Administration Tackles ‘Great Crisis of the Spirit’ in America : Instilling values has become a central justification for several key items on the White House’s domestic agenda.

How does a society instill and invigorate values? It’s a philosopher’s dilemma with increasingly practical implications.

From President Clinton to conservative former Education Secretary William J. Bennett, political leaders across the ideological spectrum are declaring that government programs cannot ameliorate America’s social problems without a sweeping spiritual renewal.

A “great crisis of the spirit . . . is gripping America today,” Clinton says. “The real crisis of our time is spiritual,” says Bennett.

For years, values have been the political equivalent of weather: Everyone talked about them but no one did anything about them. Now the Administration is beginning to shift the debate to new terrain by elevating the issue of how public policy can strengthen personal values and the community institutions that nurture them.

This impulse is increasingly influencing hard-headed discussion over welfare, urban renewal and even crime. The crackdown-on-criminals legislation passed by the Senate last month, for instance, also includes $400 million to help community groups operate after-school programs in troubled neighborhoods. The Administration is crafting its urban redevelopment plan to encourage cities to use grass-roots community organizations to design and deliver social services.

The common aim in these initiatives is “to strengthen the fabric of churches, nonprofit groups and local organizers--things that pull people together and can uphold values,” says Marc A. Weiss, special assistant to Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry G. Cisneros.

Much still divides left and right on these issues. But even the widening consensus that many social problems are rooted in cultural trends like the growth of out-of-wedlock births represents an enormous convergence after decades of polarization.

“There is a growing sense that as a society, as a public sector, we don’t have enough carrots or sticks to put things right,” says William A. Galston, deputy director of domestic policy in the White House. “If a majority of our citizens don’t do what’s right because it’s right, we’ll never solve our problems.”

This latest upsurge in public discussion of values comes just a few months after Hillary Rodham Clinton’s musings about the need for a “politics of meaning” drew snickers in Washington and less than two years after then-Vice President Dan Quayle was chastised as racist, sexist and hopelessly nostalgic for condemning out-of-wedlock births in his famous “Murphy Brown” speech.

But the debate about values continues to push forward--this time largely because of rising anxiety about crime, which is increasingly seen as linked to the erosion of the family and breakdowns in other social mechanisms for transmitting mores, observers say.

“Americans have been taught for at least 30 years it is inappropriate to comment on the choices that other people make,” says Gary L. Bauer, president of the Family Research Council, a conservative think tank. “The tension is that on the other hand, Americans are clearly seeing that the individual choices that have been made are having public policy consequences.”

Clinton has scrambled the partisan dimensions of this national dialogue by enunciating views on the importance of two-parent families and personal responsibility that Democrats mostly have shied away from for the last quarter-century. When discussing the contribution of moral erosion to problems like teen-age pregnancies or crime--or the need for criminals to bear personal responsibility for their actions, no matter the conditions of their upbringing--Clinton can sound like a conservative. But these agreements between left and right mask a fundamental difference in approach, particularly on government’s role in inculcating values.

In a speech to the Heritage Foundation earlier this month and in a later interview, Bennett argued that a restoration of cultural values demands a rollback of government, because the modern welfare state has usurped the roles formerly played by private institutions like churches. This rule has exceptions: Most conservatives believe public schools should be encouraged to “teach right and wrong.” They also back school vouchers, partly because they could help churches start or expand religious schools.

But generally, Bennett says, concern about eroding values “leads ineluctably to the conclusion that we need less government--that government arrogates responsibility unto itself and this ends up taking responsibility from the American people.”

For many conservatives, welfare typifies the dynamic. In an argument embraced by Bennett and other leading conservatives, author Charles Murray maintains that welfare has obliterated the historic financial constraints against bearing children out-of-wedlock and thus disrupted the “natural forces that have . . . for millennia” encouraged marriage, as he put it in a recent article.

Murray’s answer: eliminate welfare for all women not now on the rolls. In less drastic form, the same argument shapes the House GOP proposal to allow states to cut off welfare for teen-age mothers.

Clinton rejects those proposals as punitive. While largely echoing the conservative call for a revival of values, he portrays such spiritual renewal as a supplement to government action, not a substitute for it.

In the memorable phrase of his November speech to black ministers in Memphis, Tenn., Clinton maintained that progress against social problems requires changes from both the “inside out” and the “outside in.”

Most of these “outside in” changes are components of his broader domestic agenda: more money for Head Start, job training and college scholarships, the creation of community development banks to lend in depressed areas and increased funding for community police.

But Clinton has moved well beyond those broad policy initiatives. Without much attention, the claim of instilling values has become a central justification for several key items on his agenda.

In the Administration, the uncharted frontier of these discussions about cultural reconstruction centers on efforts to use government to strengthen the local institutions, from churches to block associations, that bolster values and form the civic spine of neighborhoods.

These evolving efforts at “capacity-building” for local institutions reflect an awareness that “government has the least credibility on the street level in terms of promoting values,” one senior policy-maker says.

Under the urban renewal legislation passed as part of the budget package last summer, cities have to include grass-roots organizations in the planning process when designing applications for the new federal “empowerment zones” that will be established later this year.

Similarly, the $100-million initiative to combat homelessness under way at HUD envisions much greater use of nonprofit local groups to deliver services, Weiss said. The same thrust drives legislation that Sen. Bill Bradley (D-N.J.) has pushed through Congress, providing funds for community groups to operate after-school programs at public schools and modern equivalents of settlement houses for young mothers.

Overall, the Administration’s thinking on strengthening community institutions is “still spotty,” says Linda Tarr-Whelan, president of the National Center for Policy Alternatives in Washington. Financial constraints have reduced many of these ideas to pilot projects. But the direction, Tarr-Whelan believes, is promising: “One of the larger gains of the Clinton Administration could be creating new ways to think about not only how we deliver services, but how we leave something behind in the community beside the service itself,” she says.

Still, no one underestimates the difficulty of reversing insidious cultural trends that have cumulated for decades, particularly in depressed urban areas.

Indeed, Douglas S. Massey, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, says Clinton may be overestimating the value of moral exhortation and underestimating the importance of social isolation in setting urban cultural standards.

“At one level it is important to say these things are important to the society,” Massey says. But in most urban areas, he maintains, the call for spiritual renewal “will be seen as irrelevant unless you change the circumstance.”