| Roundtable Interview |
September 06, 2004
An interview with An Interview with Robert M. Franklin Jr. of Emory University
Robert M. Franklin Jr
Robert M. Franklin Jr. is the Presidential Distinguished Professor of Social Ethics at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta, where he is also a senior fellow at the Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Religion. He is the former president of the Atlanta-based Interdenominational Theological Center, a graduate professional school of theology that has historically trained African-American clergy, and has been program officer at the Ford Foundation, with primary responsibility for grants to African-American churches that provide secular social services.
An ordained minister as well as scholar, Franklin's academic and community work over the last decade has included efforts, in his words, to "jumpstart a community-wide conversation about the future of our families, with an eye toward how we provide the best possible support and nurture for children."
He spoke with the Roundtable about research he has been involved in over the last 18 months with the Annie E. Casey Foundation, talking to focus groups of African- American clergy about the role they might play in promoting healthy marriages in low-income African-American communities.
The Roundtable:
How do you approach African-American clergy about efforts to promote marriage?
Professor Franklin:
One of the things that we tried to do to highlight this issue for busy, often bivocational, pastors, is to simply note that today the non-marital birth rate in African-American communities is about 70 percent. We look at some other data that indicates that since the 1970s, there's been a dramatic decline in marriage rates for African-Americans. And we look back 100 years, back to the 1890s and 1900s.
What's remarkable is that two-parent African-American households were about 80 percent (of all African-American households) back in the 1890s, and yet today, approximately 39-40 percent. So all that makes the case for having lost significant ground in the arena of stable, healthy marriages and families.
Now these are leaders who primarily focus on what I refer to as political goods -- ensuring that minorities have the right to vote, run for office. Secondly, economic goods --- they have jobs, income, wealth accumulation, access to capital. Third, what might be called goods of personal development-access to education, culture and so on.
But healthy families and marriages often doesn't get on the radar screen of these busy leaders. So we try to call attention to this lost ground in the post-Civil Rights Movement period, and identify influential African-American pastors to inquire about what their congregations were doing to foster healthy relationships -- marriages and families.
It was a two-part conversation -- on the one hand, to elicit from them sort of "field reports"on what they were doing to promote marriage and family, and second, for us to share recent research on the state of marriage and family and child wellbeing, particularly in low-income communities.
We convened several conversations in Baltimore, and in Chicago I attended and also interviewed pastors in other cities who were attending the African-American Healthy Marriage Initiative sponsored by the (federal) Administration for Children and Families (ACF). So all that data fit into this initial report that we're working on now.
The Roundtable:
Can you summarize some of the findings that have emerged?
Professor Franklin:
First, that congregations currently do sponsor quite a variety of marriage and family- friendly ministries and programs -- men's day, women's day, couples retreats, singles ministries, obviously programs for youth, for children, increasingly programs that focus on marriage enrichment, on preventing sexually transmitted diseases, especially HIV/AIDS, and so on. So we heard a lot of good things are going on, but the quality of these programs, the resources and the materials employed in them, is exceedingly uneven. That's one big lesson, and of course a note of hope.
The Roundtable:
What do you mean when you say the program quality is uneven?
Professor Franklin:
There's nothing particularly strategic about the work they do -- they're not generally linked to other, secular nonprofit organizations in their communities that could assist them with a more formal approach to relationship education or child service delivery, etc. Also the staffing and training tends to be quite -- informal is the best way to put it. They use volunteers who are available and not necessarily people who have backgrounds, training or education for this delicate work.
Second, a number of pastors, when we told them about the vast number of marriage enrichment organizations throughout the country -- many of them, by the way, developed by and largely aimed toward educated, suburban, affluent, white Americans, college educated -- were intrigued about these programs, felt they could benefit from the curricula, the training materials, the input. But many feared that they were risking their pastoral capital by collaborating with some of these marriage enrichment organizations.
The Roundtable:
Can you elaborate on that?
Professor Franklin:
Pastoral capital is the influence, the reputation, the good standing, that a clergy person enjoys in his or her community, earned over many years of diligent work, of unselfish service to the community. And many felt that these materials simply weren't culturally competent and culturally sensitive. And so the pastors weren't anxious to embrace uncritically these materials or the organizations and their leaders, but they did want to explore further possibilities for developing new approaches to serve their communities.
