Tough Love on a Level Playing Field: the Intellectual History of George W. Bush's Faith-Based Initiative
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Tough Love on a Level Playing Field: The Intellectual History of George W. Bush’s Faith-Based Initiative ____________________________________ A Thesis Presented to The Honors Tutorial College, Ohio University _______________________________________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for Graduation from the Honors Tutorial College with the degree of Bachelor of Arts in History ______________________________________ by Eli S. Wanner April 2021 Contents Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1 Historical Precedents to the Faith-Based Initiative ............................................................. 2 Conception and Birth of the Faith-Based Initiative .......................................................... 19 Philosophy and Reasoning behind the Faith-Based Initiative .......................................... 27 Compassionate Conservatism ........................................................................................... 42 Skepticism of and Opposition to Faith-Based Initiatives ................................................. 53 Political Fate of the Faith-Based Initiative ....................................................................... 60 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 70 Bibliography ..................................................................................................................... 74 1 Introduction Before 9/11 and the Middle East took over President George W. Bush’s presidency, he ran on a distinctly religious platform. Inspired by his own religious convictions and his triumph over alcohol abuse, Bush centered his 2000 presidential campaign on the “Faith-Based Initiative,” a novel partnership between the public and private sectors that he believed held the key to overcoming indigence and moral dissolution in America. Although it would face harsh criticisms from both the Left and the Right, as well as political challenges, the Faith-Based Initiative has had a lasting impact on American governance to this day. The Faith-Based Initiative presented a distinctive approach to social services in America. It fit neither the big-government mold of Roosevelt’s New Deal, nor the liberal welfare state of Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty, nor the libertarianism of Reagan’s federal budget cuts. Instead, the Faith-Based Initiative merged a variety of conservative and religious philosophies into one -- a peculiar project that differed from anything that had been tried in America before. Bush and other allies of the Faith-Based Initiative drew on Catholic social teaching and “subsidiarity,” neoconservatism and “civil society,” Calvinist “sphere sovereignty,” religious pluralism, Clintonian “charitable choice” law, and, perhaps most importantly, “compassionate conservatism.” Each of these concepts, when applied by White House officials, helped bring religious providers of social services into the American welfare apparatus. The Faith-Based Initiative allied the federal government with religion and embraced moralism by allowing religious entities to apply for federal funding on equal footing with secular agencies, pushing back against trends toward the secularization of the public sphere. 2 Historical Precedents to the Faith-Based Initiative Public-private partnerships were not a novel idea. For the entirety of American history, the federal government partnered with local organizations to support or provide charitable services. George W. Bush’s Faith-Based Initiative was just one more iteration of the concept. In the 19th century, before the Civil War, welfare as we understand it today did not exist. Instead, the line between public and private service providers was blurred as the poorhouse became the chief mode of welfare provision. Poorhouses were sponsored by both the government and private agencies. The network of poorhouses that developed in the mid-19th century would soon become a system of Protestant and Catholic organizations that aimed to reform and discipline the unfortunate.1 Elizabeth McKeown, writing on the Catholic contribution to charitable organizations, argues that the most important goal of Catholic social service providers was to save the souls of the needy.2 However, this salvation-centered view of charity would gradually give way to a larger-scale, centralized, secular approach. From the late 19th century to the 1920s, charity and welfare increasingly became the purview of the social worker (often liberal, Protestant, middle class women), a role that traditional Catholic service providers saw as “propagandists for birth control” and divorce – social work was the sign of a society in moral decline.3 Progressive reform toward professional social work would originate with the Settlement House Movement started by social worker Jane Addams and her Chicago Hull-House. Settlement Houses were a kind of 1 Elizabeth McKeown, “Claiming the Poor,” in With Us Always: A History of Private Charity and Public Welfare, ed. Donald T. Critchlow and Charles H. Parker (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1998), 145. 2 Ibid., 146. 3 Ibid., 150-151. 3 group home in which middle-class social workers would live alongside the poor and provide them with a variety of social services – everything from healthcare to child- rearing to art shows (which happened to transfer middle class culture to the poor).4 Settlement Houses offered middle-class women the opportunity to obey their Protestant faith’s commandment to love their neighbor and relieved them of what Addams called “the desire for action, the wish to right wrong and alleviate suffering [which] haunts them daily.5 Another form of philanthropy that arose in the late 19th century was the Charity Organization Society, a kind of organization that appeared in the Midwest and on the East Coast in the 1870s. Proponents of Charity Organization Societies believed that the modern, “scientific” organization methods of large-scale institutions were superior to a multitude of smaller religious agencies. The agencies that coalesced into these larger units operated under the assumption that such centralization would provide more efficient relief to the poor. Still, Charity Organization Societies retained some of the moral impetus of smaller religious organizations, made manifest in their efforts to encourage poor families to adopt middle-class habits and their worries that public assistance would lead to dependency.6 This call for behavioral change would become a hallmark of American welfare. The moralistic focus of the Charity Organization Societies would temporarily end in the 1920s, as professional social work replaced the work of local poorhouses and 4 Michael E. McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920 (New York: Free Press, 2003), 65-69. 5 Jane Addams, “The Subjective Necessity of Social Settlements,” in The American Intellectual Tradition: Volume II: 1865 to the Present, ed. David A. Hollinger and Charles Capper (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 143. 6 Andrew J. F. Morris, The Limits of Voluntarism: Charity and Welfare from the New Deal through the Great Society (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), xxxiii. 4 religious organizations. Charity Organization Societies, influenced by the Progressive belief that poverty was caused by societal (not moral) failure, evolved into associations that focused on providing material relief instead of changing poor people’s behavioral patterns. In 1921, the founding of the American Association of Social Workers further professionalized the social work profession. In the past, social workers had been volunteers, dispatched to visit poor families and dispense moral advice. Now, in the 1920s, social workers shifted their focus from morality to psychology. The new welfare apparatus, while still privately organized, emphasized the “maladjustment” of the poor on a psychological level. They were especially influenced by Freudian thought – poverty was best overcome by helping the needy to overcome past trauma and unresolved inner conflicts, not by improving their behavior.7 Bush's religious and voluntary Faith-Based Initiatives would retain certain elements of this secular, professional social services model. Both Bush’s Faith-Based Initiatives and the professionalized voluntary services of the 1920s (like Associated Charities) had a general distrust of the federal government’s ability to provide social services. For example, both voluntary service providers and professional social workers strongly opposed the pensions provided to single mothers by forty out of the fifty states. This distrust primarily stemmed from the idea that a public welfare system would fail to recognize the individual needs of particular families, and that its blanket welfare provision would not be appropriately tailored to specific poor people’s situations.8 Similar concerns would reemerge almost verbatim among proponents of charitable choice and compassionate conservatism in the 1990s. 7 Ibid., xxxv. 8 Ibid., xxxvi. 5 Ultimately, however, governmental control of social services took precedence. With the Great Depression of the 1930s, the need for welfare was simply too great for the voluntary sector to accommodate. Private charitable organizations began to shift their caseload over to the public sector, particularly those cases that were not unique and did not call for