It's part travelogue, part memoir, part politics, part narrative. Marvin Olasky's Compassionate Conservatism: What It Is, What It Does and How It Can Transform America, is an engaging account of Olasky's road trip with son Daniel, 14, in the summer of 1999. The two set out in search of living examples of compassionate conservatism. Olasky chose Dallas, Houston, Indianapolis, D.C., Philadelphia, Minneapolis and St. Louis to observe anti-poverty programs. Some depended on government funding, some did not.
Best known perhaps as editor of World magazine and journalism prof at University of Texas, Olasky has also been advisor to George W. Bush since the mid-1990s. He has frequently been credited with coining the phrase “compassionate conservatism,” but he says his research indicates Vernon Jordan first used the phrase in 1981 in a verbal attack on the Reagan Administration for not showing compassion.
More recently, says Olasky, media elite have viewed compassionate conservatism as “word candy for a political campaign that seeks not to offend.” But he contends that assumption is far off base. He says a century ago, “before government ever became involved, thousands of local faith-based charitable agencies and churches around the country waged a war on poverty much more successful than our own.”
In a brief history, he traces the public transformation of the definition of compassion from the classic dictionary meaning of “suffering with” someone to the politically correct “voting for a welfare spending bill.” Olasky ascribes seven adjectives to compassionate conservatism: assertive, basic, challenging, diverse, effective, faith-based and gradual.
The Olaskys hit the road in chapter 2. First stop, Dallas, Texas, where they visit with Calvin and Johnnie Mae Carter, a retired couple who set up a community center in a former crack house in their rundown neighborhood. They teach GED classes and tutor young men caught in the drug industry.
“Unpaid and uninstructed,” writes Olasky, “the Carters had developed a welfare program that works — a local, unsupervised, tailored effort by highly dedicated people.”
Also in Dallas, Rev. Stephan Broden runs the Fair Park Friendship Center, a summer school and evangelism program for forty elementary students. Broden says, “There's no way we could take [federal] money …. We might as well shut down.” He's afraid of the strings that would be attached.
Kathy Dudley spent 15 years helping revitalize a poor West Dallas neighborhood and organized the Dallas Leadership Foundation to carry the program to other Dallas neighborhoods. Like Broden, Dudley has been afraid of government money. She says the feds “will support particular services, but government has to take the lead and it wants a monopoly on the overall plan.”
Inspiring stories such as those in Dallas reveal how wide has grown the chasm between government and struggling faith-based social programs. However, in Indianapolis, Olasky found a striking demonstration of the premise he believes could be duplicated if government will allow faith-based groups using tried and true strategies to work to transform their neighborhoods and their cities. He described Indianapolis as a city that demonstrates how government should work.
Mayor Steve Goldsmith (now retired) was the visionary and motivating force behind the Front Porch Alliance, a civic group that during the 1990s worked with faith-based and other groups to develop 800 partnerships for neighborhood action. Under Goldsmith's watch, the city saved millions of dollars and saw neighborhoods transformed and citizens served through this alliance.
The middle chapters of the book focus on Olasky and Daniel's visits in the various cities, and their impressions of the programs they observed, the people they met. They put many of the committed program personnel in the hero column. They saw sacrifice pure and selfless — and sometimes sustained over long periods of time. They met people who give flesh and bone and names to the viability of faith-based social programs funded by tax dollars.
Olasky concludes the book with “Back Home: Ten Lessons We Learned.” Among the lessons was the need for social capital, i.e., values, churches, volunteer organizations. Another is that we need discerning journalists, fair-minded and thorough in their reporting. A third is that we need presidential leadership.
At the beginning of his book, Olasky had written, “Only political courage will enable compassionate conservatism to carry the day and transform America.” He still has hope. The heroes he writes about are reason enough to give us all hope.
(This article courtesy of Agape Press).
