Two of the weightiest questions in contemporary social ethics are: What is government’s legitimate role in welfare work? How ought the Christian Church to relate itself to the welfare role of government?
The state’s function is to maintain order and to promote justice. In this maintenance of justice, the state is obliged to preserve human rights (including property rights), thus insuring all men their equal due before the law.
The Apostle Paul states, moreover, that “the power … is the minister of God … for good” (Rom. 13:4). Similarly the preamble to the U. S. Constitution states “to promote the general Welfare” as one of the purposes of government. Is the intention of such passages the assignment to the state of unlimited powers in the sphere of human welfare, or is government activity limited (so that the state is not, for example, to administer man’s “religious good”)? What are the responsibilities of the State and of the Church in respect to social welfare programs?
In recent decades, government has steadily widened its functions in the welfare area. The state has become increasingly responsive not only to man’s needs but to his wants. The budget of the U. S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare rocketed from $2 billion to almost $3½ billion between 1954 and 1959, as government absorbed many functions formerly assumed by private voluntary agencies. Such Federal displacement of voluntarism, moreover, will probably increase in the years ahead, due to political pressures on congressmen and to the absence of organized opposition to expanding government powers. A monograph (Arthur S. Miller, Private Governments and the Constitution) just issued by the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, now the main enterprise of the Fund for the Republic, assumes that
The United States can be thought of as a combination of a Social Service or Welfare State, which we have become during the last two decades, and a Garrison State, which we have in some measure approximated since the end of World War II. An appropriate label for this combination is the ‘Security State,’ a name derived from the apparent character of Americans today, which reflects the demands of the individual for economic and psychic security subsumed under the notion of the social-service or welfare principle of government, and the demands of people generally for national security.…
This enlarging government role in welfare activity is widely accepted today. It is justified by such arguments as these: 1. The Great Depression of 1929 required extending the role of government beyond the ministry of justice, because voluntary agencies were unable to cope with the social problem. In the big cities, men gathered at church offices in large numbers begging bread and work; unfortunately most churches lacked resources and manpower to meet such needs. Thereupon the U. S. crossed a new bridge in the concept of social justice in which, it is said, the nation must now accept a factual situation that includes continual state legislation in welfare matters. 2. With the evolution of a scientific and industrial culture, the “Christian response” must necessarily differ from that of earlier cultures. Instead of harboring jealousy over the state’s assumption of welfare burdens, the Church should welcome this development, and evaluate it as a moral and spiritual advance in the state’s sense of responsibility. This new situation requires, it is said, a new church philosophy of welfare; instead of “obstructionist” insistence on older concepts of functions of Church and State, a Protestant policy yielding “creative answers” should transcend all “static views.” 3. The Church’s proper role is one of “partnership” with the state. By entering into mutual contractual responsibility, the Church should supplement the state’s welfare activities by infusing a motif of service and spiritual content into an otherwise secular ministration. By putting spiritual meaning into state welfare activity, the Church is said to bring together justice and love.
This new situation in social welfare involves American Protestantism in Church-State relationships vastly different from those of previous generations. Protestantism has sunk itself approvingly into a state orientation of welfare work without an articulate philosophy and therefore to its own consequent confusion. The “social action—social welfare” field has become the most ambiguous sphere of Protestant effort; nowhere else are controlling principles and consistent practice so lacking.
Some churchmen are wearying of long-established social welfare practices guided by no ecclesiastical principle. Uneasy voices are asking whether the churches can much longer maintain their uncritical partnership with government; whether it is high time to admit that Protestantism currently operates on a philosophy different from its traditional commitments; whether the situation may even be beyond a recovery of thechurch’s historic social purposes. Are the churches ready to pay the price of regaining their older position for which defensive principles are available?
A totalitarian state blurs human “rights” and “welfare” into indistinguishable concepts. The citizen has no inalienable rights against the state and the state alone decrees what constitutes the citizen’s welfare. The state is considered the ultimate source of all rights and the sovereign determiner of the general good. In other words, both “rights” and “welfare” become basically a matter of state definition and implementation; the state monopolizes diakonia along with all else. No demarcation remains between the state’s role in respect to human rights, which assures every man his due before the law, and the quite different role of voluntary benevolent agencies that extend a ministry of mercy to persons in special need.
