March 7, 2004

The Rev. Eugene Rivers, founder of the Boston-based National Ten-Point Leadership Foundation, brought his faith-based anti-crime crusade to Richmond this week.

More than 750 people, about a third of them white, crowded into Fourth Baptist Church in the heart of Church Hill March 4 to hear the fiery Church of God in Christ preacher urge them to help launch a new civil rights movement, one based on an alliance between Christian churches and the police.

Rev. Rivers has gained a national reputation for his decades of work among inner-city youth. The ministerial-police coalition he built in Boston is credited by some with sharply reducing homicides in that city. Now he is nationally promoting his "ten-points" model, which includes churches "adopting" the neighborhoods where they are located, faith-based mentoring as a substitute for juvenile incarceration and clergy and police officers teaming up to outreach to at-risk youth.

Rev. Rivers new movement is already taking shape in here in the capitol city. Richmond Police Major Daniel A. Goodall, himself a Baptist minister, told the crowd at Fourth Baptist that a series of workshops for members of the clergy would be held the next day at the church. Eight more workshop sessions would follow, he said, funded by the Richmond Police Department, which has already been developing a clergy-based anti-crime network.

Others who spoke briefly before Rev. Rivers took the pulpit included Police Chief Andre Parker, Vice Mayor Delores McQuinn, City Manager Calvin Jamison, Baptist General Convention of Virginia President Patricia Gould-Champ and Richmond Hills Rev. Michael A. Sanders.

Much of what Rev. Rivers proposed sounded positive although he made it clear there would be no mercy for those youths who refused the benefits of his outreach efforts. "If they dont respond to the carrot, theyre going to get the stick," he promised.

What was strange about Rev. Rivers talk was the amount of time the Harvard-educated minister spent on criticizing the traditional civil rights movement.

"We are now in the post-civil rights epoch," Rev. Rivers thundered. "The civil rights movement is over!"

In place of mass political struggle, Rev. Rivers called for "a new movement of the spirit that moves beyond the race card, that moves beyond the blame game." The day is over, he said, "when our community can blame another man for our situation."

According to Rev. Rivers, the problems plaguing low-income Black communities today particularly juvenile violence are not due to racism, whether personal or institutional. The reality of children killing children, he said, is instead the result of absentee fathers, churches that pray on Sunday but ignore the problems around them on Monday, and the "failure" of liberal civil rights leaders.

Of course, there is more than a grain of truth in all those charges. And, to be sure, personal responsibility is indispensable if social problems like neglected children, substance abuse and senseless street violence are to solved.

But it wasnt absentee fathers who shut down the Richmond factories that used to provide entry-level jobs for young people. Those decisions were made by well-paid CEOs concerned only about profits.

And civil rights leaders, past and present, arent responsible for the fact that more than one million Black men many of them fathers now live behind bars. That has more to do with racially discriminatory drug law (longer sentences for crack cocaine, shorter sentences for the same amount of powder cocaine), selective policing (drug raids in the East End for crack, but not in the West End for powder), and the well-documented institutional racism of the criminal justice system.

Its true that churches can and should do more to serve the poor. But churches alone cant take the place of the government in creating massive numbers of public-sector jobs or pushing private businesses to invest in the inner city.

Rev. Rivers is really preaching two sermons at the same time. One is a call for churches to become more involved in serving the poor on a day-to-day basis. Thats good, as far as it goes.

But the other sermon is much more political: Its a call to the community to stop demanding that the government also serve the poor and the working poor and the middle class.

This is a dangerous message. Why? Simply because it is only the government that has the massive resources necessary to address the deep-seated problems of poverty, unemployment, the shortage of low-income housing and inadequately funded education, recreation, social work, etc.

While Rev. Rivers very adeptly described the many ways that some churches avoid the nitty-gritty work of dealing with harsh, inner-city realities, he was silent on the real reasons why much of the Black community is confronted with critical, poverty-driven social problems.

The most fundamental reasons boil down to these three: Vietnam, drugs and the changing economy.

During the Vietnam War, hundreds of thousands of young men were drafted, injured, killed, or came back to their communities with multiple social problems. The war spurred the use of drugs, both because drugs were plentiful in Vietnam and because heroin was heavily pushed on the streets back home. In the years following the war, up to one third of all state and federal prisoners as well as homeless men were Vietnam-era veterans. More Vietnam-era veterans died from suicide after the war than were killed during it.

This was the generation that fathered the young men that today make up the majority of homeless men and prisoners.

And all this was happening at the same time that the United States was changing from a manufacturing-based economy to one based on service industries. Gone were the good, high-paying, unionized blue-collar jobs. Working for U.S. Steel was replaced by flipping burgers at McDonalds.

While these developments hit all sections of the population, they fell especially hard on the Black community. Percentage-wise, African-Americans served in Vietnam in higher numbers than whites. Hard drugs flooded the Black community. And when the manufacturing jobs began to dry up, it was "last hired, first fired."

The massive social problems we face today are based in economic changes and government policy. The solutions also must address the economy and government policy. Churches can help, but they cant replace the government.

Of course, Rev. Rivers philosophy does dovetail nicely with the Bush administrations push for "faith-based initiatives" as a substitute for government programs. In fact, it more than dovetails it it promotes it.

On Feb. 19 and 20, Rev. Rivers Leadership Foundation hosted a national conference in Boston to promote his vision of a "new civil rights movement". One of the three featured speakers was none other than James Towey, the director of the White House Office of Faith-based and Community Initiatives.

Mr. Towey, of course, has access to resources, and its likely that some of this money will soon be flowing into Richmond. Some churches will benefit. Others wont.

Interestingly, the program at Fourth Baptist included Baptist, Presbyterian and C.O.G.I.C. speakers but no Muslims, Catholics or Jews. It will be interesting to see if the government funding for this new Richmond initiative flows to all denominations and faiths both liberal and conservative or just to a favored few.

It also will be interesting to see if churches that become dependant on government funding for their social programs will feel inclined to criticize the government including the police on critical social issues.

There is no argument about the fact that Richmond part of Richmond is in a state of emergency.

Rev. Rivers Richmond meeting took place in the predominantly Black 23223 zip code, which includes more than a fifth of the citys population. According to the 2000 U.S. Census, one third of all adults in this area 25 years of age and over havent finished high school. Nine percent of the work force is unemployed. Of the more than 5,000 single mothers, one in four lives on less than $10,000 a year, while more than a third live on less than $15,000.

Yes, religious communities of all faiths should be doing more to address the problems of poverty and violence. They can help with literacy programs, mentoring, recreation and more.

But they cant be a substitute for the massive government programs that are needed to address the systemic problems of unemployment, inadequate housing, school drop-outs, poor nutrition, lead poisoning, asthma, HIV/AIDS, child abuse, clinical depression and more.

Blaming all the problems on the community itself and declaring an end to the need for political struggle does a severe disservice to the very people Rev. Rivers says he is trying to help.

Rev. Rivers should be commended for his enthusiasm and energy. But his call to counterpose a new "spiritual" movement to the ongoing and necessary movement for civil rights a movement that has always been spiritual should be received with more than a healthy degree of skepticism.