Who Will Provide? The Changing Role Of Religion In American Social Welfare
336
Who Will Provide? The Changing Role Of Religion In American Social Welfare
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781000010411 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Taylor & Francis |
| Publication date: | 11/28/2021 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 336 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
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Chapter One
Religion, Civil Society, and Social
Provision in the U.S.
Theda Skocpol
The genius of U.S. voluntary membership federations was to make local and national commitments complement rather than oppose one another. When today's conservatives advocate local voluntarism apart from, or in opposition to, government, they advocate a break with the past, not a return to it.
GROUPS RALLY AND PARTICIPANTS PLEDGE to remake their lives. Older associations and religious denominations are besieged, while new groups multiply and flourish. Organizers issue clarion calls for volunteers to help individuals, embody fellowship, and pursue national salvation.
Is this the United States of the 1990s?—the America of the Million Man March, movements of church and community people to "Stand for Children," of stadium rallies for Promise Keepers; the America of proliferating evangelical and Pentecostal churches, the "thousand points of light," and the national Volunteerism Summit? Or is it instead the nineteenth-century United States, with its evangelical camps, crusades for temperance and against slavery, its Chautauqua meetings and wildfire roundings of Methodist and Baptist congregations, its waves of poor relief organized by benevolent and charitable societies?
Just posing this question reminds us that America has experienced repeated crusades combining quests for community and for individual and societal salvation. Again and again, established religious denominations have beenovertaken by religious renewals; and Americans recurrently call for voluntary efforts to reform persons and society. Religious people, religious ideals, and religious ties figure prominently in American social movements and in the making and implementation of the nation's social-welfare policies.
But how, exactly? The challenge is to comprehend the full set of ways religion and religious folks have mattered in American democracy and social provision. This is not easy at a time when very tendentious and misleading claims are being made, both by those who would condemn and those who would celebrate the contributions of religion to our nation's social and political life.
Secularism versus Charity
These days, many on the liberal end of the U.S. political spectrum presume that religious instincts in public life are inherently small-minded and antidemocratic. Liberals often imagine that everything progressive in U.S. society and politics has been rooted in secular, economically grounded struggles. Celebrating the achievements of the New Deal and its immediate aftermath, secular liberalism downplays much that happened in the history of American democracy and social provision prior to the mid-twentieth century.
Almost in mirror image, today's self-proclaimed conservatives call for a moralistic revival, advocating a return to what they consider pre-New Deal fundamentals in the realms of civil society and social compassion. Some conservatives talk of revival in religious terms, while others speak more secular tongues. Yet regardless of idiom, the conservative revivalist hope is much the same. It is grounded in a vision of an allegedly simple authentic America of the self-sufficient family, immediate neighborhood, and local church. In this romanticized America, domestic government above the local level is thought to be unnecessary. Except for purposes of national defense, reliance on government and extra-local politics can be avoided as the source of corrupting social evil.
Battling liberals who celebrate a national, secular welfare state, conservative revivalists paint the twentieth-century "welfare state" as a bureaucratic demon. Modern welfare states spread "spiritual malaise," writes Irving Kristol, because they encourage dependence and decadence, undermining the "reverent" communal religiosity on which true personal fulfillment depends. Religiosity also appears in the version of the revivalist argument advanced by Marvin Olasky. In The Tragedy of American Compassion, a book much touted by conservatives, Olasky outlines a twentieth-century-long process of social decline, as U.S. welfare-state builders turned away from an early American "understanding of compassion that was hard-headed but warm-hearted" and was based on a Calvinist understanding of a "God of both justice and mercy." Olasky hopes there can be a "renewal of American compassion" through "faith-based charity"—person-to-person ministration by churches, community leaders, and ordinary citizens.
Similarly, in their article issuing a clarion call for "A New Civic Life," Michael Joyce and William Schambra advocate repudiating America's entire misguided century-long, progressive-led "experiment" with national community and the "professional" and "bureaucratic" welfare state, returning instead to "the America celebrated and immortalized in Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America," the authentic America of local "island communities." In that America, Joyce and Schambra argue,
A citizen's churches and voluntary groups reflected and reinforced his moral and spiritual values and imparted them to his children, surrounding him with a familiar, self-contained, breathable moral atmosphere. Voluntary social welfare associations ministered to the community's vulnerable according to the tenets of compassion and charity. A citizen's schools, whether publicly or privately funded, enshrined those values, and were run in accordance with them, with extensive citizen involvement and supervision. Critical public decisions were made in township meetings, ward conclaves, or other small, face-to-face gatherings in which the individual's voice was as important as his vote. The most important decisions about citizens' lives were made not by faceless others in some distant state or national capital; they were made among the citizens themselves, in gatherings of neighbors and acquaintances.
