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1 introduction A Force for Good Greater Than Government On February 5, 2009, scarcely two weeks after his inauguration, President Barack Obama delivered a short speech announcing that he was continuing one of his predecessor’s most controversial programs, the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, albeit with a slightly altered focus.1 Given Obama’s background as a community organizer in Chicago—one that involved a great deal of work with churches (Obama 1995)—it is perhaps unsurprising that the new president decided to retain and improve the office rather than abolish it as some of his supporters had called for him to do. Much more surprising was the language he used in his speech. While carefully highlighting the compassion that motivates many faith-based organization (fbo) volunteers, and the positive works of fbos in general, the president inserted a conspicuous phrase that was picked up and repeated by wire services as the embodiment of what he is trying achieve with the office: “No matter how much money we invest or how sensibly we design our policies, the change that Americans are looking for will not come from government alone. There is a force for good greater than government” (White House Office of the Press Secretary 2009). “A force for good greater than government” became the next day’s headline in many newspapers. Whether he intended it or not (and if one reads the full speech, it is apparent that his point was much subtler than this), the president had repeated and reinforced the notion that the work of faithbased organizations is more virtuous, or at least more capable, than that of government-sponsored welfare. It is easy to overemphasize casual phrases buried within much larger speeches —to take things out of context and assign meaning later—but Obama’s invocation of this notion is a seductive point of departure for a variety of more substantive contextual reasons. Above all, Obama had just won an election by repudiating his predecessor’s antigovernment policies. The Faith-Based Initiative was one of President George W. Bush’s most controversial programs. 2 • introduction With two wars and an economy in shambles on his plate, it is intriguing that Obama decided to foreground such an issue so early in his administration. Why did he do this? Was it a simple case of political pandering? Possibly—Obama did make inroads with the evangelical Christian community during the election , and perhaps this was an attempt to nurture those votes. But it is also possible that Obama’s casual invocation of the benefits of faith-based institutions marked something more significant, namely, the discursive normalization of faith-based organizations as a suitable replacement for government-provided welfare. It is possible that the president was simply repeating a widely held assumption among the electorate—that government-based welfare is manifestly inferior to faith-based care—even if his own views on the topic are considerably more complex. This book explores the political mobilization of this sentiment—individualistic , antigovernment, but proreligious notions of welfare —over the past thirty-five years in the United States. In short, this book is about “religious neoliberalism ”—its theological origins, its political orientation, and its power to motivate mainstream policy and ideas. It is not intended to impugn or secondguess those who are motivated by faith to provide aid to the poor. The critical angle is directed at the idea of deploying that motivation as a justification for eliminating the state’s role in welfare or, more generally, in society. To be sure, this topic is often associated with the Republican Party or the Religious Right. It is impossible to ignore the institutions and movements that underlie the religiously conservative Right—nor would I want to—but if Obama’s turn of phrase indicates anything, it indicates that this rationality is deeper than the Republican Party or the high-profile ideologues who promote this view as a panacea to solve sundry social ills. Religious neoliberalism did not originate when George W. Bush was inaugurated in 2001. It did not evaporate when Obama was inaugurated eight years later. It is a sentiment that has great political power precisely because it cuts across a number of different political and theological perspectives. Simply put, many people have political axes to grind with the welfare state, and a great number of people view their form of worship as a suitable means to replace it. But while this sentiment has been mobilized successfully to bond...

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