Speaking at a Salvation Army center in Atlanta last month, Al Gore announced his support of expanded government subsidies for religious groups that were using the "unique power of faith" to fight America's social ills. With his heavily promoted speech, Gore prominently allied himself with an idea that has, until recently, been associated with the "compassionate conservatism" his leading Republican rival, Texas Governor George W. Bush, champions.

Of course, Gore and Bush are only two of the growing number of politicians from both parties who have called for increased government reliance on the social welfare activities of churches and religious charities--or what supporters like to call "faith-based organizations." The list includes presidential hopefuls--from Bill Bradley to Lamar Alexander--plus countless governors, mayors, and state legislators. In Congress, the movement even has its own advocacy coalition: the Renewal Alliance, a bicameral collection of roughly 30 Republicans organized by former Indiana Senator Dan Coats. Beyond Capitol Hill, it has supporters everywhere from the Heritage Foundation to the Brookings Institution.

That the faith-based agenda is so wildly popular is not altogether surprising. It promises to attack poverty and other social problems not by spending more but by freeing public dollars from the clutches of government bureaucrats and shifting them into the hands of religious institutions. As such, it appeals both to conservatives who wish to downsize the welfare state and to liberals who want to foster grassroots solutions to lingering social problems. But it would be a mistake to read too much into this consensus, for behind it remain two very different visions for the future of the welfare state--one of which, at least, is not as appealing as it might sound at first blush.

Left and right have arrived at this apparent meeting of the minds by strikingly different paths. Recent liberal support for faith-based programs grew out of the Clinton administration's effort to stake out a "Third Way" that combines traditional Democratic goals with greater emphasis on personal responsibility and community values. Since his 1996 declaration that "the era of big government is over," Clinton has been at the forefront of the push for small-scale government interventions designed to enforce widely shared values. Clinton has also been a leading booster of voluntarism and community service, and he has supported efforts to promote cooperation between federal agencies and grassroots organizations. Symbolically appealing yet relatively inexpensive initiatives such as this have been central to Clinton's strategy for rebuilding public faith in government and the Democratic Party, and they would likely play the same role in a Gore administration.

But, even today, for all the talk about downsizing the public sector, liberals do not see faith-based organizations as a substitute for government. Quite the contrary, they believe that government and religious charities should coexist and nurture one another--that they are necessary partners in the strengthening of civil society. (Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, for example, has argued that carefully tailored public policy can invigorate associations and civic networks.) Not coincidentally, their calls for expanding the role of religious institutions comes in the context of calls for more, not less, spending on social welfare.

Conservatives, by contrast, embrace faith-based organizations as an outright alternative to what they ridicule as the clumsy and permissive top-down welfare policies of the past. Echoing moralists such as Marvin Olasky and Gertrude Himmelfarb, they argue that the welfare state has crippled private charity and compassion, which remain the only effective ways to deal with the nation's social problems. Not only should government do less, but social policy must also be, in Himmelfarb's memorable phrase, "remoralized." It's not enough for government to encourage better values; those in need should be forced to conform with community norms, to take responsibility for their failures, to change inside before expecting outside help. Olasky's 1992 book, The Tragedy of American Compassion, extols the private relief efforts of the nineteenth century for demanding personal transformation as a condition of aid. "There was a hardness in those days," Olasky writes approvingly, "based on the belief that some individuals needed to suffer in order to be willing to change."

While this strand of conservative thought seems at odds with the familiar libertarian strand in conservative philosophy, it still comes down in favor of reducing the size of government. Indeed, compassionate conservatives frequently seek to cut back public spending and revenues. For example, former Senator Coats's much-heralded 1996 plan for an expanded charitable tax deduction--one prototype for faith-based-services legislation--would have cost tens of billions of dollars, paid for by cuts in existing social programs. The Renewal Alliance in Congress supports a similar initiative that would allow states to pay for expanded tax breaks for charity by siphoning off up to half of their welfare block grants. These proposals do not represent a new antipoverty crusade so much as they do a renewed push to privatize public responsibilities--or to abdicate them altogether.

As long as the issue at hand involves shifting relatively modest amounts of money, these different agendas don't really matter. Giving a slightly greater role to religious institutions is harmless, maybe even beneficial, and something on which both sides can agree. But liberals will naturally grow suspicious as conservatives push to off-load ever-greater portions of the welfare burden onto faith-based groups. They will argue that this represents a wholesale change in the philosophy of the welfare state, one that would jeopardize the well-being of the people who rely on it. And, based on the available evidence, they will be right to do so.

