Don't Look to Us!

Third Quarter 1998

Despite the supposed American aversion to mixing religion and politics, our welfare policy has exemplified a characteristic Protestant ideal: Semper reformanda—always reforming. Renewed idealism, changed conceptions, revelations about gaps in coverage, and especially the perception of failure have produced recurrent episodes of controversy about social provision, followed by lesser or greater policy change. Our current era of reforming zeal, however, outstrips such periodic adjustments. The nation has now overthrown a six-decade-old strategy for dealing with social distress. Assistance to the needy has become conditional, no longer an entitlement. Rather than Washington being the final protector of the needy, the authority to design welfare programs has been devolved to the states.

And devolution does not end there: welfare authority is being shifted not only from the federal government to state governments but from government to civil society—to non-profit organizations and to voluntary groups. Moreover, this devolutionary movement requires a significant breach of the divide between religion and politics, for its proponents regard religious institutions—churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques, but also faith-based social service agencies and religious voluntary association—to be particularly effective helpers of distressed neighbors and neighborhoods. In the new paradigm for America' s anti-poverty battle, government is supposed to be a support for, rather than an alternative to, faith-based assistance to the needy.

But although it is of the essence of the church, both theologically and historically, to minister to the needy in body as well as soul, many churches have responded to the invitation to enter into a new partnership in service of the poor mainly with indifference or even opposition ....

The Church as Advocate for the Poor

The liberal or mainline vision of how the church should respond to the divine call to show love of neighbor emphasizes a communal and especially a political responsibility to the poor. It is not that a direct personal or church responsibility to reach out to the needy is denied. However, poverty has structural causes that necessitate more than a charitable response. Furthermore, the charge to rescue the oppressed is issued to all of society, and as the action agency for the nation, the government is obligated to respond to ensure that the needy receive what they lack. In this perspective, the evil of ending the 60year federal guarantee of help to poor children outweighs possible positive outcomes of proposals to increase collaboration between government and religious charities.

Moreover, as liberal Christians emphasize, churches already are extensively involved in social services in cooperation with public programs. Indeed, much of their funding comes from government via contracts and grants. Cuts in government social spending, far from increasing the opportunity for creative new service arrangements, instead will actually undermine religious charities. Nor is there a need for legislation to enable faith-based charities to be overtly religious in the services they offer in the public square.....

As advocates for the poor, the new framework sought by liberal Christians is a revitalization of the federal commitment to needy children and families, "a welfare program that will protect all of America' s poor children"—not experiments to direct public funds to explicitly religious charities.

The Church as Alternative to Government

The conservative churches' social/political vision is the polar opposite of the liberal view. Federal welfare—materialistic, an entitlement not necessitating any positive action by the recipient, delivered according to bureaucratic rules—does actual harm to poor families and communities. Welfare instead ought to impose requirements; it should "disincentivize" self-defeating behavior such as abandoning a family or becoming pregnant out-of-wedlock; and it ought to be administered at the lowest level possible, where the welfare worker can know the circumstances of the needy and respond flexibly.

However, real progress in helping the needy requires welfare replacement, not welfare reform. The "tragedy of American compassion," Marvin Olasky argues in his vastly influential book of that title, is in large measure the consequence of the displacement of religious charities by government welfare. Effective help is "Compassionate, Personal, and Spiritual," to use Olasky' s popular catch phrase, and such assistance cannot be delivered by government agencies. Rather, it is provided by churches, religious agencies, and Christians individually, who engage the poor as whole persons, as spiritual and moral as well as physical beings. Truly useful assistance is thoroughly religious: it is transformative, helping people to turn their lives around, and it does not simply dispense benefits because someone is needy.

It is just this sort of dynamic interaction with the poor that the proponents of government collaboration with charities hope to engender, of course. However, conservative churches are deeply skeptical precisely of collaboration with public authorities, for government money comes with strings, or rather ropes, and a chief target of government rules is the overt expression of religion by service agencies.

At one conservative Christian conference on welfare reform, many favored the charity tax credit over legal protections of religious integrity due to the distance it preserves between religious charities and secular government. But others pushed for even more distance, advocating the simple expansion of the tax deduction for contributions in order to forestall anti-religious mischief by officials empowered to decide which charities are eligible to participate in a tax credit program. Yet others thought that the only real prophylactic for secularist government regulation was to radically chop government action and taxes, leaving it entirely to citizens to fund religious charities ....

Prospects

It is disheartening that Christian communities, the churches—the very institutions whose new involvement in the public square holds the key to effectuating a new New Deal in welfare—are inclined rather toward the opposing poles of private charity or statist welfare solutions. Fortunately, however, although these are the strong major tendencies, they are neither the only impulses nor the only reactions.

Conservative churches, despite their disapproval of government welfare and their deep distrust of government intrusion, do not uniformly reject all cooperation with public welfare. Mississippi's "Faith and Families" program draws churches into collaboration with public authorities. The Salvation Army, a theologically conservative church as much as a service agency for the needy, relies on government funds as well as citizen donations to finance its diverse and extensive programs.

Although the Christian Coalition advocated tax credit support for charities in its Contract with the American Family it supported the Charitable Choice concept, and in its "Samaritan Project" called for legislative changes that would permit states to turn to faith-based programs to help substance abusers. The Washington Office for Governmental Affairs of the National Association of Evangelicals, which represents a wide range of evangelical, fundamentalist, and charismatic churches, has actively worked on behalf of both Charitable Choice and the charity tax credit.

On the other side, notwithstanding their "advocacy" stance in the welfare reform debate, mainline denominations are not necessarily wholly committed to maintaining or expanding "welfare as we know it." Their Washington lobbyists may have dismissed the call for a new kind of partnership between government and the churches, but at the local level congregations have been more supportive....

In concept, at least, the new policy ideas should hold significant attraction for the churches, despite their polarized initial reactions. The charity tax credit is explicitly designed to enhance service to the needy, not to replace the governmental safety net, and to do so without harming the religious character of faith-based charities. Charitable choice is meant to guarantee the religious integrity of ministries that collaborate with public welfare, while protecting the religious rights of beneficiaries, and in principle it involves a change, not diminution, of the governmental commitment to the poor.

[Edited excerpt from the Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics & Public Policy, Volume 11, No. 2, 1997. Stanley Carlson-Thies is the Director of Social Policy Studies at the Center for Public Justice.]