Dr. Livingstone, I Presume?* Rethinking the Terms of Faith-Based Humanitarianism

By Jonathan Agensky, University of Cambridge
(This essay is part of a forthcoming scholarly article looking at the microphysics of evangelical humanitarian NGOs.)

Faith-based humanitarianism has become a central means through which Northern groups intervene in the society and politics of African states. As a result, it is of growing interest in academic and policy circles. In this context, evangelical Christians have emerged as one of the most controversial faith-based groupings active within international affairs. Northern-based evangelicals have been regarded with a general mix of optimism, curiosity and skepticism—something made all the more complicated by the heterogeneity of the movement and its surprisingly varied political positions.  However, given its common conflations with particular streams of American social conservatism, there is often a lingering and deep suspicion surrounding various evangelical political and humanitarian interventions. This is amplified by a general unease about faith groups taking an active part in what is typically regarded as the secular domain of international affairs.

I argue that instead of making a priori assumptions that evangelical and other faith-based groups are inherently suspect, whereas “secular” groups are not, we need to understand the many ways in which the two resemble each other. All should be subject to the same critique of their roles in the broader humanitarian industry.  Moreover, in order to understand what is “different” about faith-based groups, we need to look at evidence from the wide range of specific sites in which they operate.

The underlying assumption of many scholars is that the work of faith-based groups substantively differs from that of their secular counterparts. I have been pressed in more than just a few academic conferences to reach the ‘logical normative conclusion that what these groups are doing is wrong’. For many, the idea that faith-inspired and organized global activities could be anything other than instrumental means of proselytization is just too hard a sell. Samaritan’s Purse (SP) is a particularly stunning example: the organization has been deeply involved in high level political advocacy regarding the last Sudanese civil war. Franklin Graham has often been credited for his influence within circles close to the Bush administration and for playing a significant role in shaping American foreign policy towards Sudan. SP does not adhere to industry standards of neutrality or impartiality, worked outside of the Operation Lifeline Sudan framework (set up by in UNICEF 1989, which defined and set the parameters of mainstream humanitarian delivery in Sudan),[1] and had extremely close ties with the main southern insurgent group, the Sudan’s People Liberation Army (SPLA) (giving rise to the joke: SP—LA). At the same time, notwithstanding its ‘cowboy’ reputation (as SP has been described in far too many interviews to mention)—or perhaps because of it—the organization is lauded by many in-country for its adept relief work in both the North and South of Sudan.[2]

Those who criticize evangelical groups assume that secular interventions should be the norm.  Instead, they should problematize international interventions more broadly. Nicholas D. Kristof has refuted the “normative-secular” assumptions about aid, producing a number of op-eds and blog posts in the New York Times that have done much to rehabilitate perceptions of the complex world of global evangelical activism.[3] This type of response goes far in generating a more representational view of real-world actors and events, as well as in decentering attention from what Kristof calls the “blowhard scolds” of American evangelicalism—such as Rev. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. There has been a growing chorus emphasizing the ‘good works’ of these groups outside of the missionary context.[4]

In South Sudan, one of the sites in which I have been conducting my own research,[5] there has been no shortage of reports about small scale evangelical missions (mainly American or white South African) flying into remote parts of the country. These missions often wreak havoc with local communities, government and international faith-based NGOs themselves. Indeed, many of their sponsoring organizations generate and publish their own accounts that attest to the harrowing, chaotic and often misguided adventurism of mission-based humanitarianism.[6] Additionally, individuals like the ‘Machine Gun Preacher’, the subject of a recent Hollywood feature (Sam Childers, an American former biker and convict turned preacher/ savior of children in South Sudan), make for sensational caricatures that further animate missionary–humanitarian and normative–secular debates.[7]

But looking at the aid environment in Juba—a key operations hub for relief organizations working throughout South Sudan— shows that it is far more difficult to distinguish between faith-based and non-faith-based NGOs than one might expect. There is a spectrum of Christian NGOs, covering a range of methods and approaches. Among them, the professional international organizations share similar organizational and funding structures as their secular counterparts with whom they share workers, collaborate on projects, exchange security and logistics information and form localized communities. They also employ the same measures and means for assessing, strategizing and soliciting support. Overall, these groups conform to the methodological, relational, material and spatial practices of the mainstream international aid community.

