Current is grateful for P&R Publishing’s permission to serialize Marvin Olasky’s memoir, Pivot Points: Adventures on the Road to Christian Contentment.
Chapter 12: Marvin Appleseed
In 1995 the Texas ground turns out to be more fertile, and I pivot to work on an opportunity close to home. It’s a David versus Goliath struggle that initially receives no press coverage. Bureaucrats at the Texas Commission on Alcohol and Drug Abuse (TCADA, pronounced tacada) are ganging up on a small but effective anti-addiction program in San Antonio, Teen Challenge of South Texas.
The battle pits Teen Challenge head James Heurich, a big bear of a man and a former addict, against John Cooke, the pinstriped, starched shirt, and cuff-links–wearing assistant deputy director of TCADA’s Program Compliance Division. From Austin, Cooke sends a letter to Heurich in San Antonio:
“TCADA is suspending the license of Teen Challenge. . . . Teen Challenge shall not provide chemical dependency treatment services. [Teen Challenge] shall make appropriate transfers and referrals for all clients remaining in the program.”
Heurich knows Teen Challenge doesn’t meet TCADA standards, which require treatment counselors to sit through at least seventy-eight hours of classroom training to be licensed. Heurich thinks that requirement is ridiculous. He hires people like himself who thank Jesus for turning their lives around. Heurich wants counselors with street smarts rather than classroom training. He is also a paper-minimalist (VIOLATION of state standard 116a, which requires each personnel file to have nine specific sets of records) and a believer in informally talking through problems (VIOLATION of standard 144b, which requires a formal, six step client grievance procedure).
The New York Times later reports our meeting this way: “In the dual role of advocate and journalist, Olasky showed up with pen in hand. ‘It was real hot, and we were both sweating,’ recalls the Rev. James Heurich, executive director of Teen Challenge of South Texas. ‘He was just smiling and grinning at me, and I had the sense that this was fun for him. But I didn’t think anything was going to come of it.’”
It is fun. Heurich and his supporters plan a demonstration on July 17 in front of the Alamo, a beloved monument to Texas independence. I drive the seventy miles south and find three hundred people singing “When the Saints Go Marching In.” Many of the mostly Hispanic and Black demonstrators wear Victory Fellowship T-shirts and swelter in 93-degree heat.
Back in Austin, Cooke sits in an air-conditioned office and defends to a World reporter those expensive government requirements: “That’s what you take on when you open a center. You have to take a look at what your overhead is. If you decide you can’t afford lights, do you open the center and burn candles?”
The Alamo demonstrators carry cheeky signs. My favorite is one offering secular appeal on side A—“Once a Burden, Now a Taxpayer”—and a spiritual explanation on the flip side: “Because of Jesus I Am No Longer a Debt to the State of Texas.” The rally makes brilliant use of the Alamo. Bas-relief
sculptures of Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, and William Travis are a demonstration backdrop.
My contribution to the cause is a cover story and column in World. I have never before concluded a column with a direct appeal for political action but do so this time: “Letters of support for Teen Challenge should be sent to Texas Governor George W. Bush, Box 12428, Austin.” Several days later, letters begin to arrive. The Wall Street Journal publishes a column of mine about the colorful rally. More letters arrive. Then comes a phone call: Could you come by the governor’s mansion for lunch and explain what is going on?
Karl Rove is already planning a Bush presidential run. The Alamo demonstration might hurt those plans, but with smooth handling it could advance them. Bush and I meet. He grasps the problem right away. In 1995 he tells Assistant Deputy Director Cooke and his bosses to back off. In 1996 he instructs his officials to help rather than hinder faith-based community service groups. In 1997 the Texas legislature passes three pieces of legislation to keep state bureaucrats on a leash.
The 288-foot capitol dome in Washington and the 303-foot capitol dome in Texas look similar, but in 1995 the political tunes sung under them are as different as country and hip-hop. With the Texas reformation moving along and the Washington welfare effort stalled, I hit the road and visit poverty-fighting groups in three dozen states. At fundraising dinners for them, I tell stories about compassion in the literal meaning of the word, suffering with those in need.
I’m not a good speaker, but the content is good. My basic message compresses the lessons of history into three points: effective compassion is challenging, personal, and spiritual, as opposed to entitling, bureaucratic, and inclined to ignore God. Politicians can be most helpful by chopping away choking regulations and by instituting tax credits, the best mechanism for getting groups more money without forcing them to bow to Washington.
My speechifying regularly concludes with a hypothetical for the audience: If you had five hundred dollars to give to any poverty-fighting organization, please raise your hand if you would give it to the federal Department of Health and Human Services or some other Washington agency. Typically, no hands go up. How about your state government? City hall? Maybe one or two. How many of you know of a community-based, nongovernmental group in your own area that would do a better job with your five hundred dollars? A forest of arms.
I tell journalists about that response and apply it to the tax credit idea: not just a small deduction that only itemizers can use, but a 75 percent credit that will hugely motivate giving. New York Times columnist Peter Steinfels reports that “Olasky and his allies see . . . a vast outpouring, from millions
of Americans, of personal commitment.” Then he comes back to the question other journalists ask: “It is an inspiring vision, but is it realistic?”
