The Social Security Act of 1935: Religious and economic belief systems underlying the congressional debates.

摘要

This study addresses how economic and civil religious belief systems combined and complimented one another within accepted political ideologies to produce the debates of the 1930s and the social policy debates of the last ten years (1995-2005). Little has been said about the symbolic and cultural role that religion has played in shaping political debate and praxis. The study uses the Social Security Act of 1935 (SSA) as a case study for identifying the tenets of the U.S. capitalist economy and Calvinist-based civil religion that informed preceding congressional debates, and subsequently the SSA law and its amendments, in the 1930s. These tenets form belief systems comprised of assumptions, values, practices, and paradigms, all manifest in the tenets. Behind the practical and economic questions of who would pay for social security benefits, and how much, were ethical questions and issues of race, class, and gender. Because both U.S. capitalism and civil religion share tenets and have mutually reinforcing tenets, there are syncretic combinations that have evolved over the centuries and found expression along the conservative/liberal political spectrum, at least since the early nineteenth century. Textual analysis of the congressional debates shows that economic and civil religious beliefs were expressed in the words and metaphors used to argue for and against various sections of the act. A review of the debates over social welfare policy between 1995 and 2005 shows that the political combination of the tenets has remained rather consistent since the 1930s. These deeply embedded values and ideologies have social welfare policy implications for the future because they stem from unquestioned cultural assumptions that usually change slowly, if at all, over time.