February 3, 2005 | Read Time: 1 minute
A Public Charity: Religion and Social Welfare in Indianapolis, 1929-2002
by Mary L. Mapes
With Indianapolis as its focus, this book explores the role of religious organizations in providing social services and influencing social-welfare policy.
Ms. Mapes, an adjunct professor at Lake Forest College, in Illinois, who wrote the book with support from the Lilly Endowment, begins by describing how the city’s religious charities carved out a role for themselves in the social-welfare system that emerged in the 1920s. She notes, for instance, the success of Catholic Charities of Indianapolis in asserting that it had a right to care for Catholics and to do so with government money.
The author also examines the tendency of social-service and religious groups during the 1940s and 1950s to focus on the middle class at the expense of the poor. During the War on Poverty a decade later, she says, blacks and clergy members of black churches aligned with white liberals against the conservative public-welfare authorities in Indianapolis to fight for more federal grants to empower poor minorities.
Her last chapter looks at President Bush’s efforts to provide more support to religious groups, and argues that most churches are neither able nor willing to offer the kinds of social services that government can. What’s more, she says, government support for religious groups has implications for how Americans think of the causes of poverty and their responsibilities in helping the poor. “By turning to churches,” Ms. Mapes writes, “policy makers have revived the nineteenth-century assumption that the moral failures of the poor rather than structural inequalities cause poverty.”
Publisher: Indiana University Press, 601 North Morton Street, Bloomington, Ind. 47404-3797; (800) 842-6796; fax (812) 855-7931; iupress@indiana.edu; http://iupress.indiana.edu; 173 pages; $37.50; ISBN 0-253-34480-8.
