God’s Economy: Faith-Based Initiatives and the Caring State

Eight years after President George W. Bush began federal support for faith-based social services, the program is still contested by both the right and the left. Daly, a senior fellow at Demos, a nonpartisan public policy think tank, offers the current economic crisis as a good reason why President Obama should redouble efforts to more fully embrace it. His dense, scholarly review of the history of faith-based initiatives, which he traces to 19th-century German and Dutch welfare systems, may be the most comprehensive and evenhanded to date. Daly charts the evolution of the First Amendment’s establishment clause from strict institutional separation of church and state to one that emphasizes equal treatment for religious and secular service providers. Daly is convinced that faith-based social service providers offer the best moral standards for protecting families and communities, though it is clear he is referring mainly to Christian providers. In pluralistic 21st-century America, where people of no particular faith are the fastest-growing segment of the religious landscape, it’s not clear that the public is ready to trust religious institutions more than secular ones. (Dec.)