Any state may, of course, carry heavy welfare responsibility in times of disaster, and in other emergencies when voluntary agencies break down. But whenever welfare needs are fixed as a moral dimension of state concern, government is exposed to increasing pressures to extend its responsibility beyond unfortunate citizens in dire need—pressures that lead sooner or later to the full welfare state.
The Christian must support, and even nourish, the state’s respect for individual dignity which undergirds an emergency concern for public welfare. National interest in the underprivileged has in fact gained depth in recent centuries through Christian influences in social ethics. Both as voters and as officeholders, Christian citizens have helped to shape new patterns in which the contrast between Caesar and Christ is not as sharp as it used to be. Many reservoirs of help for the needy would stagnate, many rivers of general compassion would dam up, many lives would be lost, were it not for the evangelical impetus to social concern and the leadership of Christian laymen in reform efforts.
Evangelical Christians, admittedly, too often approach Christian social ethics in terms of interpersonal relations. Consequently, they neglect the believer’s involvement in the larger framework of corporate social order, and his duty in view of God’s moral purpose through the organs of political power. The Church dare not dismiss all that is done by the state as secular, nor insist that what the state does can become desirable only if performed by the churches. The churches must recognize and support legally established community efforts to meet welfare needs. Payment of taxes, even supportive of state welfare effort, is a part of the Christian’s legal obligation (taxes imposed on early believers went in part to support Nero’s garden parties). Because the Church has an interest in justice also, she dare not dissociate herself from state activity simply because the Church has her own program of love. The conscience of the citizenry must be stirred in respect to statute law, either to support it if good or to repeal it, or individuals will soon be unprotected against the fluctuating pressures of society.
Yet the fact that a Christian may hold office, and may be called to political life, is no reason for his performing all Christian duties officially. The state is to do the things the Church should not do. Caesar indeed is to remain “under God.” But, from the fact that most of the population is seldom any longer active in the churches (even in lands with a state church), and that even if they were minded to do so, churches cannot carry the vast welfare burdens now assumed by the state, it does not follow that the state should assume more welfare work. For the establishment of voluntary beneficial societies by nonchurch members is arbitrarily excluded only by a socialistic state. When the Church competes ineffectively in parallel welfare activities, and allows the impression to grow that public services do the task better because churches no longer pioneer with the highest standards, the Church may well search her own conscience—not to see if some of her present welfare activity would be more efficiently handled if yielded to the community or to the state, but to see if her own contribution can be lifted. The impracticalities are largely due to the fact that modern welfare programs extend far beyond the area of human needs, as traditionally conceived, into the area of human wants.
Do not churchmen concede the case to “welfare statists”—who argue that social welfare is ideally a state responsibility—when they advocate that the Church achieve its own mission and welfare goals through tax-supported government programs? American Christianity must decisively disown the social gospel, which regarded democracy reshaped by “welfare state” ideals as the coming kingdom of God, with government more and more “materializing the Sermon on the Mount in national and international affairs.” This dream was as costly as it was perverse, since it not only recast the biblical imperative, but confused the relation between Christianity and government, Gospel and law, love and justice.
Only by repudiation of the state’s monopoly of social welfare activity, both on the ground of the inadequacy of public material relief, and of the limits of state power and responsibility, will significant social tension be preserved between freedom and compulsion. The Christian revelation not only bases the state’s role of order and justice, and human rights as well, on the transcendent will of God, but also authenticates a sphere of voluntarism and personal duty that socializing governments must not be permitted to usurp. Dare believers approve the “welfare state” concept, expecting from government the fulfillment of their own welfare duties? When Christian leaders argue merely for the liberty of the Church to undertake welfare work, and take the mediating view that the state should not “do it all,” have they not already made a costly concession to welfare-state theory?
