominated it, into the foreign aid arena in a massive way, crowding out the unprepossessing Evangelical, Methodist and Presbyterian missionaries who had labored so hard in Africa, the Middle East and Asia, for the most part not interested in making converts but in teaching children and healing the sick.
“Some liberals are pushing to end the longtime practice (it’s a myth that this started with President George W. Bush) of channeling American aid through faith-based organizations. That change would be a catastrophe. In Haiti, more than half of food distributions go through religious groups like World Vision that have indispensable networks on the ground. We mustn’t make Haitians the casualties in our cultural wars.”
There’s more of Kristof’s peculiar mixture of wisdom, confusion and condescension in the accompanying blog entry:
“There’s a tendency for liberals to devote lots of ink to decrying conservative Christians, because of their positions on social issues. I disagree strongly with typical evangelical positions on gay marriage, abortion, abstinence only education — but I also think that liberals don’t appreciate the impact of the arrival of evangelicals into humanitarian space or give sufficient credit for that change. The United States is doing far more for Africa today than a decade ago largely because evangelicals became a strong constituency for the Pepfar AIDS program and the PMI malaria program. Liberals were always in favor of such ventures, and what changed was that conservatives pushed for them as well — and of course the Bush White House listened to them in a way it did not listen to liberals. And don’t minimize those programs: Pepfar and PMI are saving millions of African lives.”
Both column and blog are well worth reading, not just for their information, but as an example of a secular conversion experience – well worth celebrating – that Kristof can appreciate and defend to his readers the work of faith-based organizations despite what he believes to be their moral shortcomings.
–Sam Schulman
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