Professional evangelical NGOs are generally funded, at least partially, by mainstream institutional donors.[8] They are therefore required to formalize their projects and mandates and standardize their programs in order to meet the parameters of the donor partnership. For the most part, these groups respond to appeals and funding calls, with generally at least one on-site staff member focused mainly on grant writing. These appeals set the overall agenda for what types of projects will be funded—and therefore what gets done—in which sites.

The labors of faith-based organizations line-up with the broader set of institutionalized humanitarian ‘clusters’, with many working on projects such as water and sanitation and hygiene as well as dealing with matters of livelihood and South Sudanese returnees. Their implementation protocols follow industry standards and many adhere to codes of best practice such as the ICRC Code of Conduct and Sphere. Many are also deeply engaged in interagency cooperation. Indeed, the NGO Secretariat—a vehicle for such cooperation in South Sudan (the supporting administrative body of the South Sudan NGO Forum)—is currently hosted and funded by Tearfund UK, an evangelical relief organization.[9]

Professional faith-based organizations are mainstreamed into the broader NGO environment, which is shaped by the constraints and conditions of institutional donors.  These include restrictions on activities outside the scope of specific projects, guidelines for hiring practices, particular demands for project evaluations and assessments, and so on. These restrictions, as well as codified standards of conduct, prohibit proselytization, privileging co-religionists in the delivery of aid, and diverting funds for the support of local religious institutions or individuals. This, of course, does not preclude the possibilities of these types of practices occurring covertly—at either the organizational or individual level, but it does speak to the overall structural and normative environment in which these groups function.

But ideologically-driven groups, as well as inexperienced ‘do gooders’ and ‘well wishers’ who manage to make their ways into sites of disaster and emergency, pose a large problem for all professional faith-based relief workers (not to mention for scholarship on the broader impacts and measurements of faith-based humanitarianism). This has been a common theme/ lament in many of my interviews with professional faith-based aid workers. It is a problematic reality that there are few mechanisms to regulate or account for the activities of independent, small scale and privately funded groups.

Of course, groups that derive their support from private funding sources are subject to fewer external institutional demands—about what kinds of activities they can engage in, how accountable they need to be and how strictly they need to adhere to proposed projects. However, many of these groups work alongside their institutionally funded counterparts, and are still susceptible to the normative, and normalizing, pressures of the mainstream community. Speaking with several such aid workers in Juba, for example, there was a prevailing sense of professionalism. The same could be said for the majority of faith groups who appear, on the face of it, quite similar to each other and to secular groups as well.[10] For example, even in the case of an organization like Samaritan’s Purse, which is mainly privately funded and operates outside of institutional constraints (for example, allowing it to operate a large a church rebuilding program), there is not much apparently ‘faith based’ about the relief work itself.

As evangelical NGOs struggle to distinguish themselves from the mainstream for purposes of organizational identity, resource mobilization and community engagement, they do so under intense, and often self-imposed, pressure to conform to the norms of mainstream humanitarianism. Many of the staff I have spoken with have expressed great antipathy towards mission-based aid groups. The linking of aid with conversion-centred practices such as bible distribution, prayer, church planting and others, has become anathema to many faith-based relief workers who consider themselves to be part of the mainstream professional relief community. Moreover, there are pragmatic and security concerns about negative spill-over effects—that is, making it difficult for these groups to gain access to, and operate in, non-Christian sites or secure their staff against local elements harboring religiously-inspired hostilities (the dangers of which have been seen over the last year in Afghanistan and Pakistan).[11] Many consider the linking of aid with proselytization to be problematic from a theological perspective as well, and are sensitive to the exploitative and coercive dimensions that underwrite such an encounter.

