Is Welfare Redeemable?

A new vision for America’s social safety net would overcome the responsibility crisis.

When Bill Clinton said during the presidential campaign that his hope was “to end welfare as we know it,” there was a ready-made and enthusiastic consensus for change.

Eighteen months later, with the administration’s welfare-reform plan still on the drawing board, the nationwide consensus to reform America’s costly welfare system has fractured as policy experts, federal bureaucrats, and lobbyists contend with a welfare system that does not work and seems to defy repair at an affordable cost.

At ground level, the welfare system’s sorry state can be easily witnessed. “Susan,” a welfare recipient who asked that her real name not be used, has become jaded after her close encounter with welfare. She had been a law student at a prestigious school in the East when she was diagnosed with a rare disease. Dropped by her medical insurance company, she sought help from the federal government.

“If there’s a safety net out there, I sure missed it,” Susan says. “The way the system is set up, it forces you to lie unless you can live on $343 a month. If you receive assistance from somewhere else, you lose your benefits.

“From the moment I approached the system, I was treated like dirt,” Susan told CHRISTIANITY TODAY. “When they answer that phone call, they make moral assumptions about who you are; that you are undeserving. One woman reached into my purse without asking. As far as she was concerned, I’d lost my right to privacy.”

She believes that if government officials would regard welfare recipients with more respect, “there would be an extraordinary change in outcomes.”

Wendell Primus, a human services policy expert with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), freely acknowledges major problems within the system, which result in a “loss of dignity” among welfare recipients. He said the system is perhaps too heavily influenced by reports of those who cheat the system, reports that “drive us to get more invasive in terms of the policy.” There are extraordinary abuses of the multibillion-dollar welfare system that take place in spite of extensive safeguards. In April, a Gallup poll found that two-thirds of Americans believe most people on welfare take advantage of the system, but they would be willing to pay for a new system if it got people off welfare.

CHURCH AND STATE

Church and state have historically been the two institutions attempting to relieve poverty, care for the sick, and work to end human suffering. At times, churches and governments have worked in concert for the benefit of poor people. There perhaps have been equally as many times when these two institutions have worked at cross purposes, leaving the poor worse off.

In Washington, the Center for Public Justice (CPJ), with assistance from the Christian College Coalition, has taken some unusual initiatives in stimulating public-policy experts, members of Congress, and religious leaders toward developing a new vision and direction for America’s welfare system.

A working draft of their new vision for welfare was released in late May in conjunction with a two-day conference. The four guiding concepts are:

♦ Fruitful welfare reform depends on an accurate understanding of human dignity.

♦ A dependable vision of human life in society comes most clearly into focus from a biblical point of view.

♦ The distressing conditions associated with poverty—particularly in the most degraded urban areas—are the expression of a multifaceted responsibility crisis.

♦ Public policies should not serve to legitimize irresponsibility. Instead, government should call people and institutions to healthy patterns of life in society.

The long-term purpose in generating a new vision for welfare in America is to influence the thinking of politicians and policy writers before the political process kicks in.

The Clinton administration is expected to unveil its legislative plan to reform welfare this month. The crowded legislative calendar, the fall election season, and the tight deficit ceiling make it improbable that welfare reform will be enacted this year. Yet, major legislative reforms rarely occur at first attempt.

William Galston, deputy assistant to the President for domestic policy, after reviewing the CPJ draft statement, says it represents “a unique voice but not an alien voice; it is a voice that is heard and resonates in the administration.” In Galston’s view, the core question to be asked about new policy proposals is: Do they expand opportunity, reinforce responsibility, and strengthen community?

Despite the Clinton administration’s commitment to pursue welfare reform, some are less than sanguine about the prospects. Marvin Olasky, journalist and professor at the University of Texas at Austin, says that current policy provides financial incentives for fathers to abandon their children. “This is the welfare system from hell. As Christians, we know that God is our Father. Children need human fathers to see his image.”

Olasky believes wrongdoing is “virtually inevitable,” given a system run by a “government that by law excludes God.” He believes it would be inhumane to cut benefits from those who depend on government aid, but he advocates exploring ways to “keep new people from getting on.” He also supports public policies that would eliminate economic, social, and bureaucratic barriers to adoption.

John Carr, an official with the U.S. Catholic Conference, shares Olasky’s skepticism, saying the administration’s friendly posture toward religious institutions does not always mesh with reality. “The gap between the White House breakfasts and the policies of the agencies needs to be closed.”

Carr says there has been a loss of moderation and civility in the national discussion over social reform. “I’m afraid our debate is increasingly dominated by the Rush Limbaughs and Louis Farrakhans,” he says. “We need both better policies and better values. We must say to our friends on the Right that abandonment [of the poor] should not be a strategy or a policy, and to friends on the Left that government can’t and shouldn’t do it all.

