Posted on 05/08/2002 7:55:01 AM PDT by serinde
In a way no one anticipated, George W. Bush has shifted the national conversation about renewing America’s social fabric.
Not since Dwight D. Eisenhower has a president used the bully pulpit as aggressively to tout the importance of faith to republican government. “Without God, there could be no American form of government,” Ike bluntly put it, “nor an American way of life.”[1]
President Bush seems no less persuaded that religion is required to keep the democratic machine up and running. His faith-based initiative assumes that religion’s ability to spark personal and social reform is essential to the nation’s welfare. “In every instance where my administration sees a responsibility to help people,” Bush says, “we will look first to faith-based organizations, charities and community groups that have shown their ability to save and change lives.”
The president is in good company when he links cultural renewal to religious belief. Nobel-prize winning economist Robert Fogel makes essentially the same argument in his recent book The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism. As does Robert Putnam in his bestselling book Bowling Alone. He calls faith communities “the single most important repository of social capital in America.”[2] It’s the same idea in Alan Ehrenhalt’s book The Lost City: The Forgotten Virtues of Community in America.
The president’s agenda is a work in progress, but several themes have emerged in the debate over the role of faith in the public square. Make no mistake: Until religious ideals and institutions re-emerge as the bedrock of civic life, there’s no good historical reason to expect widespread social renewal.
First, the secular dogma guiding social-welfare policy must be overturned. This is the hardest task facing the White House, yet the failure of government programs to face the moral and spiritual dimensions of poverty, drug use and family disintegration can no longer be ignored.
The president sent the right message when he appointed John DiIulio, a leading academic researcher into the potency of church-based ministries, to head his Office of Faith-based and Community Initiatives. When doubters maligned the initiative as “untested” and “risky,” DiIulio delivered the perfect rebuttal: “We already know more of a scientific nature about the extent and efficacy of these programs than the architects of the Great Society ever did when they launched their big-government initiatives in the 1960s.”
Defenders of the Welfare State resist this idea with every breath. House Democrats fought intensely last year over how—and whether—to allow voluntary religious activity in government-funded programs. One got the sense that, apart from any First Amendment concerns, critics couldn’t fathom how exposure to religious ideas or practices might help those in need.
Social science researchers, who’ve done so much to shape public policy, seem equally baffled: A recent evaluation of more than 400 studies of juvenile delinquency found that barely 10 percent even took religious into account. The reason, explains Harvard professor Theda Skopcol, is that the academic literature on social-welfare policy is “so dominated by leftist secularists that it has written out of the record” the work of religious organizations.
The result is a human-service regime that remains indifferent to matters of the heart. This judgment was driven home, for example, in interviews I conducted outside needle-exchange programs in New York City. The idea of these programs is to give clean needles to intravenous drug users to keep them from sharing syringes and getting AIDS. One patron, who gave his name as Walter, already had the disease. He was selling his free needles for drug money. Asked if he could imagine a life without heroin, he winced: “I’m past that. The only good thing I do is getting high.”
As applied to social services, this is the mischief of materialism: It stops hoping that people, with God’s help, can change. They stop hoping as well.
Yet common sense, not to mention the history of the church’s ministry to the poor, tell us that treating people with God-given dignity matters supremely. Indeed, good social-science research increasingly is making the case that faith makes a difference. A faith-friendly White House can promote that research and help set the record straight.
A second lesson from the fight over the president’s initiative is that civil liberty and religious liberty must be defended together. The Senate bill now being considered, called the CARE Act, requires “equal treatment” for all social-service providers seeking government support. That’s a milestone for government social policy.
Nevertheless, it omits key religious-liberty protections passed in the 1996 Welfare Reform law and approved by the House last year. The provisions, called “charitable choice,” allow organizations getting federal welfare funds to keep control over the “practice and expression” of their religious beliefs. The law also permits charities to use religion as a criterion for employment.
It was the latter provision that nearly derailed the legislation and forced the Senate compromise bill. Liberals, gay activists, and others assault the hiring protection as “federally-funded discrimination” and “turning back the clock” on civil rights. The Salvation Army even came under fire for allegedly offering the White House a quid pro quo: support of the Bush plan for federal exemptions from against anti-discrimination laws that clash with Army rules against hiring homosexuals. One of the nation’s most respected charities was vilified as a haven of intolerance.
The remarkable thing is that such open assaults on the independent sector are now routine. No private organization—secular or religious—can preserve its freedom if it loses control over its fundamental mission. An organization’s staff, of course, carries out that mission by embodying its deepest beliefs and values. That’s as true for Planned Parenthood as it is for Prison Fellowship.
