A Limited Partnership: The Politics of Religion, Welfare, and Social Service
A Limited Partnership: The Politics of Religion, Welfare, and Social Service
Synopsis
Excerpt
In this introduction I start to examine the ideas that gave rise to the current welfare policy in a way that I follow throughout the book. It is a method of analysis that varies from many analyses of social policy because I proceed with one eye glued on the policy debate itself, and the other focused on how the actual implementation of policy affects the delivery of local social services. This way of looking at things adds some new thinking to a central, but untested, idea buoying the 1996 welfare reform legislation. It is the idea that religious congregations and faith-based nonprofit organizations are much better at delivering social services locally than the welfare bureaucracy.
The 1996 legislation not only ended welfare as we knew it, but it also sent the design and delivery of welfare services to states and localities with an assumption that the religious community would be a key player in local welfare efforts. Attached to the legislation was an important stimulus designed to create more religious involvement in local social service delivery. the provision, called Charitable Choice, allows public money to go to religious congregations and faith-based organizations to provide public social services. the details of Charitable Choice are less important at this point in the discussion than its spirit, which is that the religious community . . .