Paved with good intentions: the politics of national service

Christian Century, July 31, 2002 by Douglas A. Hicks

LAST JANUARY President Bush announced that he was building on "a magnificent, courageous and compassionate response to terrorism" with the creation of the USA Freedom Corps, an initiative that combines the AmeriCorps, Senior Corps and Peace Corps. Then he added a new organization, the Citizens Corps, which will focus on prevention of and emergency response to terrorism. The president is calling on Americans to support him by giving at least two years or 4,000 hours of service in their lifetimes. The initiative, if approved by Congress, will cost about $1 billion annually, with $560 million of that money going to new expenditures.

I see the good done by volunteer service every time I teach "Service to Society," a course in which undergraduates venture off campus to serve people in the Richmond community. In class we discuss concepts such as charity, justice, service and community, with students sharing the social problems that they've discovered through their volunteer work. I have seen that service coupled with critical reflection can transform both those who are served and those who serve. Some students even reconfigure their understandings of career and vocation.

The potential good of voluntary service, however, should not mask its complexities or problems. Persons of faith, in particular, have good reason to be skeptical when a political leader employs the language of service. They know that there is both promise and peril in raising the public profile of voluntary service. President Bush has called upon religious communities to play a major role in promoting his initiatives. But religious communities should respond by carefully assessing the Freedom Corps and the current public interest in service.

First of all, it is important to note the distinction between intentions and outcomes. Well-intentioned volunteers are not always well-qualified ones, and social-service agencies and people in need benefit most from the service of trained, dependable people. In a speech titled "To Hell with Good Intentions," Catholic social critic Ivan Illich once admonished a group of U.S. volunteers headed to Mexico to fight poverty. His point was strong and clear. The young Americans meant well, but they did not have the background, the perseverance or the will to face the systemic factors that contributed to Mexicans' deprivation. Although the U.S. volunteers had received training to avoid culture shock, Illich said, the Mexican recipients had received little protection to shield them from the onslaught of U.S. values of individualism and materialism that the volunteers would unintentionally but inevitably bring with them.

Many volunteers offer help with the best of intentions yet fail to address the needs of their recipients. I tell my students what they often do not wish to hear: it is possible to do more harm than good. Volunteer mentors may sign up, for example, to befriend a boy or a girl. But often the new mentor fails to keep an appointment or drops out of the program after a few months. When their lives get busy, volunteers often drop their service commitment, and add to the disappointments that the child has experienced.

On this point, President Bush is correct. Most volunteers could benefit from an organized program that encourages self-discipline and coordinates the overall effort. It is not obvious, however, that keeping a journal or "record of service" will help increase commitment. A better move would be to fund federal, state and local programs to identify nonprofit agencies that accept volunteers, and then to fund those agencies to train, supervise and support volunteers.

Second, people of faith must ask, "Service for what?" What is the goal of the USA Freedom Corps when its programs address three such disparate ends: international aid (Peace Corps), homeland security (Citizens Corps) and community rebuilding (AmeriCorps and Senior Corps)? The first answer to the "service for what?" question is that the Freedom Corps initiative is attempting to stitch a seamless new entity from goals that may or may not fit together well. Imagine the different attitudes and actions of two volunteers in a local neighborhood. One is charged to promote a sense of community; the other is assigned to report on suspicious people as part of terrorism prevention. Perhaps these goals can be held in constructive tension, but it is not difficult to see that they could often work at cross-purposes.

President Bush states that the Freedom Corps is part of the wider national goal of responding to "the evil of the terrorist attacks." More specifically, he asserts that service can help Americans show "the evil ones [who] thought we were weak" that America is strong and compassionate. People of faith must be alert to when the rhetoric of service is appropriated to serve national interests.

To be sure, the Peace Corps, born in the Kennedy era of cold-war geopolitics, has fit within the enlightened self-interest of the United States. But we should express concern when Bush suggests that Peace Corps workers should go into Afghanistan and elsewhere in "the Islamic world" in order to demonstrate what a great and compassionate nation America is. His rhetoric does little to convince citizens of those nations that the U.S. is not arrogant or paternalistic. More to the point, his patriotic proselytism defies the notion that service should be undertaken most centrally not for the benefit of the server but for the one who is served.