Joyce and Schambra believe that their version of authentic America persisted throughout the nineteenth century, only to be compromised and damaged by twentieth-century progressives and liberals who tried to establish a false national community and disrupted genuine local bonds. "Whereas before, public affairs were well within the grasp of the average citizen, easily comprehended and managed by ordinary folk wisdom and common sense, now public affairs had allegedly been so complicated by modernity that, according to the progressive elites, the average citizen could no longer hope to understand and manage them." In the name of a false "national community," progressive experts and bureaucrats "replace[d] civic and voluntary social programs" and turned citizens into "passive 'clients'."
All of this reached its zenith in the Great Society anti-poverty reforms, say Joyce and Schambra. But then a return to American basics set in. Since the 1970s onward, they argue, Americans of all persuasions have been pulling back from the "apparently smoothly humming federal edifice." With "the moral foundations of the liberal project ... eroding," the "federal government comes to be seen ... as a distant, alienating, bureaucratic monstrosity." Americans yearn to "return to the idea of community that finds expression in small participatory groups such as the family, neighborhood, and ethnic and voluntary associations—an idea far more natural and easier to sustain."
Many liberals tell much the same story of trends and shifts over time. They simply offer an opposite moral assessment, viewing the growth of a national welfare state during and after the New Deal as the high point of American democracy, and decrying tendencies before the 1930s and after the 1980s to "abandon" the poor to the vagaries of private charity.
A Distorted Picture
Before we accede to the terms of debate structured by these arguments we should notice that dubious understandings about the place of religion in the shaping of American civil society and public social policies underpin both of these points of view.
There may be bits of truth in both perspectives, yet each misses crucial religious contributions to American democracy and social provision.
Today's conservative revivalists imply that "original," healthy forms of civil society in the United States were local and apolitical, that churches and other voluntary associations developed apart from extralocal government, and that American social policy has been mainly about (better or worse) ways of helping the very poor. This focus on charity for the very poor makes sense to conservatives, because they simply presume that all nonpoor Americans have done just fine through a combination of market enterprise and salvationist religious faith rooted in voluntary local congregations.
To be fair, conservatives have underlined some important and somewhat forgotten truths. In recent years the academic literature on "social welfare policy" has been so dominated by leftist secularists that it has written out of the record positive contributions from religiously inspired service to the poor If noted at all, such ministry has transmuted into machiavellian acts of class or racial domination. This is unfortunate, because much of redeeming value has been accomplished by religiously committed individuals and congregations delivering spiritual along with material aid to fellow members of congregations or needy persons beyond the existing congregation.
There can be little doubt that many religious congregations have flourished—both in the past and today—because they are communities for all of their members in both practical and spiritual realms of life. Today's evangelical "megachurches" feature huge arrays of support groups for adults and programs for children. They also promise caring warmth. As a huge evangelical church complex on the outskirts of Presque Isle, Maine, blazons on its billboard: "Family Christian Center: An Oasis of Love."
As for care of the poor, Marvin Olasky's book details hundreds of examples throughout American history of volunteer efforts to minister to the needy or the wayward. From colonial days on, religiously motivated women, above all, have organized and undertaken these efforts. Whoever may have formally headed the countless "benevolent societies" of America's towns, women provided the footwork and the direct human contacts. Olasky bemoans that today, even religiously administered aid to the poor has too often become bureaucratized, dominated by professional social workers rather than volunteers. Although his fulminations against social workers are often misplaced, Olasky is right to suggest that there is still a need for personal and spiritual engagement along with the even-handed delivery of social services.
This point is poignantly made in Not All of Us Are Saints by David Hilfiker, a leftist physician and Christian who lives, worships, and delivers care amidst the poor of Washington DC. As Hilfiker shows, a loving and demanding faith can often be the only effective means of redemption in a setting where access or material benefits alone cannot help disorganized and disorderly persons. Hilfiker also recognizes, however, that broader public institutions with adequate resources and procedures are also necessary, to support and surround faith-inspired personal engagement with the poor.
Despite important insights about religiously inspired personal ministry, conservative revivalism fails just as much as leftist secularism as a full account of the history of American civil society and social provision. American voluntary efforts, religious or secular, have never been just locally organized. Starting long before the New Deal, democratic civil society and public social policy alike have flourished at the intersection of government and voluntary associations. Successful social programs have as often been about mutual social support among average Americans, as about the delivery of aid to the desperate. Important programs have stressed mutuality and democratic inclusion, not just betterment of the down-and-out. And to the degree that professionally administered social services have developed in the United States, church-affiliated agencies have been at the heart of the process, as anxious as any other agencies to have funding and support from state and national governments.
