Introduction

This chapter sets the scene for the discussion of this book by reviewing the literature on the relationship between religion, human well-being and social policy. In Chapter One, I suggested that the relationship between religion and social policy is not new and in many ways is mutually constitutive: world religions are not just belief systems, they are also social systems with strong impulses to be active in the public sphere (Haynes, 2003). Concurrently, their public role and standing on issues of social welfare, justice and human dignity have been shaped by their interaction with the various social and political ideologies that have come into place throughout human history (Higgins, 1981; Chan and Lap-Yan, 2000; Tyndale, 2003).

This has meant that religiously inspired welfare has been championed not just by the clerical establishments of the major world faiths but also, and indeed more significantly, by lay individuals who in many cases have been prominent intellectuals and social reformers as in the cases of Christian Socialism (Atherton, 1994), modern Hindu thinkers such as Ghandi and Rammohan Roy (Richards, 1985), Muslim reformist thinkers such as the Egyptian Seyyed Qutub and the Iranian Abdolkarim Soroush (Tripp, 2006) and the Christian Democratic movement in the Catholic countries of Europe (Van Kersbergen, 1995). In all cases, religiously inspired ideals have been at the forefront of public action, with many finding their way directly into the machinery of modern governments.

The engagement of the Catholic Church in the 1980s Solidarity Movement of Poland or with Christian Democracy in Western Europe, the development of socialist strands of Protestantism and Sunni Islam from the 19th century, and the proliferation of the Hindu gram seva (village service) in India under the leadership of Gandhi in the early 1900s, are all illustrations of an ongoing historical engagement between religion and social welfare action. It is also the case that world religions have been influenced by each other, such as the influence of socially conscious Christianity on Hinduism through India's contact with Britain (Klostermaier, 1994). It is, therefore, very much the case that the interpretation of religious teaching is itself historically contingent: the same teachings are read differently by different human generations. The ethical social teachings that are described, therefore, in this chapter are generic teachings that are more or less common within the faiths discussed.