Charitable Choice: Bringing Religion Back into American Welfare

According to the most influential metanarratives in American social-policy history, religion has been virtually irrelevant to the development of American welfare in the twentieth century. In crude terms, the main story line is that public welfare replaced religion--for good. The chief alternative story agrees that religion was replaced--but for bad. More carefully, the mainstream story portrays a "quasi-welfare state" supplanting the fragmentary assistance offered by local sectarian, voluntary, and municipal programs, and measures welfare progress by the growth of government provision at the expense of private and religious action. ¹ The competing interpretation regards the creation of the government welfare system to constitute, in Marvin Olasky's terms, "the tragedy of American compassion," because effective, personal, and spiritual assistance was replaced by bureaucratic programs unable to address the deepest needs of the poor. ² Although the two stories evaluate the outcome differently, they agree about the disappearance or irrelevance of religion to American public welfare.

But religion did not vanish. Care for the poor in twentieth-century America cannot rightly be understood without taking into account many roles of religion: providing a wide range of services outside the government welfare system, delivering government-funded services, advocating for changes in welfare policy, raising questions about how much and what kind of assistance is offered. Yet the metanarratives are right to this extent: as the American welfare state was constructed during the century, religion was marginalized, privatized; it became "boxed-in," ³ sidelined. It did not disappear, but it was no longer a major player.

However, by the end of the century, a prominent role for religion was being revived. If in the early decades the growth of government involvement was applauded as a way to overcome the localism, moralism, and discretionary nature of sectarian and private welfare, by the last decade many were welcoming an expanded role for religion precisely to reintroduce a personal, tailored, and value-centered approach. In its new role, though, religion would not be an alternative to government welfare but rather a supplement and even a partner. Federal welfare-reform legislation included a specific measure, the Charitable Choice provision, designed to make faith-based programs part of the mix of services offered by the public sector to families in need. Religion was being de-privatized, becoming explicitly part of the nation's public welfare system. ⁴ It is this more complicated story of religion and American welfare that I sketch here.

The Trajectory of Twentieth-Century American Welfare

Notwithstanding the rhetoric of some latter-day politicians and policy wonks, there never was a period in American history in which all care for the poor was provided by the churches. From the early days of European settlement, government played a role; indeed, in the colonial era local government was the main actor in the Poor Law system of assistance carried over from England. However, lacking a sharp division between church and state, even within this system religion was important; in the South, for instance, Anglican clergy administered public relief. ⁵ And as the new American nation took form after the Revolution and then matured, religious figures and organizations, along with other nongovernmental actors, assumed a major role in providing assistance.

Before the New Deal, arrangements in the new nation for care of the poor were fragmentary, locally diverse, and continually changing. After the Civil War, the federal government provided pensions to veterans and their dependents; in the early twentieth century, state governments began to operate workers compensation programs and to offer mothers' pensions. The main foundation of support throughout, however, was local government. But private and religious charities became essential resources: care for the needy was a prime example of that flowering of associational activity that so captured Alexis de Tocqueville's attention as characteristically American.

The flood of orphans produced by a mid-century cholera epidemic, for instance, prompted Protestant churches to organize the Chicago Orphan Asylum. Evangelical...