To begin with, it remains an open question just how effective faith-based organizations really would be in a greatly expanded role. Those who champion faith-based programs tend to cite the same familiar examples--Eugene Rivers's Azusa Christian Community in Boston, which has spearheaded community efforts to revitalize inner-city Boston; or Charles Colson's Prison Fellowship ministry, which provides faith-based counseling in prisons across the nation. But systematic research on these and similar programs is meager. And, although some evidence suggests the power of the "faith factor," studies of faith-based programs suffer from the methodological difficulty that many of the programs deemed most successful are small and idiosyncratic, hindering comparison or generalization. Worse, evaluations of faith-based programs inevitably confront the problem of self-selection: people who turn to faith-based charities are likely to be particularly receptive to the message they deliver. The failure of most studies to control adequately for personal and social characteristics that might be associated with participation in faith-based programs makes it hard to know if faith is the key ingredient of these programs' successes, or if faith-based interventions could be replicated on a broader scale.

Even if faith-based programs do prove broadly effective, the current scale and scope of these programs means they are, in all likelihood, incapable of bearing too ambitious a burden. State, local, and federal spending on social programs was more than $1.4 trillion in 1994. And this figure does not even include the scores of tax breaks and credit subsidies that have social welfare aims or the extensive spending channeled through private health insurance and other employer-provided benefits--which, all told, would perhaps double the official figure. In contrast, the annual private social spending by congregations, national faith-based charities like the Salvation Army, and other religious organizations is probably not more than $15 billion to $20 billion per year, according to research supported by the nonpartisan Aspen Institute. This is by no means a trivial amount, and it does not account for unpaid volunteer work. But, even if the total contribution of religious organizations was several times larger than the best current estimates, it would still be tiny compared with government spending. To expect institutions of this scope to dramatically expand their infrastructure and expertise in response to new government grants--much less to become the nation's core providers of social assistance--is unrealistic.

Nor are the limited resources controlled by faith-based organizations distributed evenly across American communities. A common theme of recent encomiums to faith-based charities is that their activities are most valuable and vibrant in the poorest inner-city communities. They may well be, but, perversely, the resources available to religious organizations are most limited precisely where the need is greatest. Although the pattern of giving to religious charities is complex, the rate of private donation is generally higher in wealthier communities and lower where social conditions are worse. Larger and wealthier congregations provide services more often, and the congregations most likely to be involved in service provision are in the suburbs, not the inner cities. Even accounting for the long tradition of community outreach in urban African American churches, faith-based organizations in poorer communities still have great trouble raising the private funds necessary to support their programs, particularly as they face far more pervasive and immediate needs. For more than a decade, moreover, the share of private religious giving that is slated for activities not directly tied to a local church has fallen, making the problem of community resource disparities all the more pressing.

Indeed, many faith-based programs active in low-income neighborhoods must already rely on another source for help, and it's the very source many conservatives want to downsize: the government. As Johns Hopkins University political scientist Lester Salamon has argued in a series of influential studies, cooperation between government and nonprofit service providers--including religiously affiliated nonprofits--is a longstanding and pervasive feature of U.S. social policy. Although churches themselves have not been prominent recipients of government funds, many collaborate with local agencies in other ways, sharing information and even providing volunteers for public programs. More important, many religiously affiliated organizations--from national religious networks such as Catholic Charities USA to local faith-based initiatives--do receive government funds, either directly or through separate nonprofit organizations specifically chartered to deliver social services. Catholic Charities USA, for example, receives more than 60 percent of its funding from federal, state, and local governments. Among nonprofit human service providers as a whole, the government now supplies a greater share of operating funds than does private giving. And these funds come on top of the significant tax advantage enjoyed by nonprofit organizations and Americans who donate to them.

None of this is to deny the immense value of faith-based organizations or to say that they cannot play a somewhat larger role in our social welfare strategy. But to ascribe to faith-based organizations a magical power to heal all social ills is to forget how limited their resources are and always will be, how insufficient their activities were before the arrival of the welfare state and still are today, and how extensively their success depends on a steady supply of public funds and interaction with government agencies. It is also to forget that the strength of many of these institutions rests precisely on their voluntary character--and on their ability to advance beliefs that are sectarian, exclusionary, and even offensive to some. It's not surprising that many conservatives who have long wanted to scale back government believe that faith-based programs can do nearly everything the state now does, only better. What's surprising is that so many people are taking the idea seriously.