The Christian errs both when he seeks full solution of social problems from legal compulsion and environmental pressures, and errs whenever he relies for their solution only on haphazard interpersonal relations shaped by the imperative of love. Christians fall easily into the first error whenever they undervalue the Gospel’s significance as a moral force in human life. By relying exclusively on law and compulsion for social solutions (whether they seek temperance through prohibition, world peace through the League of Nations or the U. N., integration through Supreme Court legislation plus “guns and tanks” if necessary), Christian leaders romantically assume that a change of legal climate can revise the social outlook fundamentally. On the other hand, by underestimating the state’s necessary role in community life, and trusting exclusively in the regenerative powers of redemptive religion in personal life for social betterment, they needlessly surrender a divinely established bulwark against social injustices which the state is designed to rebuke. The self and the state will both be kept in view when Christians comprehend God’s purpose for the individual and for the political order.
Whereas the state is to minister on the plane of justice, the Church is to minister on the level of love. The state is to respect “the family of creation,” without partiality to creed, without preferment of person. The Church’s responsibility is first to “one’s own household” and to “fellow believers”; this special care also reinforces the broader compassion for the multitudes beyond, from which the Church wins her own recruits. As citizen of two worlds, a temporal society and an eternal Kingdom, the Christian living in a democratic nation has large opportunity to combine the concern for law and for love in a single heartbeat. Touching the state’s activity in social welfare, the believer can season official justice (which is non-preferential) with love (which treats each recipient as a special object of affection). The Christian knows that love alone fulfills the law; that a “legal spirit” as such does not meet the deepest needs in human welfare work. The state’s program is humanitarian, but this humanitarianism is not Christian love. At the very least, Christianity will need to supplement existing governmental service.
Has the Church any basis for expecting the state to consider agape a government duty, or for making agape a citizen’s rightful expectation from the state? By providing what is due (as answering to the rights of men)—not as agape, as a love-gift, an act of mercy—the state fulfills its obligation of justice.
Failure of the Church to distinguish clearly what she supports in government welfare as justice, and what if anything she approves from government welfare as benevolence, is a costly mistake. The involvement of the large religious bodies in foreign distribution of U. S. government surplus goods, for example, has tangled the missionary witness in nationalist criticisms of identification with American self-interest in the world power struggle. But that is not the worst. Since 1950, Lutheran World Relief has distributed more than $50 million worth of U. S. surplus foods, and under existing legislation might have exploited the foreign distribution operation even more. But it is now voicing serious regrets. Dr. Paul C. Empie of Lutheran World Relief recently told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee:
This pattern of partnership with government in a relief activity inevitably embodies some working relationships which may alter to some degree its character as a voluntary religious agency.… The voluntary agency may gradually, and perhaps without being aware of it, tend to shift the burden of the support of its program from the gifts of its constituency to the contributions received from government, failing to recognize that its own witness is being gradually diluted thereby. Should it simultaneously fail to acknowledge and publicize at all times the source of the supplies which it distributes, it undermines its integrity from within, and its reputation from without. Since it is, above all, the purpose of a voluntary religious organization to give explicit testimony to the faith its members hold, it is virtually impossible for such an organization to prevent the impression abroad that its charitable activities result solely from its own inner life and resources. When it depends largely upon contributions from government to the operation of its program … this inevitably means the building up of the strength and reputation of religious organizations by the use of government contributions. We of Lutheran World Relief do not want this for ourselves and we cannot believe that any voluntary religious agency would wish such an outcome for itself.
The “partnership” welfare program, in fact, has played fully into the hands of Roman Catholic theories of State and Church. Moreover, in conspicuous instances Rome has not troubled to publicize the fact that supplies it distributes abroad to the needy are really an American government provision and not an ecclesiastical gift. Sometimes in Spain, Italy, Latin America, and Formosa, distribution has even been made contingent on attendance at mass.
