Mediating Structures: A Paradigm for Democratic Pluralism

Abstract

The advent of the modern welfare state has tended to undermine the "mediating structures" that form linkages between the individual in his private life and the vast institutions of the public order. Such institutions as churches and families are important not only because they are the value-generating and sustaining institutions in demo cratic society, but also because they are the agencies through which people most frequently interact in public life. The steady erosion of these natural communities by government expansion has resulted in public policies which lack the confidence of the people most directly affected by them. At the same time, there is an increasing desire for government services. Churches have been effectively excluded from con siderations of public policy by a view which identifies the public realm solely with the state. Where church participa tion is acknowledged, the forces of secularization and profes sionalization continue to assault the religious character of that involvement while the expansionist tendencies of the state are manifested in attempts to bring churches further within the sphere of government control. The mediating structures proposal calls for an imaginative recognition of institutions like churches in public policy in order to bridge the ever- widening division between individual belief and public purpose.