Religious organizations and values have helped to shape broad features of U.S. voluntarism and shared social provision that today's secular liberals and conservative revivalists tend to overlook. Hardly restricted to a search for righteousness or salvation, religious beliefs have been the source of inclusive and nation-spanning values and organizations fostering shared and participatory citizenship. Periodically, too, religiously inspired Americans have led tumultuous movements for social justice and radical reform, even as they have continued to call for helping individuals one at a time.
Before returning to the ideological clashes and perplexing social and political trends of the current era, let me spell out this alternative story, at odds with both liberal and conservative orthodoxy. I first describe the core features of large-scale social provision in America, and then document that voluntary groups have often been extensive membership federations, not just local charities aimed at the poor. American civil associations managed to leverage religious values, ties, and resources, without ceding direct control to clergy or to any religious establishment. In this way, biblical religion in America nourished a lively democracy, which in turn demanded and benefited from public social programs aimed at broad categories of fellow citizens.
The Heart of U.S. Social Provision
Both conservatives and liberals today discuss "social welfare" in America as a set of federal government initiatives fashioned during the New Deal and the Great Society. Much of the argument between these camps focuses on programs for the very poor, which liberals view as essential aids to the least advantaged, while conservatives see anti-poverty programs as largesse distributed without regard for personal behavior or morals. In addition, today's liberals and conservatives argue about "entitlements," understood as unencumbered payments out of public funds to individuals. But both sides of these disputes are arguing about a very skewed picture of American social provision. Public social programs emerged and flourished long before the New Deal. And at all stages of the development of American social provision, the most extensive and expensive efforts have never dealt with the poor alone; nor have American social programs ever been justified in individualistic terms.
While some might quibble here or there, most would agree that America's finest social policy achievements have included the following milestones, spanning much of the nation's history:
Public schools: The United States was the world's leader in the spread of widely accessible public education. During the nineteenth century primary schools, followed by secondary schools, spread throughout most localities and states.
Civil War benefits were disability and old-age pensions, job opportunities, and social services for millions of Union veterans and survivors. By 1910, more than a quarter of all American elderly men, and more than a third of men over 62 in the North, were receiving regular payments from the federal government on terms that were extraordinarily generous by the international standards of that era. Many family members and survivors were generously aided as well.
Programs to help mothers and children proliferated during the 1910s and early 1920s. Forty-four states passed laws to protect women workers, and also "mothers' pensions" to enable poor widows to care for their children at home. Congress established the Children's Bureau in 1912 and in 1921 passed the Sheppard-Towner Act to fund health education programs open to all American mothers and babies.
Programs to help farmers and farm families, including subsidies for landgrant colleges, services provided through U.S. Department of Agriculture and its extension services, state-level agricultural programs, and the farm-price support programs of the New Deal and afterwards.
The Social Security Act was passed in 1935, including unemployment insurance and public assistance to the poor along with Old Age Insurance (OAI), which subsequently became its most popular part. OAI eventually took the name "Social Security" and expanded to cover virtually all retired employees, while providing survivors' and disability protections as well. Most employees and their dependents were included in Social Security by the 1960s. Modeled in part retirement insurance, Medicare was added to the system in 1965.
The GI Bill of 1944 offered a comprehensive set of disability services, employment benefits, educational loans, family allowances, and subsidized loans for homes, businesses, and farms to 16 million veterans returning from World War II. Subsequent "little GI bills" extended some aid to veterans of subsequent wars.
Although these giant systems of social support developed in different periods of American history and varied in many ways, they have several important features in common, each of which is worth a bit of elaboration. Taken together, these features add up to a formula for cultural and political viability for broad-gauged social provision in American democracy.
Major U.S. social programs have aimed to give social benefits to large categories of citizens in return for service to the community, or else as a way to help people prepare to serve the community. The most enduring and popularly accepted social benefits in the United States have never been understood either as poor relief or as mere "individual entitlements." From public schools through Social Security, they have been morally justified as recognitions of—or prospective supports for—service to the community. The rationale of social support in return for service has been a characteristic way for Americans to combine deep respect for individual freedom and responsibility with support for families and due regard for the obligations that all members of the national community owe to one another.