Nevertheless, even so-called New Democrats such as Senator Joseph Lieberman are citing Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s to complain about groups that discriminate in employment for religious reasons. Never mind that the 1964 Civil Rights Act specifically exempts religious bodies from anti-discrimination laws on the employment question. Never mind that the Supreme Court has upheld this right for private and religious institutions as a First Amendment protection. And never mind that there’s something deeply offensive about comparing the inner life of America’s churches and synagogues to the institutionalized racism of the Deep South, circa 1950.
Unfortunately, the White House has adopted a strategy of silence on the question. This may have salvaged the legislative effort for now, but at what cost? The Boy Scouts—who meet in living rooms and take no government money—barely survived a recent Supreme Court challenge to their prohibition against gay Scoutmasters.
The autonomy of religious institutions is no longer taken for granted, in part because of a failure to see the nexus between religious and political liberty. Herein lies the next frontier for militant secularism, and unless checked, the president’s initiative will be draw into its dark wood.
Third, church and state must work together to reassert fatherhood and marriage as a national ideal. Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan recently was asked what he considered the most significant cultural change of the last 40 years. His answer: the meltdown of the two-parent family.
“The principal object of American government at every level,” he says, “should be to see that children are born into intact families…and that they remain so.”
That can’t happen without intense suppport from churches, synagogues, and congregations of every stripe. It must be one of their principal objects as well.
The most vital social function of religious communities is to strengthen families. How could it be otherwise? The task of raising children and building strong marriages demands sacrifice and moral commitments sustained by religious belief.
As David Blankenhorn, author of Fatherless America, puts it, “the renewal of fatherhood in our society, if it is to occur at all, will be instigated in large measure by people of faith.”[3] Whatever else our congregations set themselves to do, they must not neglect what amounts to a sacred duty.
A Bush White House now makes it possible for government and religious institutions to mobilize together around the nation’s most urgent social goal: the restoration of fatherhood and marriage.
The administration seems to appreciate this fact. In its welfare reauthorization plan, the White House would allocate $300 million to state programs to “reduce nonmarital births and increase the percentage of children in married-couple families.” We can argue over whether this is a federal responsibility, but we can no longer rationally argue that government has no interest in the fate of fatherhood in America.
Despite the rhetoric of extremists, support for the two-parent family remains wide and deep, crossing political, racial, and economic lines. The administration should enlist organizations such as the National Fatherhood Initiative, Marriage Savers, and the Alliance for Marriage—the latter being a coalition of religious leaders who disagree on most things, except the sanctity of marriage.
Each of these groups taps the authority of religious communities to promote the two-parent family as a civic norm and the surest way to reverse cultural rot. “We now have 30 years of evidence and suffering,” says Matt Daniels, president of the Alliance for Marriage. “We must use every lever available to promote marriage.”
A final lesson of this debate is that the task of social renewal belongs primarily to forces outside Washington. This may prove to be the greatest accomplishment of the Bush initiative: restoring civic trust between church and state. Over the last 18 months, at least 14 states have established offices to broker agreements between social-service agencies and congregations. Bush’s home state of Texas has moved the fastest, forging hundreds of partnerships with religious groups to help with everything from welfare-to-work programs to criminal rehabilitation.
More than 100 mayors have announced plans to launch similar offices in their own cities. Al McGeehan, mayor of Holland, Mich., puts it this way: “If people don’t understand the positive linkage between faith-based organizations and city hall, they’re not living in the real world.”
Right here in Philadelphia, the former mayor personally appealed to religious leaders to create one of the nation’s most ambitious mentoring programs for at-risk children. In less than six months, churches mobilized more than 500 new mentors, doubling the existing Big Brother Big Sister program. Much of this activity would have been unthinkable not long ago.
Though the president is making an ecumenical appeal, there’s a special opportunity—and a serious challenge—for religious believers in his initiative: a vision for civic engagement that does not expect the church to surrender her prophetic role in order to serve the common good.
To borrow from the apostle Paul, a faith-based initiative that takes the church’s mind off things above won’t do much good for the things below. “If you read history,” wrote C.S. Lewis, “you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next.”
If the church is no longer free to be the church, the president’s hope of mobilizing the “armies of compassion” will dissolve. It remains to be seen whether he and other leaders in government will use the tools of government—law, public policy, and the bully pulpit—to preserve their freedom and multiply their works of mercy and grace.
Joseph Loconte is the William E. Simon Fellow in Religion and a Free Society at the Heritage Foundation and a regular commentator on religion for National Public Radio.
[1] Marty Marty, Modern American Religion: Under God, Indivisible: 1941-1960, Vol. 3 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 296.
[2] Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 66.
[3] David Blankenhorn, “The Spirit of the Fatherhood Movement,” in The Faith Factor in Fatherhood, Don Eberly, ed. (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 1999), xiii.
No private organization — secular or religious — can preserve its freedom if it loses control over its fundamental mission. An organization’s staff, of course, carries out that mission by embodying its deepest beliefs and values. That’s as true for Planned Parenthood as it is for Prison Fellowship.
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