“We need a moral revolution in this society, and it’s not just a revolution that ought to touch the poor. All of us need to understand it’s not what we get, it’s what we contribute; it’s not what we have, but how we care for one another.”

THE RESPONSIBILITY CRISIS

One clear failing of the present welfare system is its inability to provide assistance without creating harmful dependencies, diminishing individual responsibility, and eroding family cohesiveness and accountability.

“Government should be doing more, not less, to fight hard-core poverty,” says CPJ director James Skillen, “but it should be doing so by working to strengthen and hold accountable the primary and secondary institutions of society, especially families, rather than by taking on poor people as its own clients while allowing more immediate institutions and relationships to disintegrate or perpetuate irresponsibility.”

Brett Schundler views the crisis in responsibility from a distinctive vantage point. He is not only an elder at New Jersey’s Old Bergen Church in Jersey City, he is also the city’s mayor. Schundler has seen how the welfare system can “absolutely devastate people’s lives.

“We are destroying human spirits and souls when we create a system which is focused totally on the elimination of deprivation, instead of a system which encourages autonomy, encourages people to develop their skills, encourages people to live lives of disciplined virtue.” Schundler observes that, under the current system, people are told to get a job but are better off financially if they do not. “We’ re mandating virtue, but paying for vice.” Schundler says reform must grant individuals the power to choose where they want to live and where they want their children to go to school.

Calling attention to historic social inequalities in American society, James Shopshire, a professor at Wesley Theological Seminary, believes, “Black folks are still the most despised of the racial ethnic groups.

“[They] have had experiences in context that have in a very real sense disabled them.” Shopshire notes that blacks worked as slave laborers to help build this nation, and that they were then emancipated “with no land, no education, no wealth or resources, and told to make it.” He believes the new policies will not be effective unless they take into account the ongoing prejudices rooted in American culture.

UNEXPECTED CONSEQUENCES

A sobering reality for those who pursue structural reform is that policy changes, government programs, and new laws can have unintended consequences.

John Mason, an economics professor at Gordon College, Wenham, Massachusetts, says there can be too much focus on the dynamics of individual responsibility and not enough on the structural causes of poverty.

Mason says, “Governmental powers have been used by the nonpoor in ways that helped to establish the concentrations of poverty in our central cities.” He cites not only slavery and segregation, but also government-subsidized transportation networks that allowed people of means to escape the city, along with zoning laws prohibiting construction of low-income housing and confining the poor to the city.

Looking at the failed antipoverty programs of the 1960s, Mason says, “The poor did not enact these reforms. They simply responded to the incentives that were created for them.

“In what sense morally can we now ask the poor to bear the full cost of adjusting to welfare reform as [some leaders] have argued recently?”

Abortion has emerged as another area where policy changes may have undesirable side effects. A House Republican staffer, Ron Haskins, for example, says the GOP’s solution to the welfare crisis would entail “cutting welfare benefits for illegitimate children” because they believe there is a link between poverty and children born out of wedlock. Yet, Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) believes such a policy would increase abortion among unmarried, pregnant teenagers who would face the loss of any child support.

Haskins says, “The majority of Republicans, even believing that there would be higher rates of abortion, were still willing to do something very serious to send the signal that they are not willing to continue providing lots of benefits for illegitimate births.”

Primus of HHS says the administration’s plan would stress establishing paternity and cracking down on fathers who shun child support. “Our current welfare system is very sexist,” Primus said. “We expect the females in the system to be the parent and caretaker, as well as the breadwinner. We often let males completely off the hook.”

COMMON GROUND?

The Center for Public Justice’s draft vision statement has introduced the idea that church and state should not let their institutional differences get in the way of energizing the reform process and enhancing grassroots efforts against poverty:

“The kind of help that is most successful comes from people with deep moral and religious commitments, and very often from those who work for explicitly religious organizations.”

For instance, Ron Sider, president of Evangelicals for Social Action, proposes a new twist in voucher-based social programs. He advocates a voucher system according to which needy individuals would be able to choose for themselves whether to seek help from a faith-based or secular social-service institution. Advocates for voucher-based programs argue that vouchers help the overall system by introducing a healthy form of competition among service providers.

For the CPJ’s Skillen, progress in the reform debate would come when policymakers and reformers overcome “a false dilemma.” He says, “Those on one side want government to relinquish its welfare clients altogether, while those on the other side want government to offer welfare clients something different—a stronger work incentive instead of a handout.

“It’s a false dilemma. To overcome [it] we need a different standpoint from which to make judgments about human responsibility—personal responsibility, government responsibility, and the responsibilities of families, schools, business enterprises, churches, and voluntary organizations.” Whether that standpoint will be biblically based remains a central issue for those Christians engaged in reforming welfare.

By Randy Frame in Washington, D.C.

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