Skillen

Faith-based social service defended at Princeton

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:

	that this tradition wants to "privatize" religion and make it a mere "personal preference," "disconnected" from public life;
	that the movement for public education during the nineteenth century was flawed not only by Protestant hegemony but by the assumption that education is a "government" function;
	that the court decisions during the second half of the twentieth century redefined "nonsectarian" to mean "secular" or "non-religious";
	that this secularism is the equivalent of a religious faith, and that it has gained a public monopoly, such that it not only discriminates against religious groups but "leaves nothing that it touches unsecularized."

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.