Piety and Public Funding by Axel R. Schäfer

Author:Axel R. Schäfer [Schäfer, Axel R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, 20th Century, Political Science, Public Policy, Social Policy
ISBN: 9780812206593
Google: z1ha4eBJlP8C
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2012-06-28T01:07:21+00:00

In summation, starting out in the 1940s on a strict separationist platform, the NAE had by the late 1960s moved toward a much more integrationist stance; it sought to protect the organizational autonomy and spiritual mission of religious providers under public funding arrangements and focused on ensuring equal access to public subsidies. While still adhering to a rhetoric of separation, the organization not only acknowledged that many member churches had benefited from public monies, but also began to embrace the subsidiarist policies it used to eschew. The impetus for this originated both with the social awakening of postwar evangelicalism and with Cold War public policies. In particular the programs of the Great Society were crucial in pushing forward the revision of separationist attitudes and practices among evangelicals. The indirect funding streams and absence of effective restrictions on evangelizing that characterized the War on Poverty encouraged closer links between evangelicals and the state, as the examples of education, health care, and social services indicate. Great Society programs largely privileged nongovernmental over public social provision, reduced the state to a role of paymaster, and sanctioned faith-based practices. This suggests that the significance of Great Society social policies for the political mobilization of conservative Protestants lay not simply in their being an easy target for charges of “immorality” and “permissiveness,” but in the role they played in integrating evangelical agencies into the subsidiarist welfare state.

The “subsidiarist turn” of evangelicalism was characterized by a two-pronged approach. On the one hand, evangelicals continued to position themselves as staunch adversaries of the state and sought to uphold a separationist identity. On the other hand, they worked on building funding networks with government agencies and influencing public policy. In short, they combined reacting against the rise of the state with taking advantage of the benefits it offered. Although evangelicals continued to conjure up the specter of secular intrusion in the educational, health care, and social services arenas, they no longer used this to reject public aid, but to limit federal restrictions on their agencies under public funding arrangements. By making the preservation of autonomy within a system of state subsidies the key of the church-state attitude, their main concern was no longer the size of government, but the specifics of the funding arrangement. Evangelicals rejected state subsidies when they threatened to infringe upon religious providers, but demanded them when it came to making sure religious agencies were not excluded from public aid.

Removed from the realm of unquestioned dogma, church-state separationism thus became largely a matter of pragmatic policy that covered up the growing closeness to the structures of the Cold War state in the ensuing decades. As the next chapter shows, this ambivalent position, rather than the outright rejection of the welfare state, formed the basis for the political mobilization of evangelicals under the auspices of its increasingly powerful conservative wing.

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