According to their desert.

Lifting Up the Poor

A Dialogue on Religion, Poverty, and Welfare Mary Jo Bane and Lawrence M. Mead

Brookings, $16.95, 179 pp.

HAMLET: Good my lord, will you see the players well bestowed? Do you hear, let them be well used ...

POLONIUS: My lord, I will use them according to their desert.

HAMLET: God's bodkin, man, much better. Use every man after his desert, and who shall 'scape whipping? Use them after your own honor and dignity. The less they deserve, the more merit is in your bounty.

(Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2)

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and the editors of a contemplated series of dialogues on religion and public life, E. J. Dionne Jr., Jean Bethke Elshtain, and Kayla Drogosz, are to be congratulated for bringing out this book. It features three rounds of exchanges between Mary Jo Bane, a liberal welfare-policy scholar, public official, and serious Catholic, and Lawrence Mead, an equally serious Protestant and a conservative scholar well known for his advocacy of reciprocity and paternalism as the core of his recommended new approach to welfare policy.

Two features of these exchanges are especially striking. The first (noted by participants) is how little they disagree on matters of policy. They agree on public assistance for those who work but do not earn enough to lift themselves and their families out of poverty. They agree that our society should make a decent and human provision for those who cannot work. Remarkably, Bane who resigned in protest from the Clinton administration when the president signed the 1996 welfare reform act, now accepts the work provision at its heart. The grounds for her reversal--which many welfare recipients have articulated--are that they "needed the push of a work requirement to overcome their own lack of initiative in finding jobs or training experiences that later turned out to be valuable to them." Just as remarkably, Mead agrees with Bane (at least "in principle") that a decent society will make provision for certain basic needs--food, shelter, health care--without regard to individual conduct.

The second striking feature of these exchanges is how deeply the participants disagree theologically and how much their disagreement reveals about differences between aspects of the Catholic and Protestant traditions. Bane repeatedly invokes what she calls the "Catholic sensibility," which she describes as a "stance toward the world that is at its best hopeful rather than despairing, trusting rather than suspicious, more generous than prudent, more communitarian than individualistic." This sensibility contributes to a Catholic social teaching that is rooted in "tradition, reason, and experience as well as Scripture." Indeed, she argues, "there is always the danger of selecting Scripture texts to suit one's own purposes, and dueling with proof-texts is not a particularly edifying activity. That is why placing Scripture within a centuries-old tradition of discernment and dialogue within the church can act as a check on individual prejudices." To the extent that Catholic social thought rests on a Scripture-based interpretation of Jesus' life and ministry, it teaches that he had a "special place in his heart for the poor and vulnerable" and "did not make God's love, forgiveness, and healing contingent on good behavior but extended it graciously and generously to sinners, to outcasts, and to enemies."

Mead disagrees with Bane's theology on both methodological and substantive grounds. In classic Protestant fashion, he stresses direct encounter between the individual reader and the Bible. (In his opening statement alone, I counted no fewer than 174 references to the New Testament.) And he argues that a close reading of the New Testament offers little warrant for what Bane offers as the Catholic view. Jesus did not have a preference for the poor, was willing to make demands on them as well as on the rich, and affirmed obedience to the law as the necessary (although not sufficient) condition for salvation. Mead cites Paul's admonition, "If any one will not work, let him not eat," as an authentic expression of the Christian willingness to combine mercy and forgiveness with stringent moral requirements. Later on, Mead quotes Bane's description of a "compassionate, inclusive, peaceful Jesus--who loved, healed, and forgave indiscriminately" and comments: "The Jesus I see in the Gospels is a more dynamic and demanding figure ... the Catholic conception misses the element of challenge in the life of following Jesus."

These theological differences have consequences for what Bane calls midlevel principles. She accepts Mead's characterization of Jesus' ministry to the poor as directed to the three goals of sustenance, community, and autonomy. Catholics, she says, emphasize sustenance and community, even at the expense of autonomy. Repeatedly citing Jesus' conduct at the Pool of Bethesda, Mead retorts that to sacrifice the goal of autonomy for the poor is to distort the teachings of the gospel in a manner that reinforces contemporary liberal prejudices in favor of structural or "sociological" explanations of poverty. This is why he declares, ringingly, that "politics is secondary. Theology is still queen of the sciences, and we must get it right."

As both Bane and Mead recognize, these theological differences have secular counterparts and can be expressed in philosophical rather than religious terms. Bane's stance focuses on human needs as the basis of entitlement to social goods, while Mead emphasizes desert (or as he puts it, "deservingness"). Need reflects bare existence, while desert is based on conduct. Need equalizes; desert differentiates. Bane believes that an emphasis on desert not only distorts the Christian message of unconditional love but can lead in practice to cruelty and deprivation. Mead believes with equal conviction that unconditionality not only is a distortion of Jesus' ministry but also demeans and diminishes those who receive without condition.

As a Jew, I am hors de combat. But I cannot help wondering: if we are all sinners, and if divine forgiveness and grace are in the deepest sense unmerited, then where do the ideas of desert and conditionality fit into the Christian narrative? Who articulates the more authentically Christian view, Hamlet or Polonius?

To return to the task at hand: the clarity and depth of these disagreements give the entire exchange an air of paradox. How can two scholars who differ so profoundly on fundamentals agree so significantly on public policy? The text suggests three answers.

In the first place, Bane and Mead agree that theological premises do not directly yield policy conclusions. What the scholastic tradition calls "practical syllogisms" require intermediate premises drawn from reason, experience, and the nature of political and social life, and these premises can work to mute higher-order theological disagreements. Second, and relatedly, the facts matter. Bane and Mead are too well informed and too honest to deny findings emerging from the implementation of welfare policies on which they disagreed prior to the reform's enactment. Their shared respect for the truth value of solid social science also constrains disagreement that might otherwise have flowed from divergent principles.

Third, and most tellingly: When the policy chips are down, neither is able to remain fully faithful to initial theological positions. Despite her commitment to generosity and unconditional aid, Bane has come to accept a substantial portion of Mead's flintier moral psychology. Weakness of will is more than a philosophical topic; it is a practical reality. Downtrodden individuals who sincerely want to work and take responsibility for their lives may nonetheless be unable to do so on their own. Sometimes the promotion of the human good--as individuals themselves understand their good--requires an element of conditionality backed by incentives and even coercion. Bane also acknowledges the deep link between the core principle of Catholic social thought--the dignity of the human person--and work as a contribution to the common good. From this perspective, work requirements are justified not only from the standpoint of the community, but from that of the individual as well. For his part, Mead does not adhere to the full rigor of Paul's admonition. By acknowledging non-conduct-based entitlements to certain basic needs, he shows that the spirit of generosity is strong enough to coexist with (perhaps even to override) Calvinist predilections. I infer that it would be very difficult for sustainable social policy to rest exclusively on either the openhandedness of need-based entitlements or the rigor of conduct-based deservingness. Each of these principles plays a legitimate role in decent social life, and for the foreseeable future, we will be seeking an elusive, ever-shifting balance between them.

William A. Galston is professor in the University of Maryland School of Public Affairs, director of the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, and founding director of the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. From 1993 to 1995, he served under President Bill Clinton as deputy assistant for domestic policy.