A clear-cut rationale of return for service was invoked to justify the veterans' benefits expanded in the wake of the Civil War and World War II. Less-well understood, though, is the use of civic arguments by the educational reformers and local community activists who originally established America's public schools. They argued for common schools not primarily as means to further economic efficiency or individual mobility, but as ways to shape moral character and prepare all children for democratic citizenship. American programs to aid farmers and farm families have always been justified as supports for those who perform essential national services, growing the country's food supply. Similarly, early twentieth-century programs for mothers were justified as supports for the services of women who risked life to bear children and devoted themselves to raising good citizens for the future.
Today's Social Security and Medicare systems likewise have a profound moral underpinning in the eyes of most Americans. Retirees and people anticipating retirement believe they have "earned" benefits by virtue of having made a lifetime of payroll contributions. But contrary to what pundits and economists often assert, the exchange is not understood as narrowly instrumental or individualistic. Most Americans see Social Security and Medicare as a social compact enforced by, and for, contributors to the national community. The benefits are experienced as just rewards for lifetimes of work—-on the job and at home—not simply as returns-with-interest on personal savings accounts.
Major U.S. social policies have built bridges between more and less privileged Americans, bringing people together—as worthy beneficiaries and as contributing citizens—across lines of class, race, and region. Even if policy milestones started out small compared to what they eventually became, the key fact has been the structure of contributions and benefits. Successful social policies have built bridges, linking more and less privileged Americans. They have therefore not been considered or labeled "welfare" programs.
Public schools, for example, were founded for most children not just the offspring of privileged families as was originally the case with schools in other nations. U.S. farm programs were open to richer and poorer owner-farmers alike, and sometimes to tenants as well. Civil War benefits and the GI Bill were available to all eligible veterans and survivors of each war. Although mothers' pensions eventually deteriorated into "welfare" payments to some of the very poorest mothers, they were not originally so stigmatized. During the early 1900s a great many American mothers who lost a breadwinner-husband could suddenly find themselves in dire economic need. What is more, early federal programs for mothers and children were universal. The Children's Bureau was explicitly charged with serving all American children, and its first chief, Julia Lathrop, reasoned that if "the services of the [Sheppard-Towner] bill were not open to all, the services would degenerate into poor relief."
Social Security and Medicare are today's best examples of inclusive social programs with huge cross-class constituencies. Although Social Security is the most effective anti-poverty undertaking ever run through the government in the United States, its saving grace over the past several decades—during an era of tight federal budgets and fierce political attacks on social provision—has been its broad constituency of present and future beneficiaries, none of whom understand it as "welfare."
Broad U.S. social policies have been nurtured by partnerships of government and popularly rooted voluntary associations. There has been no zero-sum relationship between state and society; no trade-off between government and individuals; and no simple opposition between national and community efforts. The policy milestones I have identified were developed (if not always originated) through cooperation between government agencies and elected politicians, on the one hand, and voluntary associations on the other hand. I am not referring merely to non-profit, professionally run social-service agencies. I mean voluntary citizens' groups. The associations that have nurtured major U.S. social programs have usually linked national and state offices with groups of participating members living in local communities all across the country.
Public schools were founded and sustained by traveling reformers, often members of regional or national associations, who linked up with leading local citizens, churches, and voluntary groups. The Patrons of Husbandry (the Grange) and the American Farm Bureau Federation were the largest of many farmers' associations that have been intimately connected to the creation, expansion, and administration of state and federal farm programs. The movers and shakers behind early 1900s state and national legislation for mothers and children were the Women's Christian Temperance Union, the General Federation of Women's Clubs, and the National Congress of Mothers (which eventually turned into the PTA). Civil War benefits ended up both reinforcing and being nurtured by the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR). Open to veterans of all economic, ethnic, and racial backgrounds, the GAR was a classic three-tiered voluntary civic association, with tens of thousands of local "posts" whose members met regularly, plus state and national affiliates that held big annual conventions.
Social Security has had a complex relationship to voluntary associations. Back during the Great Depression, a militant social movement and voluntary federation of older Americans, the Townsend Movement, pressed Congress to enact universal benefits for elders. But Social Security definitely did not embody specific Townsend preferences, and the movement itself withered away during the 1940s. Today over 35 million Americans fifty and above are enrolled in the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), whose newsletters and magazines alert older voters to maneuvers in Washington DC that affect Social Security and Medicare. The AARP does not have very many local membership clubs (though it is currently working to establish more of them). Still, many elderly Americans participate in locally rooted seniors' groups, including the union-related National Council of Senior Citizens, which has played a key role in advocating for Medicare. Moreover, along with unions and religious congregations, federal, state, and local governments have done a lot over the past thirty years to create services and community centers for elderly citizens. An important side effect has been to foster considerable social communication, civic volunteerism, and political engagement among older Americans.
(Continues...)