The Politics of Altruism: The American Church-State Conflict in the Food-for-Peace Program

Abstract

The church-state problem in the United States has its focal point usually at school board meetings, sometimes in city hall or the state house, and on rare occasions in the Supreme Court. The stakes vary from the loan of a few hundred physics textbooks through public bussing of parochial schoolchildren on up to the possible achievement of long-term federal subsidies for church related schools and social welfare programs. The antagonists are virtually always the same: the Roman Catholic Church and a few Protestant sects seeking to gain greater access to the ma terial resources controlled by the state; organized Protestants and others opposing the efforts of the Roman Catholics. The problem is so familiar that little background need be provided the reader. Consequently, the overriding aim of this article is a simple one: to bring into the view of an informed public an area of American church-state relations hitherto the conscious concern of fewer than one hundred persons. This is the conflict among church-related voluntary agencies working in cooperation with the United States Government in the Food-for-Peace Pro