Sometimes it doesn’t seem realistic, but sometimes innovative approaches last for a while. Chris Fay at Broadway Presbyterian Church in Manhattan tells me how he “was working with the poor and was burnt out. We saw the same people coming for food, year after year. We saw very few breakthroughs. Most ‘success stories’ merely reach a plateau, higher and more comfortable than being homeless, yet remaining dependent on us
or on government ‘entitlements.’ The people who volunteered for the soup kitchen didn’t know anything about the individuals who ate there. We were doing it to feel better about ourselves.”
Fay says one church member brought my Tragedy book “to the attention of our pastor. It struck him immediately as answering our questions of what we were missing. He circulated it to those of us involved in the program. The unanimity of all of us—across the political spectrum—with its conclusions was instant and total, and we resolved to change the program. More surprising still was the immediate agreement of our partners in the program, who are quite to the left of center politically.”
Fay changes the way Broadway Presbyterian offers help. He creates a program that provides in-depth help to people “willing and likely to pursue a new life direction.” As needed, they commit to “substance abuse programs, ‘life skills’ training (practicing behavior patterns necessary to maintain a job), job
skills and educational training, mental health or medical care, and entry into the working world.” Job training helps participants develop clerical skills, basic computer literacy, and specific skills for jobs in food service, janitorial, and security fields.
Broadway Presbyterian continues its soup kitchen at a reduced level that helps the desperately needy but allows staff members and volunteers to concentrate on those aspiring to change their lives. The church gets a city contract for cleaning sidewalks, median dividers, and streets. Church members with a wide range of professional experience volunteer their time to work with those in the new program—and when they see lives changing, Fay and the volunteers can joyfully carry on.
A radical church pivot like that is rare. The temptation is strong to go back to the old way of big numbers but superficiality. The Johnny Appleseed of legend is an effective sower. My sowing is feeble. One hundred flights per year in 1995 and 1996 earn me platinum medallion status on Delta as I miss some of my children’s baseball games. The guy at the Delta counter in Austin knows my name. Hurrah.
After many months of travel and politicking, I ask Richard John Neuhaus, the prominent Christian cleric and writer who is sitting next to me at some event, how he stays the course. He remembers complaining to his mentor, Rabbi Abraham Heschel, about going on the road again, that time to Chicago. Heschel freezes the rivulet of self-pity with four words: “Richard, go to Chicago.” That advice leads me to keep going until it’s time to return to University of Texas teaching at the end of August 1996.
I’ve been given twenty months of “public service” leave from teaching. The last month is both encouraging and discouraging. In August 1996, Bill Clinton’s political advisors say two vetoes of welfare reform are enough. They fear another veto will revitalize Republican Bob Dole’s flailing presidential campaign. Clinton reluctantly signs into law the Republican-led measure that turns Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) into Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF). It includes work requirements for at least half of welfare recipients and a five-year maximum for receiving TANF funds—hence the word temporary in the title. Tax credits—despite Dole’s support of them—don’t make it into the final bill.
Even though the new law transforms only one of eighty federal programs that offer money, food, housing, medical care, training, targeted education, and other social services to low-income Americans, Republicans do a victory lap that ends with a “mission accomplished” banner. Concern for the
poor drops off the GOP’s agenda. I start to realize that my post-Communist attitude of always cheering for the right is an oversimplification.
Instead of pursuing tax reform that will increase citizen engagement and create new opportunities to help the poor, Gingrich wants Republicans to use scandals to increase their House majority and win the White House. That fails to happen. Gingrich’s Progress and Freedom think tank, after blissfully
expanding in 1995, lays off half of its twenty-seven-member staff. In mid-1997 it’s in smaller, simpler quarters. By then I’m grateful for my Washington time but glad it’s over.
Not quite. Governor Bush campaigns for reelection in 1998 on a program of “compassionate conservatism.” His big win and familiar name lead to preparations early in 1999 for a presidential run. Susan and I receive an invitation to dinner at the governor’s mansion with Bush and two of the country’s most skilled political string-pullers, Karl Rove and Ralph Reed. As a journalist I’m skeptical of them, but Bush is charming.
After dinner, he takes me out on the balcony, from which the lit-up state Capitol building seems incredibly close. He tells me how much he likes sitting out there while listening to Texas Rangers games. He likes poverty-fighting groups that include spiritual help. He tells one and all, “I quit drinking in
1986, and I haven’t had a drop since then. It wasn’t because of a government program. It was because I heard a higher call.”
When Bush throws his ball cap into the ring, Rove asks me to chair a campaign task force about public policy changes that could help the poor and establish a role for religious groups. Two key recommendations have a decentralist edge: Establish a White House office to examine regulations that discriminate against religious groups. Support tax credits to encourage Americans to give time and money to poverty-fighting charities. Washington experience leaves me doubting they’ll come to life, but they’re worth a try.
