Measuring
the Mountaintop
Research at the Divid between Church and State
Byron Johnson went up to “God’s Mountain” over
the summer. He didn’t see a burning bush there, but
he did observe “an awful lot of hugging going on” amid
a multitude of over 2,000 who sang hymns and listened to
sermons. The occasion was a reunion of former drug abusers
and their families at the Teen Challenge residential treatment
center in Rehrersburg, PA—called “the mountain” by
those who kicked their habit with the help of a program grounded
in bible study and Christian faith.
Johnson, a criminologist and director of the Center for
Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society (CRRUCS), attended
the gathering as a social scientist to conduct focus groups
and to interview the men whose lives had been turned around
by what happened to them on the mountain. For over 40 years,
Teen Challenge has taken on the most desperate and intractable
cases of drug and alcohol addiction and claims to have won.
It now has over 400 centers worldwide, suggesting there might
be something to the claim.
In conversations with Johnson, the reformed addicts told
of running up credit cards and running out of money, of going
back to detox a dozen times only to find themselves shooting
up on the way home from detox. Many of the addicts, after
repeated offenses, ended up at Rehrersburg when judges gave
them a choice between doing Teen Challenge’s tough
religious program or doing hard time. After failing at every
treatment program in the book, they said, only Teen Challenge
was able to heal their rock-bottomed-out lives. The embrace
of faith and prayer and bible study were decisive. “There’s
a God-size hole in our hearts, and you can’t fill it
with drugs,” one sermonized. Johnson watched every
head in the group bobbing Amen, brother.
“ We know there are religious organizations out there
trying to combat serious social problems,” the social
scientist maintains, “but we don’t know very
much about them.” There are entire university departments
dedicated to religious studies and theology, but there is
only one doctoral dissertation on the work of Teen Challenge. “Unless
you go out and spend some time with these organizations,
you don’t really have an accurate understanding of
what they do,” and you won’t have anything more
than your own personal bias to tell you whether people are
being helped.
CRRUCS looks at how churches, synagogues, mosques, and other
religious institutions help solve big-city problems and how
local faith communities and grass-roots ministries make a
difference in the lives of disadvantaged, mostly urban people.
It’s a “faith-friendly but fact-based” research
enterprise, Johnson explains. “We’re looking
to see if these organizations are effective or not.” Scrupulous
empirical and statistical methods are applied to examine
how religion helps—or does not help—people cope
with social ills such as poverty, crime, prisoner recidivism,
and drug abuse. If the evidence shows a ministry is achieving
results, CRRUCS will spread the good news in their reports.
If a religious program is shown to be ineffective or to cause
harm, the center will tell that story too.
Johnson calls it “inexcusable” that such studies
have not already been done and suspects that academics tend
to look askance at social programs that use and are motivated
by “high octane religion.” In some cases, the
presumption seems to be that religion is forced down the
throats of individuals already beaten down by circumstances
and bad choices. “That in itself is an interesting
empirical question worth examining,” he contends. “We
have a very limited understanding of these faith-based organizations,
but at least [CRRUCS] has been out there investigating and
trying to provide long-overdue empirical answers
to some of these questions.”
In a recent study, Johnson found that religious commitment
and church attendance offer “protective factors” to “high-risk” inner-city
youths. Other CRRUCS studies have demonstrated, among other
things, that religious youths are more healthy—they
are less likely to fight, drink and drive, or carry weapons;
and more likely to exercise and eat right. Another research
project showed that privileged youths benefit from religion
too, documenting that “low-risk” teenagers are
less likely to experiment with drinking, drugs, and delinquency.
Johnson’s latest report is on a prison program in
Houston, Texas. The study, The InnerChange Freedom Initiative:
A Preliminary Evaluation of a Faith-Based Prison Program,
found that inmates who complete a two-year rehabilitation
program immersed in bible study and Christian worship have
a better chance of staying out of jail, once released, than
members of the general prison population.
The report, officially released at a White House roundtable
discussion in June, found that inmates who graduated from
the InnerChange Freedom Initiative (IFI) were less than half
as likely to be back in prison within two years as a comparable
sample of convicts who were not in the program. In the correctional
experiment, which was set up in 1997 when President George
W. Bush was governor of Texas, inmates nearing the end of
their sentence could volunteer for the faith-based prison.
The IFI program emphasizes education, work, life skills,
mentoring, and group accountability, all carried out in a
prison environment permeated by religious instruction. Just
8 percent of IFI graduates went back to prison within the
two-year study period, compared with 20.3 percent for a matched
sample of prisoners who did not have the religious intervention.
“ The results are positive but preliminary,” Johnson
cautions.
The Texas program might be biased, he speculates, because
recruits were selected for their suitability—they had
to be able to read and couldn’t be sex offenders— rather
than being a true random sample. And Johnson would be more
comfortable with data that looked at recidivism rates over
three years after release rather than just two. The IFI report
also holds less flattering numbers. It notes, for instance,
that if the data included inmates who started but did not
finish the faith-based program, then the proportion of IFI
re-arrests (36.2 percent) would exceed the rate of arrests
for the comparison group (35 percent).
Whatever the methodological reservations, the report suggests
that religious faith—“inner change”—enhances
rehabilitation. A key to the IFI program is “spiritual
transformation,” the report notes. Prisoners repair
their poor self-image by discovering or rediscovering a relationship
with God. Of the 125 inmates interviewed, more than half
said, “ I am not who I used to be.” The data
for re-arrests hints that they may be right, but Johnson
is holding out for closer study and more definitive evidence.
Over the next ten years, about 650,000 convicts will be
released from prison every year. “We know there are
plenty of faith-based organizations partnering with authorities
to help with this avalanche of offenders coming back into
the community,” offers Johnson. “Is that a good
thing? We don’t know, but we ought to find out.” With
the right funding, CRRUCS researchers may one day come down
from the mountaintop with some answers—and the data
to back them up.
CRRUCS reports are available online at http://www.sas.upenn.edu/crrucs/8_research.html |