Once a major asset to American life, the independence of nonprofits is being eroded by politics. Their effectiveness is ebbing. There may be a lesson for the church in that story as well. The Nonprofit Crisis offers valuable insight into what we’re losing as polarized politics takes over our culture.

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.

Berman, a longtime nonprofit executive with the Center for Court Innovation, shows that this role is now threatened. Writing from within the liberal tradition, he observes the weakening consensus, which has shifted the nonprofit sector’s center of gravity. In America’s past, nonprofits belonged to what sociologist William Swatos called the community “lifeworld.” Now, they increasingly resemble the bureaucratic “system” of government and corporations—a change with serious implications for society and potentially churches too.

Changing Culture

Berman highlights a generational change in the people who serve nonprofits. Nonprofits have always attracted young people who hope to bring change and prepare for leadership. Berman observes that over time, younger employees were arriving with less willingness to defer to age and experience.

More importantly, perhaps, many young people also want to see the organizations of which they’re part reflecting a strong, left-wing social and political agenda. As one newly graduated and recently hired nonprofit worker declared, “There’s only one thing wrong with the criminal justice system and that’s systematic racism” (36). Such simplistic perspectives often lead to intolerance toward other views, which makes cooperation toward a common goal difficult.

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