Is "faith-based welfare reform" really what we need -
either for religion or for our public life?
[11-28-01]
Gene TeSelle reflects on a speech at Princeton Seminary by James W.
Skillen, president of the Center for Public Justice, a conservative
think-tank in Washington, D.C.
Princeton Seminary graduates continue to wonder about
the direction being taken at their old school, quite different from the
courageous days of John Mackay's 1954 Letter to Presbyterians.
The latest issue of the Princeton Seminary
Bulletin reminds us that the school now has an Abraham Kuyper Prize
for Excellence in Reformed Theology and Public Life, endowed in 1998 by
a special gift for the purpose of recognizing a Dutch theologian who
organized a Reformed party to intervene directly in politics. The 2001
prize was given to James W. Skillen, president of the Center for Public
Justice, a conservative think-tank in Washington, D.C.
Skillen's lecture is a defense of faith-based welfare
reform, linking it with the tradition of Kuyper. Because of its breadth
of argument, it helps clarify many of the current issues that trouble
public discussion about the relationship between government and
religion.
Skillen repeats some familiar indictments of the
heritage of the Enlightenment and twentieth-century Supreme Court
decisions on the relation of church and state:
It is not surprising, then, that Skillen welcomes the
Bush administration's faith-based initiative, which would give federal
funding directly to religious organizations. Catholic Charities may be
content, he says, to have both religious and "secular"
aspects; but other groups ought to have the right to understand
themselves as "integrally religious" and gain funding simply
on the basis of ability to provide the needed services. This, he says,
"will, for the first time, establish public and not just private
pluralism and will eliminate monopoly privileges in the public square
for any religious or ideological viewpoint."
The argument may seem plausible at first glance. But
it needs to be examined carefully, on several counts.
First, its characterizations of Supreme Court
decisions on church and state are dubious at best. The court has been
careful not to be "secular" or "anti-religious," as
the wording of many decisions indicates. It has tried to respect the
differentiation in the First Amendment between "free exercise"
and "establishment." It has also been concerned to
differentiate between various kinds of issues, ranging from school
textbooks to religious displays in the public square. When it comes to
the military chaplaincy, which Skillen uses several times as leverage
for a broader program of funding faith-based organizations, this has a
unique legal basis: if the government monopolizes its citizens' time in
a "total institution" like the military, then it has the
obligation to provide for their religious needs. While chaplains
accomplish much that is good in the military and in other "total
institutions" run by governments, it would be misleading to make
this the model for social policy as a whole.
Second, its reasoning about the appropriate ways for
Christian faith to express itself publicly is shortsighted. The West has
learned, starting in the seventeenth century, that religion can cause
unacceptable damage in the political sphere. Thinkers and legislators
began to acknowledge that we differ over many basic questions about the
ends of human life; at the same time they recognized that in many
aspects of life we are simply operating in human terms, thinking along
with others, looking at causes and consequences, trying to ensure a good
public life, and using criteria that belong to public life itself. This
kind of reasoning is "secular" without being
"secularist," and thus it may be helpful to get in the habit
of using the more accurate word "public," even as we also
de-fuse the word "secular."
In contemporary political philosophy one often
encounters the metaphor of "translation" from religious to
political reasoning. Few would say that religious convictions have no
role. People have every right to express these in civic discussion. And
we all know of many cases in which religious convictions have motivated
important political movements; often they have even encouraged "confrontive"
activities that helped bring major political transformations. When they
do this, however, it is not to impose religious viewpoints, and
certainly not to gain a share of the public purse, but to bring about
changes that are for the common good, not identical with the supreme
religious good.
What, then, are Skillen's concerns, leading him to
propose a rather different relationship between religion and politics?
His fear is that "not only does the secular triumph over the
religious, but government overwhelms the nongovernmental." For him
"secular" implies "secularism," and
"government" implies "big government." The remedy,
then, is that, "even when government sets up its own schools and
welfare agencies, it ought not to give them any advantage or privilege
not given to independent schools and service organizations."
Skillen chooses not to join the many movements that
are seeking to delimit the powers of government by making it more
democratic, more equitable, more respectful of rights. He accepts, it
seems, the power of government to tax and regulate and punish. But some
of its functions and funds would be shared with private organizations,
including religious ones.
There are several church traditions in the U.S. that
long ago forswore the public schools and set up their own -- the Roman
Catholic, the Missouri Synod Lutheran, and the Christian Reformed. The
"Christian Schools" movement, however, became widespread only
after the Supreme Court's Charlotte-Mecklenburg decision on
school desegregation in 1971. Since that time the number of religious
organizations seeking federal funding for their schools has increased.
During the same period we have also encountered other
movements whose declared goal is to bypass public school systems -- for
example, with publicly funded "charter schools" that are
usually not required to meet the same standards of teacher training and
accountability. Often these are sold to African American and Hispanic
communities as the only way their children can get a decent education.
What is lost is the motivation to ensure that all public
schools are good schools -- and along with it the motivation to ask
about the real problems of public education, such as the gross
disparities of tax income between urban and suburban jurisdictions in
every metropolitan area.
This fragmentation of public concern is one of the
disturbing signs of our times. It is the conservative or moderate
equivalent of the "post-modernism" that is so often bemoaned
as the philosophical source of all our problems.
Carving up the body politic is not the way to go, even
though it may look like the "safe and easy course" when we
consider the difficulties of public discussion in a society that becomes
increasingly diverse, not only religiously but ethnically and in many
"lifestyle" issues. But abandonment of political discourse is
a symptom of weariness with the very nature of public life. For what
else is public life than the willingness to deal with all the
differences and disagreements among people who share common turf and
seek ways for them to interact in this important but limited aspect of
their life together?
"Public pluralism" sounds good. Something
like it is necessary when civil society is as diverse and complex as
that of the United States as we enter the twenty-first century. But we
need to ask what it means and how it might best be achieved. This is not
the time for premature cries of alarm, for our legal tradition is one
that has tried, fallibly but still effectively, to take account of the
complexities as they arise. And it is not the time for premature
solutions, for we are still learning what it means to have Christians
and Jews, Muslims and Buddhists, fundamentalists and New Agers and
agnostics, share the common space of public deliberation.
