The rise of the welfare state in America cannot be completely understood apart from a consideration of the effects that the usurping of orthodox Trinitarian social institutions by these Unitarian sympathies had on American society. When this is taken into consideration, then the attenuation of private charities and other poverty fighting programs and their subsequent replacement by the welfare state is not at all surprising. This process has resulted in the consolation of many spheres of American society into one sphere, namely, the federal government. What has resulted from this consolation is the belief, closely related to the one alluded to earlier by Mead, that since only the federal government is powerful, then only the federal government makes society possible. When the effects of this theological shift to Unitarian universalism by leading American institutions in the nineteenth century is fully understood, then the rise of a liberal ideology, which is so messianic in its outlook, can be properly understood as simply the natural progression and secularization of this Unitarian theology.
Faulty theology can and does have drastic social consequences.
The debate over the theological foundations of culture is still going on today. Pope John Paul II recently pointed out the necessity of a Trinitarian theology for a balanced and humane social order in his Centesimus Annus. Orthodoxy recognized that an impoverished society is a violent society not because it is environmentally disadvantaged, but because it is a sinful society and that sin originates in the heart of individuals and then sends out corporate roots into the social realm. The problem of societal poverty, unlike the poverty of one or two individuals, has always been a problem of sin since God first cursed the ground for man's rebellion in the garden of Eden. Poverty is to be gradually overcome through the progressive sanctification of individual men and women's hearts, and then their societal institutions and environments.