The Roundtable:
What were some other findings?
Professor Franklin:
The third was the need to focus on reviving a culture of healthy dating.
One pastor, Rev. Jules Bagneris from Los Angeles, noted that the kids from African-American churches and communities really don't receive sufficient guidance about what it means to have a date, and that too many teenagers felt dating had to involve sex. And so a number of pastors affirmed this fact and in some ways admitted that they hadn't taken the lead in providing the intellectual capital needed for educating young people and others about what it means to have a healthy date.
The fourth issue was the challenge to reclaiming men. Many felt that the male investment in marriage and family was at an all-time low, and steadily declining. Some of them spoke of this in terms of the challenge in persuading men to trade in their "player's card"for a marriage license -- a player's card being a street-culture reference to the free life of the playboy.
And so the notion of monogamous relationships that entail fidelity and commitment over a long period, and bearing and rearing children, was really countercultural. And here again, no one in the community was making the case for marriage, such that it could persuade or get the attention of these young men. So that was in many respects regarded as the biggest challenge, especially among women in the group: Would the church, and especially male pastors, be able to make that case to young men?
The Roundtable:
At the ACF Welfare Research & Evaluation Conference in May, you said many African-American pastors were reluctant to embrace the federal Healthy Marriage Initiative, which includes a proposal to fund marriage education through the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families welfare program. Can you discuss that?
Professor Franklin:
Many feel that the government has rarely been a friend to supporting and building healthy black families, that welfare policy has represented a threat to building healthy families. So there's a key suspicion about government investment in marriage and family formation.
Many of these leaders think of themselves as the community's voice of protection and truth-telling -- the prophets who speak truth to power. So their natural inclination is to regard a government-sponsored initiative with some suspicion and extreme caution. It's unfortunate that the issue of marriage and family and childrearing -- which is in itself intrinsically important and a politically neutral issue, it's a human concern -- has become politicized.
Many of these pastors felt if this (Healthy Marriage) initiative had emerged from, say, a nonpartisan agency -- let's say a foundation or university or an interfaith group of organizations -- it would have had a more promising start with pastors. But for many of them, to hear the lead sponsor is HHS [the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services] and this has become a Bush Administration initiative -- many felt that they were going to have to figure out other ways to promote marriage and family, but didn't want to be used by a politically motivated agent.
The Roundtable:
Are you talking to the same groups of clergy over time or different groups? And if it's the same groups, are you seeing any change in opinion about the Healthy Marriage Initiative?
Professor Franklin:
We are working with a core group of pastors who are part of the first focus groups and who continue to be part of the conversation. We also continue to meet with new groups and different demographic cohorts to get a pulse read from, say, informally educated pastors in very poor communities at one end of the spectrum to the very highly educated -- I mean Ph.D.s and MBAs -- who lead megachurches in excess of 100,000 members. So we're trying to listen carefully in a broad way.
And yes, there has been with our sort of "control group,"some change there. They continue to have strong cautions, but many have now seen real potential from a mutually enriching, informing partnership with government and with secular agencies. I'd say there's a general openness, but it depends on the value of the product, and willingness to get together to address some of the unique issues that these pastors face.
The Roundtable:
In addition to hesitancy regarding the Healthy Marriage Initiative, you've said that African-American clergy are increasingly resistant to the Bush Administration's Faith-Based and Community Initiative. Is that a finding from this research, or something you are looking at separately?
Professor Franklin:
Separately.
I think the Faith-Based Initiative did raise expectations and hopes that have been largely frustrated, as I talk to clergy who had very high hopes that this would help to reinvigorate their community service, their community development ministries.
The Roundtable:
Why are they frustrated? Is it that funding hasn't been there?
Professor Franklin:
Yes, the funding has been slow in coming. As small, informal organizations, they still haven't had the wherewithal or capacity to compete for these grants.
The big dollars are going to intermediary organizations who will, as I understand it, provide training and technical assistance and some sort of grant monies. That sort of trickle-down process just feels like too much bureaucracy for what they hoped would be rapid-response funding for community crises.
The Roundtable:
Thank you for speaking with us.