Works & Days
Godly Republic:
A Centrist Blueprint for America’s Faith-Based Future
by John J. DiIulio, Jr.
University of California. 326 pp. $24.95
In a Republican primary debate in December 1999, the six GOP candidates for President were asked to state their favorite political philosopher. Orrin Hatch named Abraham Lincoln. Steve Forbes chose John Locke. George W. Bush answered: “Christ, because he changed my heart.”
Bush’s reply, an instance of his tendency to refer to his Christian faith, made waves on both sides of the American debate over church and state, as secularists hyperventilated about a coming theocracy and Christian conservatives hailed the prospect of a counteroffensive in the culture wars. Once Bush was elected and assumed office, both the fears and the hopes were heightened further by one of his signature policy proposals: the creation of a White House office of “faith-based and community initiatives.”
The purpose of the new office was to make sure that public funds would be channeled to charitable agencies aiding the poor and needy even if the agencies in question were affiliated with religious organizations, provided that taxpayer funds never backed expressly religious purposes. “Government, of course, cannot fund, and will not fund, religious activities,” Bush said in launching the program in 2001, “but when people of faith provide social services, we will not discriminate against them.”
John DiIulio, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania who had long promoted this approach, was a natural choice to head the new office. A socially conservative Democrat, DiIulio was also a consummate centrist, with, it was felt, some chance of diffusing the passions surrounding the effort. Although his brief service in the White House—less than nine months in 2001—did give shape to the faith-based initiative, it also taught DiIulio many cautionary lessons about church, state, and contemporary politics.
Godly Republic presents DiIulio’s reflections on his experience, and on the outlook for future cooperation between government and faith-based charities. The book is not a memoir, and DiIulio has very few insider stories to tell about his time in the White House. It is, rather, an impassioned plea for a truce in the church-state wars and, as the book’s subtitle puts it, “a centrist blueprint for America’s faith-based future.”
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According to DiIulio, the heated debate over religion and government in America has been fought between two narrow extremes that do not represent the country’s political traditions, legal realities, or national sentiments. From the first, he writes, the nation’s founders agreed “that America should be neither a secular state nor a Christian nation,” but instead should rise into “a great and godly republic” in which religion would play a crucial role in civic life but would be neither enshrined nor constrained by the federal government.
It was this middle ground that in turn came to be protected by the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence. DiIulio offers a forceful defense of the Court’s neutrality doctrine, with its distinction between government support of religious groups engaged in civic enterprises and government support of religion per se. The American public, he argues, embraces this same middle ground. “Neither strict secularists nor religious purists represent what we the people love most about our godly republic.”
Having devoted roughly half his book to making the case for this middle ground, DiIulio contends that it is best represented by local faith-based programs, supported by government, that aid the poorest of the poor. In keeping with the relevant laws and judicial decisions, a funded program must have a secular purpose (like providing social services); its primary effect must neither advance nor inhibit religion; and it must not foster “an excessive government entanglement with religion.”
Thus, funded social-service programs can do their work in a church, but that work cannot involve proselytizing or provide incentives for conversion or religious practice. They must offer aid to all who need it, regardless of religious affiliation. And they must make jobs available not only to members of the church or its denomination but to any qualified candidate.
These, in DiIulio’s judgment, are sound distinctions. Although in practice they have led to some absurdities—for instance, the Court has ruled that state governments can pay for books used in Catholic schools but not for maps—for the most part, he maintains, they have also permitted constructive cooperation within common-sense bounds.
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Why, then, has there been so much controversy about these rules? And why has their implementation, as DiIulio describes it, been both sluggish and dismally ineffective?
He blames two warring camps in Washington. On the one hand, strict church-state separationists have long prevented perfectly legitimate cooperation between government and religious groups, arguing that any such relationship is dangerous and impermissible. On the other hand, overly zealous Christian evangelists have given the public the wrong idea about what should and what should not be involved in such cooperation. In 2001, for example, congressional Republicans tried to pass legislation that would have explicitly permitted religion-based hiring in faith-based programs, and would have significantly loosened the protections against federally funded proselytizing. The effort nearly strangled Bush’s initiative in its cradle.
What is needed for constitutional church-state cooperation to become a reality is a truly middle- ground approach. DiIulio acknowledges that clear data on the relative effectiveness of faith-based social services are very hard to come by. What we do know, however, is that the institutions most often willing to enter the most dangerous inner-city neighborhoods and to ease the pain and burdens of the desperately needy are churches and other religious bodies, particularly in the black community. There is, he insists, nothing un-American or unconstitutional about government’s coming to the aid of those groups when it can, and there is something callous about refusing to do so.
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Throughout this book, DiIulio writes with a unique blend of street sense, good humor, social-science discipline, and humanitarian appeal. In a no-nonsense style backed by academic empiricism, he unmistakably conveys just how profoundly impressed he has been by the efforts of pastors and church volunteers in city after city, and the reader cannot help coming away similarly impressed.
But precisely because of its empirical and middling approach, Godly Republic can at times feel like an endless string of caveats. DiIulio begins each chapter with two “myths” —generally one myth propounded by strict secularists and another by religious purists—plus a “fact” that comes down squarely and moderately between them. At the end of every train of thought is another call for moderation: moderation in our view of religion and government, moderation in our expectations for publicly supported faith-based aid, moderation in our hopes for changing the culture of poverty. DiIulio even wants to moderate our estimate of the significance of religion in public life altogether, asserting that “scholars and pundits who once ignored religion are now exaggerating its political importance.”
All of this seeming temporizing gives the book a flavor of defeatism. In describing his own efforts to establish a middle ground for faith-based aid, DiIulio acknowledges frankly that they have come to little. “Between 1996 and 2006,” he writes, “neither the Clinton administration nor the Bush administration had done much to forge partnerships with faith-based groups that measurably helped people in need.” As for the future, he calls essentially for more of the same. We can do better, he says, but not by much. Nor does his case for doing better differ from the one he made before his tenure as director of Bush’s faith-based office.
Indeed, Godly Republic shows little sign of having been shaped by DiIulio’s experience in Washington. Oddly, he brushes past a number of clearly interesting stories about the administration’s initiative, and mentions only in passing that after leaving the White House he published and then withdrew a scathing denunciation of some top Bush officials (calling them, among other things, “Mayberry Machiavellis”). Just as he leaves open every question about that peculiar incident, so he writes as though there were little to learn from his efforts to put into practice the ideas he lays out in this book.
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Nevertheless, the impression of defeatism does not last. Proceeding through this book, one eventually grasps the truly unfamiliar character of DiIulio’s case. When it comes to aiding the poor, he really is a moderate—i.e., one who does not believe there is a way radically to transform the way we think about the poor, let alone poverty itself, but who does believe that a long-running shouting match over the First Amendment should not be allowed to prevent resources from flowing to cash-strapped volunteers who are helping needy people one by one.
Usually, when politicians propose a “third way,” they speak in terms of breaking the grip of Right and Left in order to unleash a torrent of populist common sense that will wash America clean. This is the radical centrism of Ross Perot, or in smaller doses of John McCain or Barack Obama—or of President Bush’s rhetoric in speaking of his faith-based agenda. DiIulio’s centrism is not of this stripe; his aims and expectations are as moderate as his tone and his convictions. In the end, Godly Republic is a simple and decent plea for a simple and decent end. That is what makes DiIulio’s brand of centrism truly unusual in our politics; it may also be why his efforts in Washington failed to bear fruit.
