One way of approaching the following essays is to pause here at the beginning and consider the peculiarity of the conversation we will be overhearing. In this volume we will be listening to a group of scholars who are Catholic, Episcopal, mainline Protestant, evangelical, and secularist in their varied backgrounds. They are considering the place of religion in public policymaking. The peculiarity arises if we think about American public life historically. For one thing, we are listening to people who most likely would not have been inclined to interact with each other at the outset of the twentieth century. More than that, they are talking about something that hardly anyone a hundred years ago would have thought even needs discussing.

Just fifty-five years ago, the idea of a front-running presidential candidate from either the Democratic or Republican parties campaigning at Bob Jones University was unthinkable. After all, BJU was on the cultural periphery owing to its fundamentalist reputation. Having lost the battles in the mainline Protestant denominations and having suffered the ignominy of the Scopes Trial, fundamentalists like those who sent their children to Bob Jones in the 1940s were so busy trying to recover from these defeats that the thought of deciding a presidential election would have been delusional. Carl F. H. Henry spoke volumes for the movement when in his important little book, The Uneasy Conscience of Fundamentalism (1947), he lamented that for “the first protracted period in its history,” the evangelical faith of fundamentalists stood “divorced from the great social reform movements.” Henry, who was emerging as an influential leader of a new generation of fundamentalists, neo-evangelicals as they would call themselves, wrote this book as a protest against fundamentalism's self-chosen social and political isolation. In other words, the task for evangelical leaders at mid-century was to prod fundamentalists back into public life. And this is what makes George W. Bush's appearance at Bob Jones University during the weeks leading up to the 2000 South Carolina Republican primary truly remarkable. It reveals a seismic shift among conservative Protestants. Within a brief period, evangelicals went from denouncing politics as a form of worldliness to demanding a place at the table.

Looking back over the century just ended, it is not easy to assess the status and prospects of secularism and the secular ideal in the United States. As is so often the case in American history, when one sets out in search of the simple and obvious, one soon comes face to face with a crowd of paradoxes. The psychologist Erik Erikson once observed that Americans have a talent for sustaining opposites, and he could hardly have been more right. Such Janus-faced doubleness, or multiplicity, is virtually the American specialité de la maison.

In this article I want to give at least a thumbnail sense of the background assumptions, policy contours, and vehicles for American Catholicism in engaging in public policy discussions. To do so, I will eventually concentrate on one major recent public policy discussion in the United States: the debates on welfare reform that led up to, and continue vigorously even after, the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. I do so because American Catholic institutions, including the United States Catholic Conference and Catholic Charities U.S.A., played a crucial and continuous role in these debates about welfare reform. Indeed, New York's Senator Daniel P. Moynihan, a vigorous opponent of the proposed welfare reform bill, in excoriating his fellow liberals for signing on to the bill, could lift up the example of the Catholic bishops' lobbying and exclaim: “The bishops admittedly have an easier time with matters of this sort. When principles are at stake, they simply look them up. Too many liberals, alas, make them up!” This particular debate (which is not, by any means, over) also helps to show some of the unique assumptions behind proposals found in Catholic interventions in the policy sector. In what follows, I will develop, briefly, four sections or subthemes to the paper:

1. Catholilc Social Thought: Five Background Assumptions for Policy: Human Dignity; The Common Good; Solidarity; Subsidiarity; Justice

2. The Move from Background Assumptions to Policy

3. Catholic Policy Proposals: Their Style and Instrumentalities

4. Catholicism and Welfare Policy

According to the most influential metanarratives in American social-policy history, religion has been virtually irrelevant to the development of American welfare in the twentieth century. In crude terms, the main story line is that public welfare replaced religion—for good. The chief alternative story agrees that religion was replaced—but for bad. More carefully, the mainstream story portrays a “quasi-welfare state” supplanting the fragmentary assistance offered by local sectarian, voluntary, and municipal programs, and measures welfare progress by the growth of government provision at the expense of private and religious action. The competing interpretation regards the creation of the government welfare system to constitute, in Marvin Olasky's terms, “the tragedy of American compassion,” because effective, personal, and spiritual assistance was replaced by bureaucratic programs unable to address the deepest needs of the poor. Although the two stories evaluate the outcome differently, they agree about the disappearance or irrelevance of religion to American public welfare.

Although actual classroom practice has changed far less than one might imagine over the past hundred years, the function and the meaning of American public education have become profoundly different. There are few occupations whose day-to-day activities have changed as little as have those of school-teachers, but the relationship of schools and society has become very different than it was in 1900.

In the closing years of the twentieth century, religion became a paramount concern for practitioners and analysts of American politics. During the campaign for the crucial 2000 election, probably shaping the balance of power in national politics for years to come, presidential candidates and party leaders made religion a central factor in their strategies.