There are areas across the globe where religious relief groups are the only or most effective deliverers of services. From just the Judeo-Christian arena, there are hundreds of such groups, some small and targeted, many robust and effective, ranging from World Vision to Catholic Relief Services to American Jewish World Service. Further, a decade ago, the World Bank, at the urging of its visionary President Jim Wolfensohn, figured out that in many areas of the globe in which it worked, the church or its equivalent was the most permanent, stable and effective social entity in the most impoverished areas of the globe. From our experience in the past with Robert Zelnick, we anticipate this is a partnership he will want to deepen.

Out of the World Faith Development Dialogue, comprised of prominent religious leaders from across the globe and key figures of the World Bank (and at times the IMF), efforts at reshaping the often distant relationship on the ground of development professionals and religious institutions, has had remarkable successes. It is not surprising today, that a substantial minority of the providers of medical services treating the victims of the AIDS epidemic are religious providers. And efforts like Nothing But Nets aimed at eliminating the scourge of Malaria, focusing on Sub-Saharan Africa, are turning increasingly to partners such as the United Methodist Church and my own Union for Reform Judaism as key players in providing crucial resources to make these efforts work.

On the policy level, the religious community has played a major role in efforts to combat poverty, increase foreign aid and secure human rights. It played crucial leadership roles in the Soviet Jewry campaign and the anti-apartheid campaign – and today almost single-handedly continues as key advocates for the rights of those oppressed in Tibet and North Korea. Since the mid-90s, a remarkable (and highly effective) strange bed-fellow coalition of evangelical Christians, Catholic Bishops, and the Reform Jewish Movement (joined case by case by a broad array of Protestant and Jewish groups) have been at the core of reshaping American policy on the International Religious Freedom Act, the Sudanese Civil war and then Darfur, international human trafficking, global climate change, and increasing funding to combat HIV-AIDS. (See Alan Hertzke’s book: Freeing God’s Children).

For anyone who wonders whether the religious communities of the world can still make a difference and can work together effectively, no issue so dramatizes the impact of the religious community as the struggle for debt relief for the poorest nations of the world. For nearly two decades, academics and policy experts had identified this problem as one of the great moral and practical dilemmas of the contemporary international order. But little happened. Then, as the turn of the millennium approached, the religious communities of Europe and North America, joined by others across the globe, began the Jubilee campaign – rich in religious imagery and moral power. Drawing on the biblical imagery of the restitution of property and the elimination of debt as the Jubilee’s means of proclaiming liberty throughout the land and to all the inhabitants thereof, they mobilized a major international campaign that captured the attention of the media and politicians. Because its local arms touched the human beings affected by this across the globe, it successfully focused on putting a human face on this catastrophe and it led to the 2000 agreement in Cologne to the developed nations committing $100 billion dollars in debt relief. I remember sitting in the White House discussing the urgency of the issue with the President, with Bono on one side and Pat Robertson on the other, to convey the wall to wall support for debt relief.

We argued forcefully that this debt is a form of bondage, impoverishing nations, diverting resources from nutrition, health care, education and sustainable development — depriving children and families the most basic of human needs. And it is an especially bitter bondage, for today’s heavy chains of debt were yesterday’s supposed ladders of development.
Made in good faith, often with noble intentions, these debts were supposed to help these nations build infrastructure, develop financial resources, and get a leg up in international trade. But, politics, recession and in some cases corruption intervened. And, now these tools of development have become the shackles of endless unpayable debt.

The religious communities’ response was to say to policy makers: do as Moses demanded of Pharaoh and let these nations go.

No child should be denied an education because of unending debt service to us; no family should be bereft of health care because our debt payments must be made; For the moral fiber of the developed nations, nations that wish to help, not harm; to aid, not to assault; to develop, not to destroy; we must let these nations go from debt burdens they cannot hope to repay, burdens that creditors never intended to become so unbearable.

This is just one snapshot of the moral power of the religious community when it has worked together. But it provides a lasting image of religion at its best.