God and the underclass: liberalism sneers at religion and scorns God. The Welfare State and the underclass follow accordingly.

LIKE the script of a horror film, the underclass nightmare lurches through the pages of every major urban paper.

-- In Queens, a heroin-addicted mother with AIDS murders her four-year-old daughter, stuffs the body in a laundry bag, and with the help of her current boyfriend -- also a drug addict -- tosses the bag from a bridge into the East River. The woman is "mother" to four children through a succession of drug-numbed boyfriends.

-- In Philadelphia, two commercially successful "gangsta rap" artists realize their fantasies, gunning down a female police officer during a holdup.

-- In Chicago, police raid the apartment of five sisters on welfare. The apartment swarms with cockroaches and is chilled by a winter wind pouring through broken windows. In four rooms are 19 children, the youngest 12 months old. Feces and garbage cover the floor; hungry children share food in a dog bowl with several dogs. Dazed, one of the kids asks a policewoman, "Can you be my mommy?"

-- In Detroit, a five-year-old is thrown from a 14th-floor window of a public-housing complex because "he refused to steal."

-- In Washington, D.C., a gunman empties a semi-automatic into a swimming pool crowded with young children.

The statistics are numbing. In Cleveland, the black illegitimate-birth rate has hit 85 per cent. In Washington, D.C., nearly half of all young black men are in jail, on parole, or under arrest. Young men in Harlem are more likely to die of violence than were soldiers in Vietnam.

While underclass pathology is most acute and devastating among urban blacks, it is spreading relentlessly among whites. As Charles Murray warned in his seminal Wall Street Journal article, "The Coming White Underclass," the illegitimate-birth rate (harbinger of all underclass problems) is rising steadily among whites and now approaches 25 per cent. The white illegitimate-birth rate now almost equals the black rate in the mid 1960s when Daniel Patrick Moynihan first issued prophetic warnings about black family collapse.

Conservative explanations of the growth of the underclass have focused on the destructive impact of welfare. As an underclass community starts to emerge, increasing numbers of young women become married to a welfare check rather than to the fathers of their children. Marital disruption starts transforming other behaviors. Young boys raised without fathers grow up wild. Deprived of the role model of a working husband and father, young males look to other role models -- amoral, self-destructive, and violent. As marriage is no longer seen as a necessary prerequisite to childbearing, the behavior of young women also changes; self-control shrinks, promiscuity and early sexual activity flourish.

Welfare's deconstruction of marriage is thus behind the whole tangle of underclass pathology: eroded work ethic, dependence, illegitimacy, drug abuse, crime. This thesis, developed largely by Charles Murray in Losing Ground and subsequent writings, is accurate and compelling. But it is important to note that Murray has never argued that welfare is the sole cause for the growth of the underclass. Moreover, even in the implausible event that the entire government welfare system were obliterated overnight, it is unlikely that this would promptly produce renewed and viable underclass communities. The social equivalent of the second law of thermodynamics holds: it is far easier to destroy social order than to re-build it.

Still public debate on the underclass remains preoccupied with manipulating external economic incentives to alter behavior. Liberals focus on providing well-paying jobs to encourage constructive behavior; conservatives seek to curtail welfare's rewards for self-destructive behavior. We seem to have forgotten that behavior is shaped not only by external economic incentives but also by cultural norms and internal character -- "the habits of the heart." While economic incentives must never be minimized, we should also look to how character is formed: how the principles of virtue are planted and cultivated in the psyche.

Not surprisingly, the growth of the underclass since the mid Sixties has coincided with a weakening of traditional moral culture at all levels of society: sexual mores have changed, the bourgeois family and the work ethic have been ridiculed, self has been exalted over family and community, passion and self-indulgence have been lionized over self-control. The weakening of traditional moral culture was as significant a factor as government welfare programs in the burgeoning underclass pathology. Any strategy aimed at putting the thousand anomic pieces of Humpty Dumpty back together must combine welfare reform with moral and cultural renewal.

To understand the cultural aspect of our problems, we should look to the past. A good place to start is Marvin Olasky's The Tragedy of American Compassion, which examines successful charity efforts in America's past. Olasky explains that charity workers in prior centuries saw the problems of idleness, drunkenness, crime, promiscuity, and marital desertion as emanating from moral culture and individual character. Historically, private charity organizations took as their central task the molding of character and self-discipline within vulnerable low-income communities. Efforts to deal with the economic aspects of behavior while ignoring the moral and spiritual would have been regarded as foolish.

Typical of these earlier anti-poverty efforts was the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA), established in the nineteenth century, as an instrument for combatting urban crime. The YMCA saw its mission as molding the moral character of the young: it successfully undertook a struggle to win the hearts and minds of inner-city youth.

We can also learn from the life of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism. Wesley crisscrossed eighteenth-century England on horseback for nearly half a century, traveling thousands of miles over miry, nearly impassible roads, delivering countless sermons to a largely ignored and rootless urban population. Wesley and his followers transformed the mores, character, and conviction of England's lower and middle classes. Many credit him with setting the moral foundation for England's economic, political, and social progress over the next century.

Two hundred years after Wesley's death, we still find one institution that is overwhelmingly effective in transforming behavior and in helping individuals to lift their lives out of poverty and despair, self-destruction and violence. That institution is the church. The power of religion is amply documented. Investigating black inner-city youth, Richard Freeman of Harvard finds that boys who regularly attend church are 50 per cent less likely to engage in crime than boys of similar backgrounds who do not attend church; they are 54 per cent less likely to use drugs and 47 per cent less likely to drop out of school.

