by GRETCHEN PURSER & BRIAN HENNIGAN
Tom Waterhouse PHOTO/ Flickr
Inside the program teaching submission to capitalism as a divine duty.
Trump’s “taxpayer first” budget proposal, released last month, not only guts social welfare spending, but expands work requirements for low-income recipients of aid. “If you are on food stamps and you are able bodied, we need you to go to work,” declared budget director Mick Mulvaney.
Making low-income Americans work to qualify for aid has long been couched in the language of personal responsibility, dignity, and civic and moral duty. Mulvaney’s comments during the White House briefing were no exception: “There is a dignity to work,” he declared. “And there’s a necessity to work to help the country succeed.”
While work requirements are widely regarded as darlings of the conservative agenda, few recognize the role that faith-based organizations have played in lending these policies ideological and practical support. Geographer Jason Hackworth terms this phenomenon “religious neoliberalism,” the “ideational fusion” between free-market ideologues and religious conservatives. These two groups, Hackworth argues, are bound through a mutual “faith in the market, faith in the individual, and faith in a small (or nonexistent) government.”
Arguably nowhere is this ideological fusion more prominent than in the faith-based — or, rather, faith-saturated — job-readiness program called Jobs for Life (JFL). Founded in 1996 in Raleigh, North Carolina, JFL is a global nonprofit organization premised on the belief that the local church, given its capacity to mobilize the cant of volunteers, is the untapped and ideal “solution” to the enduring social crises of poverty and unemployment.
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