Stuff To Think About
Could the rise in government spending—from economic stimulus to health care reform to education spending—endanger the vitality of religion in America? That’s a question University of Virginia Professor W. Bradford Wilcox discussed recently in the Wall Street Journal.
Wilcox zeroed in on a fascinating study entitled “State Welfare Spending and Religiosity.” The study’s authors, Anthony Gill and Erik Lundsgaarde, found an “inverse relationship between religious observance and welfare spending.” Put more simply, the more a government spends on welfare, the fewer people go to church. [ed note: links added by this ed.]
This is why it is that church attendance is so low in welfare states such as Denmark and Sweden compared to countries like the U.S. and the Philippines—where government doesn’t provide cradle-to-grave assistance.
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Nor does it bode well for the future of American democracy.
In his classic book, Democracy in America, Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville marveled at how Americans could accomplish almost anything through voluntary associations—especially churches. They built schools, hospitals, sent missionaries all over the world. He wrote, “I frequently admired the boundless skill of Americans in setting large numbers of people a common goal and inducing them to strive toward that goal voluntarily.”
De Tocqueville doubted that government could ever accomplish all that American citizens could do through their associations. But he also warned that if government should supplant the good work of these associations, the American people would ultimately end up dependent upon government. And this, he said, would imperil not only American democracy, but “civilization itself.”
All the more reason for us to create a nation where religion can flourish. Which makes me wonder about this blog post from Tony Perkins:
On Monday in an interview with French journalist, Laura Haim, President Obama spoke about the purpose for his trip to the Middle East. During the interview, which you can read on the White House website, the President stated the following:
…I think that the United States and the West generally, we have to educate ourselves more effectively on Islam. And one of the points I want to make is, is that if you actually took the number of Muslims Americans, we’d be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world. And so there’s got to be a better dialogue and a better understanding between the two peoples.
What?
In April, on his trip to Turkey, President Obama said, “we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation…”
So, according to President Obama we are not a Christian nation, but we are one of the largest Muslim countries in the world?
The President’s remarks were less than prudent in either instance, but I am not sure we want to open a debate as to whether we are a “Religion X” or a “Religion Y” nation. We are a nation that welcomes all religions and a nation where those religions thrive. We are also a nation where those religions compete, non-violently and in religious terms. That is the point the President should have emphasized.
Forms of Islam that thrive in this nation (Yes, we have our dark Islamic underbelly, but we have a dark Christian underbelly too – as the Tiller murder over the weekend proves) are generally on the same ethical page as we are and contribute to the civic order. That makes them welcome.
We are a “Christian nation” only in the sense that we are majority Christian, and frankly, it is up to evangelists and missionaries to keep it that way, not the government.
But what is really disturbing to me is that Colson is pointing out how this administration’s polcies are undermining ALL religion in the nation and Perkins wants to argue about religious labels in speeches. It’s akin to rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. And it’s why at least one strand of social conservative finds themselves planted deeply in the political wilderness, and having a hard time finding their way out.
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CarlH on 04 Jun 2009 at 9:32 am #
Article VI Blog was months ahead of Chuck Colson’s ruminations, John having posted here on March 4, 2009 with a link to a Witherspoon Institute commentary on the same study referenced above. Indeed, John scooped the March 13, 2009 Wall Street Journal article Colson referenced by more than a week. (Is there any question why A6B is a daily must-read? Thank you again, John and Lowell.)
For what it’s worth, the study only demonstrates a relatively current inverse statistical correlation between religiosity and welfare spending. Despite pretensions to the contrary by the researchers and many commentators, this study includes no historical research to support a cause-and-effect relationship, let alone which variable may be the cause and which the effect. While Colson (and others) may view the study results as suggesting that massive welfare spending may “endanger” religious vitality–it is equally plausible, IMO, to suggest that the decline of religious vitality creates higher demand for welfare spending–or, even, as another comment to John’s earlier post suggested, the link may be more subtle and arise out of a more complex interrelationship of subsidiary factors that can’t be explained by positing either religiosity or welfare spending the cause of the other.
CarlH on 04 Jun 2009 at 9:39 am #
I failed to know that Prof. Wilcox’s article in the Wall Street Journal points to a separate study at MIT showing that “religious giving” declined by 30% “in the wake of the New Deal” and “almost all of it” can be attributed to the increase in government spending. Thus, there is some historical research suggesting an effect on “giving”–but, it seems to me, there remains a gap between that “religiosity” in a broader sense.
John Schroeder on 04 Jun 2009 at 11:51 am #
Thanks Carl – but it does matter a great deal more on the pages of the WSJ or in Chuck Colson’s blog than it does here.
coltakashi on 04 Jun 2009 at 1:53 pm #
I have long suspected that President Obama’s Harvard Law degree did not equip him with a deep appreciation of mathematics, in light of how casual he has been with the Federal checkbook, but now he has confirmed his mathematical incompetence with his assertion that the United States is “one of the largest Muslim countries in the world.” The US has about 2 million Muslims, less than 1% of the population, while the United Kingdom has about the same number in a much smaller country, at about 3%, Germany has about 3 million Muslims at around 4% of ppulation, and France has 4 million Muslims at around 7% of population. The US sits at about #52 out of the top 60 Muslim populations, and does not even rank in the top 60 by percentage (Malawi is #60 at 20%). Russia has 21 million at around 15%, and China has almost 20 million at around 1.5%.
Since there are at least twice as many Mormons as Muslims in the US, I fully expect President Obama will, whenver he gets around to visit Utah, will announce that America is really “one of the largest Mormon countries in the world.” And since the same is true for the number of Jews in America, I am sure we will soon hear that the USA is “one of the largest Jewish countries in the world”. At least these two statements would be true in the sense of the relative significance of the US populations of those two religious groups relative to their counterparts in other nations. It is simply not true in any sense of the US population of Muslims.
One gets the idea from President Obama’s statement that his mental map of the religious denominations in the USA is like those famous maps of the US as seen from Manhattan Island, where the Muslim population occupies much of the foreground, while the Mormon, Jewish and even Christian populations occupy a fringe on the distant horizon. Clearly, as the son and stepson of Muslim men, who lived in the real largest Muslim nation, Indonesia, as a child, and who has close relatives in Kenya, Obama’s consciousness of Islam is magnified. This should not surprise us, except for the fact that he pointedly tried to downplay it during his campaign, where it was verboten to pronounce his middle name, under penalty of being called a bigot for reminding people where his genetic and pedagogical heritage lay.
In making his appeal to the Muslim nations today, Obama is trading on his associations with Muslim father figures in his life in order to build his credibility with Muslims the world over. Americans should remember that he sees the world through a different lens than most of us, and is in fact telling the Muslim nations that this is a reason they can trust him to be on their side. Since he avoided this association during his election campaign, he has yet to give a speech that explains to America how he sees and feels his own relationship to his ancestral religion (versus his adopted religion of Christianity UCC style). Where does he find the balance between his ties to America and his ties to Al Islam? I am sure that many, perhaps most Muslim Americans place their loyalty to America above their loyalty to transnational Muslim culture and identity. But Obama’s eagerness to affiliate with the Muslim countries, as representative of “one of the biggest”, in an era when many Muslims believe their mission is to overwhelm and overtake the traditionally Christian nations, makes me feel less secure in relying on him to enthusiastically defend America against a threat that originates in that Muslim world he so eagerly wishes to join. He is not one voice among many, but our appointed Commander-in-Chief. As Europe becomes “Eurabia”, would Obama see anything wrong with America becoming “Amerabia”?