RELIGIOUS ROUTINE:

Compassion Capital: Bush’s faith-based initiative is bigger than you think (Lew Daly, April/May 2005, Boston Review)

Quietly but steadily, the Bush administration is pursuing a seismic change in American politics and policy through its so-called faith-based initiative.

When it was announced early in Bush’s first term, the faith-based initiative met with broad controversy. Some critics—both secular and religious—raised concerns that such a program would violate the church–state divide, while others suggested that it would amount to vote-buying among poor constituencies. The Reverend Herbert Lusk of North Philadelphia’s Greater Exodus Baptist Church, for example, endorsed Bush during the Republican National Convention of 2000; in 2002 the social-service arm of his church received a $1 million grant from the U.S. Administration for Children and Families.

Today this attention has largely subsided, and the initiative is moving forward, principally through administrative fiat. Its ultimate goal, President Bush announced in a 2001 speech at the University of Notre Dame, is to make “a determined assault on poverty”: to bring the war on poverty into a third phase, beyond the Great Society and Clinton-era welfare reform. The central idea is not to spend more or less, but to spend differently, with the government providing the resources and private agencies delivering the services. More particularly, the Bush administration proposes to “level the playing field” for religious institutions in the government’s procurement of social services. It officially asks for government “neutrality” toward churches, to “bring the days of discrimination against religious groups” to an end, as President Bush put it in 2002.

President Bush wants to “enlist, equip, enable, empower, and expand” the participation of religious organizations wherever their approaches are deemed relevant to the ends of government. Building on what the president has described as the “long tradition of accommodating and encouraging religious institutions when they pursue public goals,” the faith-based initiative is guided by a theory of the limited state that was evident in the work of Bush’s religious advisers long before 2001. A product of serious thinkers with precise theological convictions, the initiative draws on doctrines that first emerged in European Christianity’s conflict with liberalism and socialism in the late 19th century. Rooted in Calvinism and Catholicism, these doctrines assign a public purpose to religious organizations and ordain government to help those organizations fulfill their public purpose without interference. If implemented in the United States, a sustained program animated by these doctrines could mean a truly radical change in governance. [...]

If we recognize the present-day efforts to bring religious groups and government together as an outgrowth of Christian-democratic principles, we then see that the Bush administration’s “faith-based initiative” is a serious theological effort. In theory at least, this is not simply a bid to replace public welfare with religious charity, or to leave individuals alone, atomized, stranded in the market, as Barbara Ehrenreich and others have argued. Rather, it is an effort to hollow out the welfare state by relinquishing its public authority to religious groups. As Coats put it at a 1996 Heritage Foundation symposium, there is a need to “creatively surrender federal authority to civil society” and encourage a “transfer of resources and authority . . . to those private and religious institutions that shape, direct, and reclaim individual lives.” The result could be well financed or poorly financed; in either case, control over the provision of services will be transferred to religious groups.

These groups, ordained by God to foster a well-balanced social order, are self-governing entities, operating through public power but not under it, with an independent life and a social purpose essential to their mission. By transferring resources to religious groups while relinquishing powers of governance over them, the state fulfills what some religious thinkers see as its ordained role as a support system for religion—a “subsidium,” in the Catholic view, to help religion do its work.

In its emphasis on the organization of public authority in the social realm, the faith-based initiative is different from anything the religious right has previously promoted, and unlike any program an American president has ever enacted from within the executive branch. It also reflects a substantial expansion and refinement of conservative religious influence, running counter to declining grass-roots numbers on the issues (by some measures) and the obvious decline (by any measure) of the major groups that made the religious right a household name in the 1980s. The elite restructuring of conservative religious influence in the United States, including the faith-based initiative, the intelligent-design movement, the revival of natural-law theory, and the growing influence of religious associations within medicine and many other professions—these are subjects for a much broader analysis that cannot be undertaken here. But if the proliferation of the faith-based initiative across virtually all the major executive-branch agencies in the last four years tells us anything, it is that the political influence of conservative religion is not simply growing, but becoming part of the public routine.

Here too Mr. Bush can be said to be a Tocquevillian.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 19, 2005 12:12 PM