George W. Bush has caused a furore by declaring that faith-based charities may have access to federal dollars to implement their programmes. Whatever about the intermittent debate loosely termed Boston versus Berlin, this highlights the immense cultural gulf that exists between the US and Ireland.
Here, for long periods, the State was completely dependent on faith-based organisations to provide essential services, particularly in regard to health and education. Today, faith-based organisations and charities are still major providers of social services. It would be interesting to see what our society would be like if the State had had to provide all those services from scratch instead of just subsidising them.
By contrast, the separation of church and state in the US had reached ridiculous levels. By the 1970s, even teachers of non-religious subjects in Catholic and other faith-based schools were no longer eligible for supplemental payments from the government. Public schools have an absolute ban on religious expression.
In 1984, for example, the Federal Appeals Court in Philadelphia held that students in a public high school could not form a non-denominational prayer group because it might send a message to non-believers that the school was somehow endorsing religion. However, Bush's move is not as radical as it may seem. There had already been some softening towards federal support for faith-based charities since 1996, with Al Gore agreeing in principle that it was a good idea.
What is more interesting is the motivation behind the move. There is no doubt that it stems in part from Bush's own conversion experience. After something of a wild youth, struggles with alcohol led him to evangelical-style Christianity. Again, that is not unique in America, where unlike here, politicians are often anxious to parade their beliefs.
Traditionally, Republicans were suspicious of government-based initiatives, believing that the market should be allowed to provide. Some leading right-wing thinkers saw that the market did not step in to provide once big government began to be dismantled.
Prominent Republican politicians began to question how responsibilities to the poor could be met when it was patently obvious that the market was not the answer. So the voluntary sector began to be of interest, because it had the charm that it reflected local initiative and not government.
HOWEVER, how far the voluntary sector could or should absorb government responsibilities is a very big question. Prof John Di Iulio, a Catholic and a Democrat, whom Bush recently appointed as head of a White House office of faith-based and community initiatives, has rejected out of hand the idea that charity can ever replace government action. By contrast, another major influence on Bush, Prof Marvin Olasky, is adamant that social welfare systems should be entirely dismantled and put into the hands of faith-based and community groups. Born a Jew, and later an ardent Marxist, Olasky is now a staunch evangelical Christian. This has led some commentators to allege that Bush's initiative is less about preventing discrimination against religious-based groups than it is about providing millions of dollars to evangelical Protestant groups.
Since these groups' primary reason for existence is to win converts, support for them raises hackles in a society where the separation of church and state has been such a mantra. Yet this may be unfair to Bush. He has been at pains to appoint centrists like Di Iulio to administer this initiative.
Although Bush suffers in spades from the amiable dunce tag which bedevilled Reagan, he actually has a vision for society. That is not to say this philosophy, which he terms compassionate conservatism, is necessarily coherent. There are many contradictions, such as emphasising community action while apparently being totally supportive of some of the worst excesses of capitalism. Part of Bush's desire to support faith-based charities is based on pragmatism. One of his genuine interests is education, and during his tenure in Texas, he quickly saw that parochial schools delivered results which public schools did not. Similarly, faith-based outreaches to prisoners often resulted in lower recidivism. This is an instrumentalist approach to religion, which endorses faith because it is useful for society, but it falls far short of the churches' own vision of what they are. Predictably, Bush's recent initiative has agitated those in the US who believe in complete separation of church and state. But it also raises another interesting issue, not without resonance here in Ireland. Too close an association between church and state can end up compromising the churches. Fundamentally, church and state are about different things. To be used by the state in an instrumentalist fashion is dangerous for any church.
This may lie behind some of the withdrawal from provision of education by religious orders in Ireland. Certainly, they no longer have the personnel, but they had to decide where to concentrate resources: on educating the children of the middle classes or on advocacy for those most failed by the current system? Many religious orders have chosen the latter.
Religious organisations, including lay organisations, engage in social action as a way of making the love of God visible. Aggressive proselytising may be a fear in the US, but Irish mainstream churches are in no danger of being accused of that.
The churches' involvement in social ministry is the acceptable face of religion in an Ireland whose media are often virulently anti-clerical. Often this acceptability is because this social action is practically identical to secular organisations engaged in similar work. That raises questions for religious organisations.
Obviously, aggressive evangelisation of those in need as a precondition for help would be an obscenity. Genuine aid should always come with no strings attached. Yet if the motivation for involvement is indistinguishable from secular organisations, what element of witness to faith is involved?
This question becomes more pressing for religious organisations when ample opportunity for service is available in non-faith-based organisations.
Younger people are primarily attracted to faith-based initiatives precisely because they are different, because they acknowledge a spiritual dimension to life. At a time of tremendous transition for churches in Ireland, a question they have to ask themselves is how do they maintain this difference.
bobrien@irish-times.ie