The economic crisis has prompted remedial policy proposals galore, yet none so anachronistic as Lew Daly’s God’s Economy.Daly is a fellow at Demos, a non-partisan New York-based think-tank (not to be confused with its British namesake). His big new idea is to heal the social woes of America, “the advanced world’s most unequal, poverty-ridden, and incarcerated society”, by funding religious organisations to run the nation’s welfare programmes.
George W Bush suggested a similar policy before being distracted by 9/11 and Iraq. Now Daly wants Barack Obama to make good a similar, vague pre-election pledge.
Daly’s thinking, however, does not derive from American evangelism – as Bush’s and Obama’s does – but from what he terms “Europe’s Christian pluralist traditions”.
Few would quarrel with Daly’s analysis of the plight of America’s have-nots.
In particular, he indicts “corporate personhood”, by which corporations enjoy the same human rights as individuals.
This anomaly, he argues, erodes employers’ duties to workers, their families and communities. Corporations have shed jobs in a cost-reduction model of competitiveness “rather than one based on innovation and social investment”. As labour rights declined and migrant labour suppressed wages, easy credit replaced authentic buying power. Until the crunch.
Daly plausibly contends that, since faith groups foster family values and community building, they are the ideal vehicles for promoting a caring society. This idea, he tells us, derives from the social teaching of Pope Leo XIII – in his Rerum Novarum (“Of New Things”), published in the late 19th century – and of Pope Pius XI in the early 1930s.
Both pontiffs, Daly points out, supported workers’ rights, employers’ duties and the formation of unions.
Pius XI also expounded the principle of subsidiarity, which states that decisions should, wherever possible, be made at a local level rather than by central authority. Leo and Pius were influenced by the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas, who taught that individual and collective morality means acting according to human nature, which is to work for the “common good”.
Subsidiarity is a duty-based, God-centred communitarianism, rather than a rights-based human-centred individualism.
Aquinas is very much in the air. In Britain, Phillip Blond, the “Red Tory” policy adviser to David Cameron, likewise argues for a God-centred model of society. Daly also shares an enthusiasm with Blond for communitarian values reminiscent of the charitable guilds and religious orders of the middle ages.
It has been described as “gothic space”: a bottom-up, pluralist model – in contrast to a top-down state monolith.
But Daly’s version of this contrast is imaginatively reminiscent of the drawings of the Victorian architect and neo-gothic aficionado Augustus Pugin. His book Contrasts featured illustrations of religious beneficence opposite utilitarian brutality: kindly monks feed the hungry in the abbey orchard, while the inmates of the Benthamite state workhouse starve.
Alas, any prospect of trust in religious beneficence today has been scuppered by the clerical paedophile scandals in America and in Ireland, where for decades religious bodies ran the nation’s welfare projects.
Daly’s welfare state would be founded on a hybrid of religious paternalism and state financial control. Clashes over matters of conscience, such as abortion and homosexuality, would be inevitable. Daly, moreover, seems blissfully unconcerned at the prospect of rivalry and overlap between Christianity and other world faiths for funding and influence.
Remarkably, there is hardly a mention of Jewish programmes in his proposal, and none of Muslim. But there are deeper, political matters. Catholic social teaching under Leo and Pius was neither democratic nor pluralist.
These popes were corporatists rather than democrats. For the Italian fascists, this meant representation by elitist selection, rather than election. The same principle underpinned paternalistic medieval confraternities, which worked for a “common good” that excluded Jews and heretics.
Daly is also keen on “solidarism” or “solidarity” – the principle of helping out those less capable of helping themselves. His understanding of solidarity invokes the work of the German Jesuit economist Father Heinrich Pesch, much favoured by Mussolini’s fascist corporatists.
Daly would have promoted solidarity to better effect by citing Karol Wojtyla (John Paul II) who, along with Lech Walesa, gave the principle historic significance as they confronted Poland’s communist regime in the 1970s and 1980s.
By then, the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) had purged the papacy of its legendary antagonism towards democracy and religious pluralism. The final council document endorsed the right of other Christian denominations and non-Christian faiths, including Judaism, to be accorded respect if not authenticity.
Daly also fails to cite John Paul II’s Centesimus Annus (A Hundred Years On, 1991), written in celebration of the 100th anniversary of Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum. The intervening 100 years between the two documents had seen the fall of Marxism and Nazism, and revealed, in John Paul’s view, the world’s folly in failing to heed Catholic social teaching.
John Paul, influenced by Vatican II, however, made a clear departure from Pius XI’s dealings with states. Pius had signed a concordat with Mussolini in 1929, and a Reich Concordat with Hitler in 1933 – accepting social benefits for Catholics while they were being withdrawn from Jews.
John Paul had learnt as a young man under Nazism, and as a bishop under Soviet Communism, not to deal with the state. He found no reason to change his mind under free-market capitalism. In short, John Paul II would have judged Lew Daly’s alliance of government ill-conceived.
There are 65m Catholics in the US, and they helped decide the past three American elections. Presidents ignore the Catholic voice at their peril; they have much to learn from Catholic social teaching, not least the pursuit of the common good.
Today’s American Catholics, unlike Daly, have been shaped not by the corporatism of Leo and the 20th-century Piuses, but by the liberalising Second Vatican Council, which insisted on a healthy distance between church and state.
Daly’s impassioned, well-meaning bid to solve America’s undeniable crisis of the poor is hardly representative of the views of today’s Catholic majority.
It is the plea of a backward-looking prophet crying in the midst of a welfare wilderness that only democracy can solve.
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