God's Economy
Faith-Based Initiatives and the Caring State
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- $67.99
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- $67.99
Publisher Description
President Obama has signaled a sharp break from many Bush Administration policies, but he remains committed to federal support for religious social service providers. Like George W. Bush’s faith-based initiative, though, Obama’s version of the policy has generated loud criticism—from both sides of the aisle—even as the communities that stand to benefit suffer through an ailing economy. God’s Economy reveals that virtually all of the critics, as well as many supporters, have long misunderstood both the true implications of faith-based partnerships and their unique potential for advancing social justice.
Unearthing the intellectual history of the faith-based initiative, Lew Daly locates its roots in the pluralist tradition of Europe’s Christian democracies, in which the state shares sovereignty with social institutions. He argues that Catholic and Dutch Calvinist ideas played a crucial role in the evolution of this tradition, as churches across nineteenth-century Europe developed philosophical and legal defenses to protect their education and social programs against ascendant governments. Tracing the influence of this heritageon the past three decades of American social policy and church-state law, Daly finally untangles the radical beginnings of the faith-based initiative. In the process, he frees it from the narrow culture-war framework that has limited debate on the subject since Bush opened the White House Office for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in 2001.
A major contribution from an important new voice at the intersection of religion and politics, God’s Economy points the way toward policymaking that combines strong social support with a new moral focus on the protection of families and communities.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.