My own research finds similar effects among all classes and races. Boys and girls who regularly attend church are two-thirds less likely to engage in sexual activity in their teens. Regular church attendance halves the probability that a woman will have a child out of wedlock.

The findings pile up. Children attending religious schools are two-thirds less likely to drop out than are nearly identical children who attend secular schools. Children aged 10 to 18 who do not attend church are a third to a half more likely to exhibit anti-social and dysfunctional behavior.

Finally, research shows that young people who attend church have a positive effect on the behavior of other youngsters in their immediate neighborhood. The positive effect of young people motivated by religious virtues is the exact counterpart to the heavily publicized negative peer pressure exerted by street gangs who suck the young into lives of aimless violence and alienation. What we need are more gangs of Sunday-school students as an antidote to the Crips and the Bloods.

Religion is a social penicillin, lethal against a wide array of behavioral pathogens. Ironically, the modern liberal mind regards religion not as a medicine, but as a leprosy from which society must be quarantined. The issue is not merely the purging of religion from the public square, but the more critical expansion of the public square in the modern era, displacing the church from its essential roles in education and charity.

But despite liberal efforts to shove it to the sidelines, the church remains America's strongest weapon in the war against family disintegration, crime, drugs, and despair in low-income communities. Churches can clearly succeed in tackling these problems where government has clearly failed. What is necessary is to allow the church to resume some part of those functions in which it has been supplanted by the modern state. In particular it is crucial to break up the near monopolies over education and aid to the poor which the state has erected through its enormous coercive fiscal power.

How can this be done? The first step is school choice: giving poor parents vouchers or scholarships equivalent to the sum that is spent nominally educating their children in the public schools. These scholarships should be used to place children in schools the parents choose: public, private secular, or religious. If true choice in education were established in the inner city, thousands of parents, desperate to save their children from a rising tide of violence, drugs, and promiscuity, would flock to religious schools. New schools, affiliated to the most dynamic inner-city churches, would spring up.

The potent moral force of the churches would be magnified as they became interwoven with more aspects of the life of the inner city. Parents who placed their children in church-affiliated schools would themselves be drawn more closely to the moral authority of the church and to other parents who shared their values. Each church school would become a nucleus around which a community of shared norms could develop. The school would serve not only as a moral haven for children, but also as a moral beacon reaching into the surrounding neighborhoods.

This spring, legislation capable of sparking this type of moral renewal in the inner cities was introduced in the House. "Saving Our Children: The American Community Renewal Act of 1996," sponsored by black Oklahoma Republican J. C. Watts and by Jim Talent, Republican from Missouri, combines the older conservative concept of enterprise zones with a new moral dimension. Following the enterprise-zone concept, the bill would create economic opportunity by cutting taxes and red tape in up to a hundred urban areas. Its novel feature is that in order to qualify for tax relief the locality would have to agree to offer school choice; low-income parents in the community would be eligible to receive federal scholarships enabling them to send their children to private primary and secondary schools, including religious schools. The bill would provide up to a half-million such scholarships.

The Watts - Talent bill also creates a new tax credit intended to enlarge the role of private-sector charity in aiding the poor. It would allow individuals to deduct 75 per cent of the cost of donations to private charities working directly with the poor: many, if not most, of these charities would be religious in nature. The credit would be available to federal-income-tax filers nationwide and could be applied to charitable gifts worth up to $400 each year. The Watts - Talent bill thus uniquely combines the economic and moral strands of conservative thought into a single vehicle to help the urban poor.

Liberals, passionate to preserve their current political quarantine of God, will argue that the bill violates the First Amendment's provisions on religious establishment. But the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled to the contrary. As long as the individual beneficiary, not the government itself, determines where funds will be spent, there is no prohibition on government-derived money being spent for religious education. Just as a widow can endorse her Social Security check and place it in the collection plate at her church, a parent may use a government scholarship or voucher to enroll a child in a religious school.

Some conservatives will object that the bill continues and validates the Federal Government's role in aiding the poor. But the Federal Government currently spends almost $300 billion each year on a huge variety of programs for the poor. The "radical" welfare reform passed by Congress last year and vetoed by President Clinton did not cut this spending, but merely slowed its rate of growth. Conservatives cannot place the underclass on hold while they wait for the federalist's millennium when federal domestic spending will cease. As long as the taxpayers contribute hundreds of billions of dollars to federal coffers each year on behalf of the poor, we have an obligation to see that that money is spent in ways that heal rather than harm. It should become a conservative axiom that, as long as a single federally collected dollar is spent on poor children, that dollar should be spent in the way that has the greatest potential to help: education vouchers to allow poor kids to go to religious schools.

By unleashing the church's strength through school choice we can at least begin the struggle for the hearts and minds of the next generation. Of course, religion is not a magic bullet. But without religious-based moral renewal, the chances for arresting the present slide into chaotic violence are nil.

School choice is thus not a narrow education issue. It is, rather, a pivotal battleground in which the moral struggle for the soul of the underclass will, in a large measure, be fought. The weapons for this vital struggle are at hand if we choose to grasp them. Meanwhile the body count continues. In Chicago, a 12-year-old is gunned down on the way home from a Halloween party. In a Manhattan welfare hotel a mother deliberately scalds her two-year-old infant to death. In Los Angeles, a family with young children returning from a barbecue makes a wrong turn and is surrounded by a murderous ring of gang members who riddle the vehicle with bullets. Several family members are hit; a three-year-old girl dies. The abyss widens.