Faith-based does not mean evangelistic or impartial. But neither does none-faith-based or secular mean that agencies are impartial nor coming with an agenda they want to impose.

This is why whatever “the left” is, I’m likely to gravitate that direction than wherever you’re at.

Maybe the research in quantifiable data, like the amount of private vs. institutional dollars, the aid worker themselves and motivation for them to be there and hopefully the actual study will include another important issue, those that are on the ground now, have been and will continue far after those academics continue to write non-quantifiable junk articles expressing personal viewpoints.

Articles of this calabre are the reason the current American administration is failing and why the policies of the left are in peril.

To address the authors summation:

1. If the constitution forbids US support, so be it. Whaddaya gonna do?

Could you please state the section or reference in the constitution that supports this?

2. Otherwise, set the rules and let the faith based compete. They are here to stay; work with them rather than against them.

Or better yet, get your own funding. Apply for the grants and get those boots of yours dirty. There are a whole lot of out of work people at Air America. They would love to have a job writing your grants. Next comes the actual hands on the ground workers, good luck manning that from the pool on the left.

3. If there are unsavory practices, let the funding spigots be closed. Incentives matter.

I believe that would be a very effective tool to demonstrate, who is suppling aid and who is willing to go to the extremely difficult places with only one motivation, to show those that are hurting, compassion. Your not going to get the Al Frankin, Barack Obama types dirty in the field.

One such principle is that the only salient principle is efficiency based on a utilitarian ethic or based on a human rights ethic. The constant efforts to appear objective and sweep under the rug any appearance of subjective, value-laden ethics in our efforts makes us less effective. We should celebrate our principles and value them – and yes, put them up for scrutiny – rather than be ashamed of being “guilty” for considering something more than we economists put in our models.

While there are legitimate discussions about how to most effectively prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS, the FBO crowd has been far more interested in prevention than the non-FBO crowd, which has focused more on cure [please note the key word more - I'm not claiming 'at all' on either side].

Although an org like World Vision may try to separate their secular activities from their evangelical activities, this distinction is largely meaningless. I personally know WV workers who work in majority Muslim areas who do their agriculture/education projects one day, then go back to the same villages “on their free time” to lead bible study groups for the minority Christians. How many people in those villages understand or care whether those individuals are on the WV clock or not. From their perspective, it’s all just “the Christians”.

I think it’s at least more honest to be a straight-up missionary that to play legal games of dividing your activities between your secular self and your devout self. A lot of missionaries do great work, and in my experience they’re highly respected by even those local people who don’t share their faith because (unlike most development workers) they come for the long haul, they learn local languages, and they build relationships. But if these people and their churches want credit for the good work they do as Christians, they should be funded as Christians. That is to say, they should be funded privately!

Nevertheless, can’t we agree that within rationality as a system of thought, ‘things’ are arranged hierarchically? For something to be rational, something else must be irrational. Now, I’m no post-modernist, so I won’t start arguing that your rejection of avoiding stepping on the cracks as a fully rational act is merely because you’re caught up in modernist discourse. But to bring it a tad closer to the point here, how about means to ‘development’? It doesn’t take long to see that different people and institutions hold different things to be rational which are often conflicting.

Take IMF versus Action Aid policies. Are they both rational without considering towards an end? Secondly, on what grounds do you determine the rationality of that (/these) end(s)?

My point is that whether a group does its bedtime reading in the company of St. Paul, Milton Friedman or Antonio Gramsci cannot be a legitimate deciding factor in government spending. What matters are their actual policies, actions and results and how these correspond to government policies.

I think its equally plausible that some of the people objecting to the funding of Christian NGOs would not be objecting so strongly if the orgs in question were Buddhist, Taoist or Zoroastrian.

1) In 2007(?), WHO ran a study (titled “Appreciating Assets”) of faith-based organizations participation in providing healthcare in Sub-Saharan Africa with specific focus on Zambia and Lesotho. Quoting:
“The study found that FBOs play a much greater role in disease prevention, care and treatment than previously thought in sub-Saharan Africa. The African Religious Health Assets Program (ARHAP) report estimates that between 30% and 70% of healthcare services in Africa are owned by faith-based organizations.”

Link to the Executive Summary: http://www.who.int/hiv/mediacentre/executivesummaryARHAP.pdf

So, does anyone think it’s a good choice to withdraw financial support for 30% to 70% of healthcare services in SSA?

2) There is one paper that I know of that attempted to do some measurement of FBO health orgs (in Uganda no less) from Sept. 2005. The econometrics used are well beyond my ability to assess, and the conclusions may have been thoroughly debunked already, but if you haven’t seen it, it’s called Working for God by Reinikka and Svensson. Here’s the SSRN link: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=508042

Rationality does not require any end, though it is a system of thought. Rational thought simply requires that all ideas are open and subject to scrutiny. For example, if I had a habit of avoiding walking on the cracks in the pavement, a rational analysis of it would look at whether it makes any practical difference to me whether or not I do; the answer would be not; the only reason I would avoid doing so is because I have convinced myself I should avoid doing so. Hence, it’s an irrational belief.

I don’t have to have any end to achieve to subject that idea to rational analysis.

I would however agree that much project cycle work is made to look rational in hindsight – I’d have a big problem with these projects too.

On your second point about whether the programmes are any less rational than other projects – again, not necessarily. My problem is with the underlying motivation, which being religious, is not rational. If the programmes do not depend on this in some way, they should not be FBOs, but run on the basis of secular-rational argument.

And as a side-thought, I would say that a lot of project-cycle-thinking is really made to be rational in hindsight.

Any ‘development’ project, -programme, -activity …. will include meddling with identities. On rare occasion even in the way it was intended.

In that respect, FBOs have their advantage in being explicit about motivation, which makes it that more easy to assess based on government/public motives.

Not to badger your comments, but the idea that religious beliefs are not the “result of debate” is extremely ahistorical. The Reformation, the schism between the Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches, the emergence of Calvinism, just to confine ourselves to Christianity not to mention the uncountable schisms within other religions, all occurred because of profound, and I would judge extremely rationale, debates over the nature of humanity.
My point is not to defend religion per say but simply to say that such ideologies are not practically, especially when it comes to implementing development projects, more handicapped in the “rationale” department than any other organization.

“Religious ideals are not rational: therefore should not be [publicly] funded.”
Without descending into philosophical pedantry, what exactly is “rationale”, or more to the point irrational, in a development context? I don’t know of any publicly funded development initiatives implemented by religious organizations that cannot be defended on rational grounds. Care to give an example?
The privileging of religious ideology is really a pretty outdated practice.

If there was an uncompromising atheist (with the former word a crucial one here) who talks about universal human rights and brooks no argument because he believes in them as unbreakable truths, I’d have a problem with that, a big one.

The difference would be that the the idea can still be debated, even if the individual won’t let it be -because it’s the product of rational argument, not based on any text invested with greater importance. The Declaration on Human Rights is only important insofar as it embodies an agreement made between actors arguing about what constitutes human rights that should be upheld. Any religious text is given importance because it is a religious text, not because the content has been debated and rationalised before it was entered into the text.

My problem is most certainly not with religious people. Many I’ve worked with have been better aid workers or better people because their beliefs have given them something that helps them get through hard times or that invests their work with more meaning. I have a great problem with an institution that is set up to uphold values that aren’t open for debate or are not the result of debate.