Nonprofits have a long and storied history in the United States. When Alexis de Tocqueville visited this country in the 19th century, he intended to study its prisons. Instead, he wrote one of the most perceptive analyses of American political life. Among his many insights was an observation about what we now sometimes call “the third sector.” In France, citizens who encountered social problems tended to look to the government for solutions. Americans, Tocqueville noticed, were different. Rather than waiting for official action, they organized themselves. They had a talent for self-government.
What Tocqueville observed has implications for the nonprofit sector today. Greg Berman warns about the evolution (or devolution) of the nonprofit sector from those Tocquevillian beginnings in The Nonprofit Crisis: Leadership Through the Culture Wars. But it’s also a book about liberalism, the political philosophy developed alongside the American republic. Liberalism here doesn’t mean left-wing politics; it refers to the pursuit of liberty itself. Limited government, consent of the governed, and freedoms of religion, speech, and the press are core liberal commitments. For Americans, these principles have been as invisible as water to a fish.
Nonprofits play a straightforward role in such a system. Because liberal governments restrain themselves in the name of freedom, space opens for voluntary institutions to meet social needs in entrepreneurial and creative ways. That space has historically been filled by nonprofits in local communities, many born out of local churches.
Click Here to Read More (Originally Published at The Gospel Coalition )
Hunter Baker (JD, PhD) is the provost of North Greenville University and the author of Postliberal Protestants: Baptists Between Obergefell and Christian Nationalism.