Book Details CPJ’s Contribution to Welfare Reform

December 17, 2009

A new book by Lew Daly, a senior fellow at the think tank Demos, presents a thorough historical study of the influence of social-pluralist thinking on welfare-reform policy in Washington from the early 1990s to the start of the Obama administration. The book, God’s Economy: Faith-Based Initiatives and the Caring State, has just been released by the University of Chicago Press. A distinctive feature of the 300-page work is its effort to explain the unique philosophical perspectives of Catholic and Reformed traditions in their work to influence policymaking.

The book also offers a good introduction to the Kuyper tradition of social and political thought, which the Center sums up in the phrase “principled pluralism.” Daly gives particular attention to the work of the Center’s former social policy director, Stanley Carlson-Thies, who, with Carl Esbeck, Charles Glenn, and others, helped shape the Charitable Choice provision of the 1996 welfare-reform law and the early policy thinking of the Bush administration. Carlson-Thies served in the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives from 2001-2002.

In discussing the influence of the Kuyper tradition on the Center for Public Justice, Daly quotes from Jim Skillen’s 2000 Kuyper Lecture: “The state’s distinguishable purpose is to interweave citizens and all spheres of society in a public order of justice. And public justice means that everything interwoven in the public order should retain rather than lose its unique identity and responsibility before God. . . . The ‘fabricated’ political community can exist properly (normatively, obediently) only by doing justice to each of the nongovernmental spheres of responsibility” (p. 160).

He further quotes Carlson-Thies: “The state’s obligation, Carlson-Thies writes, is ‘to safeguard the autonomy and scope of action of other institutions within society . . . to uphold, not substitute for, the fulfillment of responsibility by social institutions’” (p. 123).

To read further editorial reviews of God’s Economy, see the book’s Amazon page.