Both faith-based groups and mainstream humanitarian governance should be subjected to scrutiny and critique, however.  There have been few attempts to situate the critique of faith-based humanitarianism within a more general critical framework about the aid industry. What is lacking in these discussions is a perspective that harmonizes discussions about faith-based NGOs with bigger discussions about aid, Africa and global governance. The lack of such a project is a telling sign of the entrenched secular biases that still pervade even self-described critical scholarship.

Faith-based groups blend into and contribute to the overall material, spatial and physical environments of the ‘emergency imaginary’. This involves contributing to an iconography of despair and fostering the belief in controlled technical interventions. Evangelical groups utilize the same material and physical ‘accouterments’—procured in the same ways—as the rest of the international aid community: gated and guarded compounds, large and loud power generators, material and logistical support systems, muscular branded (white) SUVs with large bouncing satellite antennae, and so on (cf. Campbell 2005; Duffield 2010; Smirl 2008). The physical presence of faith-based aid workers is much like any other and all are equally part of a broader optic of a fortified ‘will to improve’ that is exemplary of liberal humanitarianism, development and security (cf. Duffield 2010; Li 2007). What is often most striking on the ground, then, is the similarity of these organizations to their secular counterparts. In operational and practical terms, these groups have more in common with the mainstream aid community than they do with local co-religionists or fringe and small-scale missionary groups.

Despite this “mainstreaming,” however, there are reasons why one might expect faith-based organizations to look and act quite different than their (secular) counterparts. Not least among them are the representations made by such groups themselves. But what merits greater attention are the internal struggles of these actors to reconcile tenets of their faith with the normative values and goals of mainstream humanitarianism, and the ways these struggles are channeled into continual reflection about the meanings of aid and impartiality.  It is within these tensions that some of the key and crucial differences between faith-based and mainstream humanitarianism emerge. How Northern-based evangelicals respond to and promote the humanitarian project is becoming increasingly important and says much about contemporary liberal governance. How these groups claim moral authority and legitimize their various international interventions is of pressing practical and theoretical interest, given the expanding scope of their global networks. The neglect of these issues illustrates the entrenched secular bias of international political scholarship and its inability to frame and theorize these types of developments.

Despite the increasing interest and rhetoric on the part of donors towards hybridity and indigeneity for governance projects, the institutional structure of aid is still weighted towards top-down, donor-driven, centralized and technical interventions. Exploring the internal response, tension and deliberations of various faith-based organizations regarding big debates about short-term aid vs. longer term development, or about the pathways and pitfalls towards local implementation partnerships, might provide valuable practical and policy insight. As would attention to the tensions that form within and across the organizational framework of faith-based groups: between operations and field teams, country and regional directors, head offices and home country staff, senior leadership on the ground, country and regional leadership and those operating across specific clusters.

The specificities of faith based groups need to be carefully addressed in relation to both their similarities and differences with others in the mainstream aid community, to which they are also a part. A productive way of going about this is to explore some of the specific empirical dimensions of these encounters. Analyzing these specifics allows us to move away from problematic assumptions that privilege secularity instead of looking at the negative aspects of the aid industry as a whole; it also allows us to understand the nuances and differences of faith-based humanitarianism.

References
– Campbell, D. 2005. The biopolitics of security: oil, empire, and the sports utility vehicle. American Quarterly 57(3):943-972.
– Duffield, M. 2010. The Liberal Way of Development and the Development‚ Security Impasse: Exploring the Global Life-Chance Divide. Security Dialogue 41(1):53-76.
– Li, TM. 2007. The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics: Duke University Press.
– Smirl, L. 2008. Building the other, constructing ourselves: spatial dimensions of international humanitarian response. International Political Sociology 2(3):236-253.