And he asks, as economic trends, government policies, cultural forces, and activist campaigns undermine sometimes unfashionable and admittedly flawed families, churches, and community organizations, Are we doing to our social architecture what a previous generation did to the cityscape? “We may,” he says, “discover that what seemed archaic, extraneous, superfluous, or old-fashioned . . . plays an indispensable role in sustaining social and cultural features that we cannot function without.”

That’s a warning worth pondering as the contemporary anti-discrimination crusade rolls onward, undermining and sometimes causing the closing of faith-based organizations that support mother-father families, protect life from conception to natural death, and acknowledge religion as a positive force. Unfashionable and “discriminatory” these organizations might appear to some to be, but suppressing the vast role they play in our society would be like destroying a village to save it or cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Here are just a few, rather random, indicators of that vital role:

Contributions to the community. Last year Christianity Today published an amazing graphic, “What’s a Congregation Worth?,” based on research by professor Ram Cnaan of the University of Pennsylvania. The graphic highlights the annual value to the community of just a single church, First Baptist Church in Philadelphia. It records the value of the k-12 schooling provided, the crimes and recidivism prevented, the divorces avoided, the jobs gained through the church’s services, the suicides that were prevented, and much more. The annual total of the positive contributions to the community of just this single congregation? An amazing $6,090,032!

Contributions to prisons. Alan Cooperman, then a Washington Post reporter, noted that, when Florida a decade ago cut spending on prisons, churches stepped in: “As Florida has slashed spending for prison rehabilitation programs, money is not flowing from the state to religious groups. It is flowing from religious groups to the state.

The Rev. J. Stephen McCoy of Beaches Chapel Church in Neptune Beach listed a few of the expenditures his congregation has made in [a prison’s] dorm: $1,163 for ceiling fans, $4,000 for musical instruments, $1,500 for a sound system, $2,500 for computers, $500 for Bibles, $840 for books, $2,500 for food, games and candy. Altogether, McCoy said, his 1,000-member evangelical church has injected more than $30,000 into the prison, and that does not begin to count the value of volunteers’ time. More than 100 Beaches Chapel members visit [the prison] each month, teaching inmates about computers and job hunting as well as about Jesus and the Bible. Other churches sponsor other dorms.”

Supplementing government’s funds. Fr. Larry Snyder, President of Catholic Charities USA–the national office of the more than 1,700 local Catholic Charities agencies–was formerly head of Catholic Charities for Minneapolis and St. Paul. Catholic Charities agencies receive a large amount of government funding to provide services, and yet, Fr. Snyder says:

“[F]aith-based organizations are not just in it for the money. We’re not just chasing the money. We will stay the course whether the money is there or not. We can do a lot more with federal money, with government money, than we could on our own, but the reality is also that I think folks think that the government pays the full fare. I can say from my time in Minneapolis, the programs that we had that were contracted with the government, the government would pay somewhere between two- thirds and three-fourths of what we needed and we had to make up the rest. So we were subsidizing the government, if you will, by hundreds of thousands of dollars every year. We were happy to do that because it furthered our mission and the mission of the common good.”

Getting kids out of foster care. In 2010, the Denver Post reported on an innovative partnership between government and churches that was initiated by Focus on the Family:

“The number of Colorado children in foster care awaiting permanent adoption has been cut in half by a partnership between churches and government that places parentless kids in ‘forever homes.’ When the Colorado Springs-based ministry Focus on the Family began spearheading the ‘Wait No More’ adoption initiative in November 2008, the state had 8,000 children in foster care. That number included almost 800 children who were eligible for adoption because their parents had lost parental rights after the state found serious and repetitive neglect and abuse in their families. In early 2010, only 365 children eligible for adoption remain in foster care, said Sharen Ford, manager of permanency services for the Colorado Department of Human Services.”