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Mary Jo Bane on Religion and Public Policy

Amid increasingly contentious exchanges over fundamentalism, abortion rights, secularism and pluralism in America, Mary Jo Bane, with research collaborators at the Kennedy School's Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations, has examined the complex ways in which religion and American democracy are interwoven. Their work probes the potential, as well as the risks, for more constructive engagement between these sectors.

Mary Jo Bane is the Thornton Bradshaw Professor of Public Policy and Management, and co-editor, with Brent Coffin and Richard Higgins, of the recently published 'Taking Faith Seriously.'

Q: Your research indicates that religion contributes to the flourishing of American democracy and that 'rigid devotion to the principle of the separation of church and state has given way to a doctrine requiring more accommodation and flexibility on the part of the state toward religion.' Please elaborate on this idea.

Bane: I want to make two points here. One is that the religious sector of American life - houses of worship, congregations, religious organizations of all sorts - is by far the largest part of the voluntary sector, the largest part of civic society, if you will, in the United States. More Americans belong to houses of worship and congregations than any other kind of voluntary organization. More money is given to religious organizations than to any other kind of charity. More volunteering is done for religious organizations than for any other kind of voluntary organization.

So, to the extent to which American democracy rests on a bedrock of civil society, on that network of relationships among people and those groups in which people interact with each other and learn to exercise civic skills, religious organizations form a crucial foundation for American democracy. Religious organizations and religious traditions are also the sources of many Americans' values and principles - of the way they think about their obligations to each other, of the way they think about their obligations to the world and what they're supposed to do, and therefore of their attitudes towards public life and towards public policies. In that sense too, I think religious traditions are a foundation of American democracy.

My second point is that I think it's correct to say that the United States is a religiously pluralist country, not a secular country. We are a society in which 90 percent of the citizens say they believe in God, 70 percent say they belong to one or another religious denomination and 40 percent say they go to church or a house of worship once a week. Well, they don't go that often, but that's what they claim, and it is clearly a degree of religious affiliation much higher than in Europe and indeed in most other countries. But it's very pluralist. The religious traditions that people hold to are extremely diverse and vary across the board.

Now, I think what is increasingly being recognized by scholars and by the courts is that the terribly important principles that we enshrine in the first amendment - the free exercise of religion, the no establishment of religion clauses - don't mean, or shouldn't mean, that we become a completely secular society, that the only appropriate way to talk about public service or do the public business is through secular organizations. I think there is an increasing recognition - and I think this is a correct way to think about American society - that as long as we recognize the pluralism and accommodate the different ways in which people worship - and don't worship - that we can meet those requirements of our constitution, which are terribly important, but recognize a little better the underlying logic of American society.

Q: Similarly, you have found that democracy has been good for religion. Please explain.

Bane: There have been some really interesting studies and findings - mostly, believe it or not, by economists - over the last number of years, trying to explain why it is that Americans seem to be so much more involved in religious practice than people in most other countries, certainly the countries of Europe. One of the explanations they have come up with is that because we place such an emphasis on the free exercise of religion and because we are so pluralist in the way we think about our society, religious organizations have had, to some extent, to compete in a marketplace. We have in this country growth and decline in religions; we continually have new houses of worship and new sects and new ways of worshiping. Ways develop in which people can find an appropriate setting in which to belong to a community and in which to relate to the transcendent.

That vibrancy is in many ways a product of the fact that we don't have an established church, that we protect the free exercise of religion and that we are, as part of our democracy, tolerant and supportive of voluntary organizations of all sorts. I believe that religion flourishes much more actively and engages people much more in a democratic setting. And I also think that the practices of democracy, the way we structure our democratic institutions, have to some extent extended into our religious institutions and made them more effective in responding to the needs and desires of the communities they serve.

Q: You have looked at the role that 'faith-based organizations' might play in the delivery of social services. What are your conclusions?

Bane: Social services in the U.S. have long been delivered through partnerships of government, not-for-profit organizations and, more recently and increasingly, private firms. We have always had a social service sector in which non-governmental organizations play an important role. It has also been the case that for a long time religious organizations have been part of that network. Now, they have been mostly the large, mainstream religious social service organizations: Catholic Charities, Lutheran Social Services, United Jewish Philanthropies and so on. These organizations have operated in the social service sector in very much the same way in which secular organizations operate. They have followed the same rules. That seems to have worked well for us, though interestingly enough there have been almost no systematic evaluations of whether one or another type of organization is more or less effective. The research is certainly not conclusive. The question now though, is whether that ability to engage as a partner in the delivery of social services in the public sector should be extended to smaller faith-based organizations and to faith-based organizations which are more explicitly religious - in which the faith component is an important part in the way they deliver services.

Public opinion polls suggest that Americans in general are pretty supportive of that notion, and they appear to be supportive of it mostly because they think 'the more the merrier' - the more choices people have, the better the social services sector will be. It seems to me that there's a lot of logic to that argument and that in many areas where person-to-person contact is important to the delivery of service - mentoring, drug treatment programs, prisoner rehabilitation - it makes a lot of sense to extend the ability to participate to smaller, more explicitly religious faith-based organizations.

A couple of caveats on that: The first is that obviously there has to be a secular alternative available for people so that no one is forced, or feels compelled, to participate in a religious organization should they not choose to do so, and I think that's extremely important. It's also important from the point of view of the public and also from the point of view of our Constitution, that public funds not go for the explicitly religious activities of faith-based organizations. Certainly the public does not support the use of public funds for anything that would look like proselytizing. Another thing I'd say is that sometimes people talk about faith-based organizations as though they could completely take over social services in the United States, that if we simply encouraged faith-based organizations to do it we wouldn't need government agencies to do the public's work in this area. That's just wrong. Faith-based organizations do not now and never will have the capacity, the resources, the people, the expertise, and so on, to take over the social services sector. I do think, though, that they can be important and effective participants and that it would do us well as a society to encourage them to participate even more.

Q: You have found that 'viewing religion in purely instrumental terms has been a flaw in social science research about religion.' How does this affect current debates about the role of religion in public life?

Bane: The researchers who wrote the essays that became the book 'Taking Faith Seriously' came to the discussion as social scientists, and we found ourselves falling into a discussion of how religion can be 'useful' to American society. Religious organizations are useful, because they can deliver services, and they train people, and so on. As we continued our conversation, we realized that this was not, in fact, what religious organizations or our own religious commitments were about. Their missions were not to be useful to American societies; their missions were to worship, to bring people together in community to have relationships with each other and with the Transcendent. We simply have to recognize that that's the mission and that the service to society comes out of that mission but that one cannot expect to simply say to religious organizations, 'we think you should do thus and so and we'll give you these incentives to do it because we think it will be good for the society.'

In doing any of that, we have to recognize what the primary mission is and work with religious organizations to see if in fact there is a fit between the religious mission and the civic mission.