Compassionate Conservatism: What It Is, What It Does, and How It Can Transform America

Christian Century, Sept 13, 2000 by Robert Westbrook

ACCORDING TO George W. Bush, Marvin Olasky is "compassionate conservatism's leading thinker. A professor of journalism at the University of Texas, Olasky has been a Bush adviser since 1993 and for the past decade a fixture in the network of well-endowed foundations, policy institutes, and publications that sustains this country's conservative intellectuals. He writes regular newspaper columns for the Austin American-Statesman and edits a weekly magazine, World, that claims 103,000 subscribers and offers "practical commentary on current events and issues from a perspective committed to the Bible as the inerrant Word of God."

Olasky's prominence among American conservatives rests on a series of books he has written over the past ten years. Most notable among these was The Tragedy of American Compassion, published in 1992. In this volume, Olasky celebrated what he termed the "Early American Model of Compassion" of strictly voluntary, private, local, moralizing, "faith-based" charity. Chief among its virtues was a sharp distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor and a coupling of the receiving of charity with shame and an obligation to repair whatever failings might have led to poverty and degradation. Olasky favorably contrasted this model of compassionate social policy with the 20th-century American welfare state, in which secular state bureaucrats replaced faithful local neighbors as the agents of compassion and proceeded to screw things up. Put in place by reform elites (of both parties) over the course of the century, the American welfare state took its most disastrous turn in the 1960s when the War on Poverty took shape as a "war on shame" in which reformers taught the poor to regard public assistance as an entitlement rather than a confession of moral failure and a down payment on reformation. "Suddenly," he wrote, "it became better to accept welfare than to take in laundry." There followed a collapse of responsibility in the precincts of the poor and an explosion there of illegitimacy, drug abuse, crime and the other pathologies of a now hopeless "underclass."

The lesson of this history was clear. In the interests of true compassion, the modern American welfare state must be dismantled and replaced with something akin to its early American predecessor which had "waged a war on poverty much more successful than our own." Olasky proposed to "put welfare entirely in the hands of church and community-based organizations."

Few historians took note of The Tragedy of American Compassion, and those who did attacked it for a romanticization of early American social welfare practices and a less than evenhanded account of the contemporary welfare state. It might be fairly said that Olasky's history, here as elsewhere, has been less wrong than extraordinarily tendentious. As fellow conservative David Brooks said in a review of a more recent Olasky book, The American Leadership Tradition (1999), "Olasky's historical judgments are so crude and pinched that one suspects his main effect will be to buttress the stereotypes of those who are prejudiced against religious conservatives."

Brooks may be correct, but among those inclined to the opposing stereotypes and prejudices, Olasky's tendentiousness has served him well. His books have come bearing forewords by the likes of Newt Gingrich and Charles Murray (of Bell Curve infamy), and Gingrich made The Tragedy of American Compassion required reading for the Republican revolutionaries who swept to power in Congress in 1994. "Our models are Alexis de Tocqueville and Marvin Olasky," Gingrich declared. "We are going to redefine compassion and take it back." Supported by the Heritage Foundation and other conservative institutions, Olasky has won for himself an attentive and enthusiastic audience on the right. Not least among this crowd is George W. Bush. Olasky was introduced to Dubya by Karl Rove, his chief adviser, and although Bush admits to having read little of Olasky's work, the two have consulted and prayed together since Bush's first term as governor of Texas. Olasky currently chairs Bush's campaign subcommittee on religion.

I suspect that Olasky's own journey to compassionate conservatism has lent added moral authority in these quarters to his arguments. Born in 1950 into a Jewish family in the suburbs of Boston, he abandoned Judaism at a young age. After college at Yale in the late `60s, where he was something of an activist, he took the improbable step of joining the Communist Party in 1972, one of the few Americans to succumb to the blandishments of Leonid Brezhnev. But his romance with American communism proved short-lived. Plagued by doubts about doubts about God in the fall of 1973 while a graduate student at the University of Michigan, he abandoned the party and drifted toward evangelical Christianity. Replacing Marx with Calvin, Olasky eventually joined the orthodox Presbyterian Church of America, and in 1994 he helped found the Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Austin, where he now serves as an elder. His wife, Susan, has said that Whittaker Chambers's Witness was an important book for Olasky, and he has traced the same path to Christ from the secular "God that failed" that Chambers, long a hero to the American right, pioneered.