ABSTRACT
The incremental, unplanned development of the present social welfare system; the erosion of moral authority underlying basic belief systems; and political and economic limitations on welfare development suggest that a new paradigm for American social welfare is well overdue. Welfare policy and programs today are empty of most of their moral authority, and without moral authority welfare has lost the meaning necessary to give the help most welfare families need. The theology of the present decades clearly could have done a better job of articulating and promoting welfare from a morally relevant base. The task of reforming the morally relevant base for social welfare development goes well beyond the efforts of either social work or government activity. Liberalism has placed ideological limits on the development of social welfare policy in America. Liberalism, capitalism, and the belief in science that have so energized American society fail to enlighten welfare policy as the ideologies have been recast in a modern idiom.
