"Charitable Choice" and the Feasibility of Faith-Based Welfare Reform in Mississippi

In the wake of welfare reform, many states-including Mississippi-have considered utilizing religious congregations as a provider of services to the needy. The possibility of utilizing religious congregations to provide social services previously borne by the state stems from the "charitable choice" portion of the 1996 welfare reform law. This study examines the feasibility of implementing charitable choice initiatives through Mississippi religious congregations with state block grant monies. Our investigation is guided by the following questions: (1) What types of relief do faith communities currently provide, and how is such aid provided? Specifically, how do congregational standards and social hierarchies (e.g., race, social class, perceptions of the poor, congregational authority structures) currently affect aid provision? (2) How are public assistance programs and, more recently, welfare reform initiatives viewed by local religious leaders? (3) Finally, to what degree are local religious leaders willing to entertain participating in charitable choice initiatives (i.e., church-state aid-provision partnerships) in the wake of welfare reform? To address this set of interrelated questions, our full study brings an array of both quantitative and qualitative data sources to bear on this important issue: in-depth interview, ethnographic data, and primary survey data drawn from local congregations in our sample, complemented by analyses of select contextual-level Census and administrative data. This report focuses most pointedly on findings distilled from over six-hundred pages of in-depth interview transcripts culled from local religious leaders representing a diverse sample of twenty-nine congregations in Mississippi's Golden Triangle Region. Several key findings emerge from our study. First, pastors typically understand religiously-based aid as a holistic form of relief that, ideally, addresses both material and non-material needs. We describe this multi-dimensional understanding of aid, while detailing the contours, motivations, and outcomes associated with four distinct aid-provision strategies that many religious communities employ as they attempt to minister to disadvantaged populations and other individuals. These aid-provision strategies include: (1) intensive and sustained interpersonal engagement with the poor; (2) intermittent direct relief to the needy; (3) congregational philanthropy and referrals to parachurch relief agencies; and (4) distant missions of relief-provision to disadvantaged populations elsewhere in the U.S. or abroad. Many churches utilize several of these aid-provision strategies simultaneously. Nevertheless, congregational dynamics influence the types of relief strategies favored by particular religious communities. Second, pastors and religious leaders in this study are generally critical of public assistance programs that have previously been administered by the government. At the same time, however, these religious leaders articulate various misgivings about recent welfare reform legislation. Finally, comparative case studies of select congregations underscore the ways in which pastoral appraisals of charitable choice initiatives are connected to the particular types of organizational dynamics that mark different types of religious communities. This study illuminates the potential advantages and pitfalls of implementing effective faith-based welfare reform programs as we enter the next millennium, and evaluates these prospects in light of the distinctive facets of rural Southern culture and Mississippi religious institutions.