Interesting research (I of II): Evangelical charities.

So, this past Wednesday I went up to the north side of the city to have dinner with a friend of mine who had done a one-year social science masters last year and is getting ready to apply for ph.d. programs in sociology. She's one of the people I depend on for social drinking -- when I ran into her on the Amtrak train I took to get home this summer, she was all ready to start buying rounds, though I declined since I was sick from all the coffee I had been drinking that day -- and though we ended up just doing dinner and then going to a nearby Swedish bar -- the glass square-window things in the entryway were dyed yellow and blue and arranged like the Swedish flag -- we ended up having a good time anyways, since though we had talked about her research interests before, we had never really sat down and talked about them in-depth.

In short, she grew up in a mildly evangelical household, and got out of it in high school and college, and was in the Peace Corps for a while, and now she's just fascinated in contemporary evangelical culture. Her research, in short, deals with the fact that recent surveys of American congregations show that more money and time are spent on arts than on politics or social services, even among evangelical congregations, which runs counter to popular perceptions, BUT -- and this is her contention -- no one has done qualitative work to go in to see about what happens in churches forms people's values and how they relate to politics and social services, in order to fill out the picture.

For her masters thesis, she went into Rick Warren's Saddleback Church, arguably the most famous megachurch in America (Rick Warren wrote the best-selling "The Purpose-Driven Life"). This is because Rick Warren is the face of evangelical relief-efforts in Africa (she says he's on Larry King about this at least 3 times a year), and the church has a big ministry that sends a ton of people over to Africa to do relief work and through that sinks a shitload of money into the dark continent.

These were her prelim observations:

1) Though using development buzzwords, the church really doesn't know development and has really wasteful, inefficient programs (she knows development decently from being in the Peace Corps and said their programs would look good to people not in the field). Though nominally encouraging full-time missionaries (which ups efficiency a lot), they more often send people for a week or two stints to volunteer and build shit.

2) Though Rick Warren has appeared on Larry King with the president of Rwanda and the church is sinking a shitload of money in the region, no one sees their activities as political, and, furthermore, it has not changed voting behavior, or even political behavior (no one writes letters to congressman about foreign aid or whatnot).

These were her explanations:

1) One of the reason for inefficiency is that poverty was described as a "spiritual problem" and the idea was that only a church could combat it, hence their not consulting more experienced NGOs for ideas and whatnot.

2) Another of the reasons for the inefficiency is that the go-to-Africa-for-a-week-or-two voluteers expressed in language reminiscent of old missionary langauge that they felt "called" to the work, and this calling not only put the work above politics -- she said they often used the word "above politics" over and over -- but also above any sort of real scrutiny.