The social agenda of churches will be expected to expand, presumably at the expense of the liturgical and theological. As the above chart indicates, religious giving is already crucial, much larger than any other field of philanthropy. Research indicates that about $20 billion now passes through churches into community programs and welfare services.

Religious giving is also individual; few foundations and even fewer business corporations engage in giving for religious purposes. Important changes in church membership and giving patterns in Catholic and Protestant denominations have been underway for several decades. The impact of new pressures is unpredictable.

A third imponderable in the philanthropic formula is whether giving and volunteering are still on the increase. The best answer researchers can offer is that "it is too soon to tell," trends are too short-term to be reliable.

The fourth unknown is the rise in self-centeredness mentioned earlier. Will expenditures for, say, memberships in health clubs, and the accompanying commitment of time to personal health and fitness displace voluntary giving and service? No one knows.

On the other hand, American philanthropy is more extensive in scale than it has ever been. There has been an explosive increase in the number of voluntary associations that are tax-exempt under the rubric of Section 501 (c) (3) of the tax code. It is this section we must keep in mind; it embraces the world of traditional charity and philanthropy--giving and service to the poor and vulnerable, education, support of the arts, religion and so on. Recent journalistic reports of the tax-exempt distort the situation by equating tax-exempt organizations whose concerns are limited to their members or other special essentially private interests with traditional charity and philanthropy. Explaining the history of such special interests in the tax law is a topic for a different sort of Filer Commission.

The most rapid increase in American philanthropic organizations is not among those providing services but in those whose work is usually labeled "advocacy. 11 Such organizations flourish in a society that has been reshaped in recent decades by "social movements. 11 Most prominent among these advocacy organizations have been those concerned with group rights: the rights of women, of minorities, of the physically and mentally disabled--but also the rights of animals, trees and rivers, and the rights of exploited peoples to their cultural heritage and property. Many if not most of these claims cut across political boundaries. They seek to influence public policy by bringing pressure on various governmental bodies to guarantee rights and basic needs in the law.

These claims from philanthropy on public policy explain the way government's role has expanded. The spirit of the civil rights movement has become embedded in legislation and public administration. Tax revenues have been used to finance transfer payments -- philanthropic initiatives have been the leverage behind major redistributions of wealth. The poor have benefited; the middle class seems to have benefited most of all.

Two further comments about advocacy:

(1) It seems to be true that advocacy was the weapon of liberalism in expanding the role of the state.

(2) It now appears to be true that advocacy is the weapon of those who would reverse that expansion and who would instead reduce the role of the Federal government and expand the role of state and local government.

The present reform movement has its roots in the third sector of voluntary action for the public good. The new, revisionist, conservative views of government, politics, religion, and modernity take root in the same voluntary soil as the once-established liberal doctrine of Federal intervention.

An important caution that is usually ignored in the one-sided debates about devolution of power to the states. American racism had its political center in the states; resistance to civil rights was concentrated in the states in the South; Federal intervention was required -- ironically by a Republican conservative president, Dwight Eisenhower -- to break the Southern resistance to school integration.

The civil rights movement arose among the liberal churches of the South and their allies in the North. The Federal Government and Federal courts overrode state opposition. A national policy of racial justice was imposed through such policies as affirmative action in education and employment. These policies are now being reversed, led largely by a new political leadership that is dominated by Southern politicians.

The Southern politicians are not the original authors of these changes, however. The most important and influential new political force in the United States now describes itself as the "Christian Coalition." It is a highly-sophisticated application of the tactics and strategies of the Left that proved so successful in changing American society in the 1950s and 1960s. The Christian Coalition seeks to control the Republican party (rather than to form a third party, although the third party threat is expressed if the Republicans drift from the Coalition's agenda). Among other things, the Coalition focuses on local school board elections, using ideological and organizational discipline more skillfully than the Marxist-Leninists of old. The Coalition has far greater financial resources than its liberal and leftist counterparts of the past, however; it raises hundreds of millions of dollars directly and indirectly through "televangelism," best symbolized by the persuasive electronic savvy of Pat Robertson who seems even better skilled at using the media than Ross Perot, the third party candidate who commanded broad support in the 1992 election.