Religion and the Role of Government

EJ Dionne has a good article in Sojourners on the liberal/conservative religious take on the role of government in our lives. The short version is that liberals need to acknowledge the importance of personal responsibility and conservatives need to acknowledge that there are some social problems that only the enormous resources of the government can adequately address:

What is required of progressives? The argument for personal responsibility cannot be ignored, and reforging the link between social and personal responsibility ought to be a battle cry of religious progressives. The poor suffer from high rates of teen pregnancy, fatherless families, and family breakup and they suffer from unjust social structures, large changes in the economy that produce greater inequality, and—in the case of African Americans and Latinos—racism. There is no reason for progressives to be silent about either half of that sentence, and no good reason for conservatives to deny the second half. By speaking out for personal responsibility, religious progressives can challenge their conservative friends to get serious about social responsibility.

But religious progressives also need to challenge the core conservative contention that government help for the less fortunate inevitably produces "dependency." Our nation moved closer to "equality of opportunity" because of extensive government efforts to offer individuals opportunities to develop their own capacities (and to offer minorities and women protection against discrimination). As legal philosopher Stephen Holmes has pointed out, Adam Smith, the intellectual father of the free market, favored a publicly financed, compulsory system of elementary education. After World War II the government's investment in the college education of millions through the GI Bill simultaneously opened new opportunities for individuals and promoted an explosive period of general economic growth. As Holmes put it: "Far from being a road to serfdom, government intervention was meant to enhance individual autonomy. Publicly financed schooling, as [John Stuart] Mill wrote, is 'help toward doing without help.'"

Progressives also need to challenge a core conservative view that private and religious charity is sufficient to the task of alleviating poverty. That is simply not true. In an important 1997 article in Commentary magazine—hardly a bastion of liberalism—William Bennett and John DiIulio made the crucial calculations: "If all of America's grant-making private foundations gave away all of their income and all of their assets, they could cover only a year's worth of current government expenditures on social welfare." What would happen the next year?

They cited a study by Princeton's Julian Walpole of 125,000 charities, each with receipts of $25,000 a year or more. Among them, they raised and spent $350 billion annually. That sounds like a lot until you realize that this is only one-seventh of what is spent each year by federal, state, and local governments.

Bennett and DiIulio, neither of them enthusiasts of the old welfare state, concluded: "It is unlikely that Americans will donate much more than their present 2 percent of annual household income, or that corporate giving will take up any significant proportion of the slack in the event of future government reductions." The title of their article was "What Good Is Government?" Their answer was clear.