According to the most influential metanarratives in American social-policy history, religion has been virtually irrelevant to the development of American welfare in the twentieth century. In crude terms, the main story line is that public welfare replaced religion—for good. The chief alternative story agrees that religion was replaced—but for bad. More carefully, the mainstream story portrays a “quasi-welfare state” supplanting the fragmentary assistance offered by local sectarian, voluntary, and municipal programs, and measures welfare progress by the growth of government provision at the expense of private and religious action. The competing interpretation regards the creation of the government welfare system to constitute, in Marvin Olasky's terms, “the tragedy of American compassion,” because effective, personal, and spiritual assistance was replaced by bureaucratic programs unable to address the deepest needs of the poor. Although the two stories evaluate the outcome differently, they agree about the disappearance or irrelevance of religion to American public welfare.

Although actual classroom practice has changed far less than one might imagine over the past hundred years, the function and the meaning of American public education have become profoundly different. There are few occupations whose day-to-day activities have changed as little as have those of school-teachers, but the relationship of schools and society has become very different than it was in 1900.

In the closing years of the twentieth century, religion became a paramount concern for practitioners and analysts of American politics. During the campaign for the crucial 2000 election, probably shaping the balance of power in national politics for years to come, presidential candidates and party leaders made religion a central factor in their strategies.