Does even the fact that those taxed as citizens (not as church members) include many Christian believers, justify the church (Protestant or Catholic) in seeking to transform government activity into religious benevolence? The distinction between State and Church does not lose validity because most of the citizenry becomes active in churches. Taxes are due the state to promote its task of justice and order, not to advance the kerygma and diakonia. The fact that 50 per cent of the populace is church-identified is no reason for seeking church welfare objectives through the state; rather, this fact requires sharper distinction between goals which can and those which cannot be properly achieved through government. Ought there to be a Christian dependence on state funds for a subsidized testimony to Christ? Even if tax monies should come to Caesar mainly from believers, what of the taxes that come from nonbelievers? Must they be forced to support Christian agencies? Has the Church a right, even in a democratic society, to exact from the state an exclusive, particularistic witness? And can the Church consider its welfare mission really complete in the absence of that testimony?
The expansion of “welfare state” policies, and the uncritical Christian support of interventionist programs that advance socialist ideals, or Christian criticism only of moral “attitudes” while welfare policy is left entirely to the state, springs from disregard of the following fundamental theses:
1. The state’s ministry is in the realm of justice—of human rights, of what is due man as man before the law. A “right” (or “due”) is not a matter of charity or welfare.
2. The Church’s ministry—not the state’s—is in the realm of mercy, of undeserved favor, of charity. What is charity is not a legal due, but a voluntary deed of grace.
3. When the Church seeks to infuse the government’s ministry of justice (tax-supported) with its religious witness (benevolent voluntarism), it destroys the distinction between justice and benevolence, and contributes toward two errors: a. One is the Romish concept of a “partnership” of State and Church toward which Catholic leaders direct the present alliances between government and private groups. While Protestant denominations, which accept government funds without an articulate philosophy, periodically show an “uneasy conscience” over the sectarian exploitation of government funds, Roman Catholics pursue this exploitation eagerly, as in full accord with a specific Church-State theory. b. The other error is the socialist concept of the “welfare state” in which voluntarism is steadily diminished, the Church is viewed as an agent of state benevolence, and the state’s ministry covers “rights,” “welfare,” and “needs” in one package of human “security.” The professing church’s growing acceptance of this philosophy may be seen in the fact that church members increasingly expect “security” from the state, that churchmen approve an extension of state power even over the churches. Under this formula of the state as the definer and provider of man’s “welfare,” the term “welfare” itself becomes a misnomer; the opportunities for voluntarism are subtly dissolved; the churches become agents of the state and increasingly dependent upon government (religious exemption from taxation being viewed as a matter of state tolerance rather than an inherent right of the churches due to the limits of state power). The socialist state meanwhile subtly transforms human “wants” into human “rights.”
4. The Church has no basis for attaching a testimony of grace (as a commentary on the Gospel) to what is owed to men as a “right,” nor can it expect men, who look to the state for this provision as a “due,” to find in it any tribute to mercy. The gravitation of welfare to the state may leave the churches some token of voluntary participation. The state’s substantial control of human welfare means that in time government action will progressively narrow the role of the churches in diakonia, and the churches will have to console themselves mainly as centers of private devotion. Already a revolution in tax laws is envisioned by some social reformers who propose to end all tax deductions for individual contributions to charity. The elimination of this incentive for charitable contributions, combined with rising taxes for state welfare, would soon destroy the remnants of voluntarism in welfare work.
Instead of hailing state welfare programs as an extension of Christian social ethics, it is high time Christian clergy and laymen consider the premise that state welfare programs are inherently anti-Christian.
STEEL DIFFERENCES SETTLED; EVERYBODY LOSES
“Good news” early in the “golden Sixties” ended the long, costly strife in the American steel industry. Instead of a resumption of the strike (which shut down 85% of the national supply, idled 500,000 workers for 116 days, and evaporated millions in wages) and a government-forced truce, the voluntary settlement will activate the mills for 2½ years, benefit labor by some 40 cents an hour without immediate steel price rises (until after election?) and assure jobs in allied industries.
But how “good” the settlement is remains to be seen. Viewed long term, the workers, and politicians credited as go-betweens, may find diminishing consolation. Unbridled in power, the giant labor unions jeopardized national well-being, sidestepped pleas for justifiable work rule revisions, and achieved another inflationary settlement. When the results register fully upon the wage-price spiral, the inflationary thrust (perhaps as much as 10%) will further devalue savings and earnings. Even the politicians who prattled about the virtues of sound money decided to mow political bay by crediting themselves for an inevitably inflationary compromise.
