What's Wrong With the Faith-Based Initiative?

March 27, 2001 by Margaret Crosby, The Daily Journal

The genius of the American constitutional system is its recognition that mixing church and state damages both religion and democracy. George W. Bush and John Ashcroft apparently never learned that constitutional lesson. They are the architects of an unprecedented proposal to funnel billions of tax dollars to religious institutions to deliver social services.

While touted as a compassionate program, the faith-based initiative has its roots in this country's abandonment of collective responsibility for the poor. Tucked into the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, the 1996 law dismantling the social safety net in the name "ending welfare as we know it," was a provision known as the Ashcroft Amendment or charitable choice. 42 U.S.C. Section 640a. It threatens to end the separation of church and state as we know it, by funding pervasively religious institutions.

Charitable choice requires the government to award contracts for certain social services to religious organizations on an equal basis as secular providers "without impairing the religious character" of the institution. 42 U.S.C. Section 604a(b). The law provides "safeguards:" a religious group receiving public funds cannot be forced to "alter its internal form of governance," i.e., hire people of different faiths, or to "remove religious art, icons, scripture, or other symbols" from the places it serves clients. 42 U.S.C. Section 604a(d).

Under Governor George W. Bush, Texas became the national leader in partnerships between religion and government. When Bush became President, he announced his intention to expand faith-based initiatives nationwide. Within a month of his inauguration, he opened a new Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. He also announced support for new legislation to increase funding for religiously oriented social services, embracing programs administered by five Cabinet agencies (HEW, Education, Justice, Labor and HUD). If enacted, this expanded initiative would create a massive program--estimated at 8 billion dollars--of state-supported religion.

Churches have always had a role to play in helping the needy. With funds from the faithful, members of religious communities have combined compassion with conversion. But, in the United States, when religious institutions obtained public funds to help the poor, they have created separate nonprofit organizations, such as Lutheran Social Services, Jewish Family Services and Catholic Charities. Those agencies receive substantial public support, and, in spending it, they hire people of all faiths, they serve people of all faiths, and they separate religion from the services they offer.

But under the Bush-Ashcroft proposals, tax money flows directly to places of worship. Churches may discriminate in hiring on the basis of religious beliefs. People clad in clerical garb may deliver services in locations laden with religious symbols. Churches may infuse tax-supported aid with religious indoctrination.

Texas provides examples of how this works in practice. In 1997, the state exempted religious drug and alcohol programs from licensing requirements. A publicly supported drug treatment program runs out of a church. Its counselors are ministers, with no professional training in substance abuse or addiction medicine. Its diagnosis: drug abuse is not a disease, it's a sin. Thus, the state-supported therapy: prayer and Bible reading.

Theoretically, a client may choose a secular alternative treatment facility with a professional staff-but he'd have to figure out that he has a right to request an alternative; he'd have to ask for it; and, in many rural areas, he'd have to travel miles to get there. Is this possible for an indigent drug addict?

Bush seeks to replicate this model throughout the country. Public funds will be systematically diverted from experienced professionals to religious groups without supervision or accountability.

The teenager on the streets-ejected from his home for being gay-will find the only shelter for miles around operated by a fundamentalist church that will combine a bed and a meal with a sermon that homosexuality is a sin--if it lets the youth in at all.

Uninsured pregnant women today may go to publicly funded family planning clinics to obtain complete range of options and treatment. Under the faith-based initiative, they may be relegated to religious centers that impose theological doctrines on health care, refusing to dispense contraceptives or to inform clients of the option of abortion. President Bush told Catholic leaders on February 1 in a private meeting inadvertently broadcast to reporters in the White House pressroom, that a goal of his faith-based initiative is to advance anti-choice sentiment in America.

Apart from its political motivations, the faith-based initiative collides with fundamental principles of religious liberty.

First, tax-supported religion offends individual conscience. The life-transforming power of faith works only when people voluntarily embrace it. When impoverished people participate in prayers only because they are desperate for the public assistance that comes with it, their religious freedom is violated. Prayer is a delicate, private matter. Paying someone tax funds to walk into a church is clearly inconsistent with the core concept of the First Amendment.

Second, turning religious institutions into government contractors will make them docile helping hands of the state. Historically, the financial independence of churches from the state has allowed them serve as powerful moral critics of the government. Religious leaders have led some of this country's most important social justice movements, including the civil rights struggle and the antiwar protests. How willing will religious groups be to challenge unjust government policy when they depend upon government grants up for renewal?

Third, the competition for tax dollars will spark a bitter religious conflict among this country's 353,000 religious congregations. Already, religious groups have compiled lists of other religions deemed illegitimate recipients of government largesse. A very un-ecumenical name-calling has ensued. Jerry Falwell called on Bush to exclude Islam from government funds, saying that the "Muslim faith teaches hate." Muslims responded that Falwell " should look in his own back yard before pointing the finger-Christian history has been incredibly violent toward other religions."

Fourth, the faith-based initiative sanctions tax-supported discrimination. Religious institutions are granted immunity from many civil rights laws. This autonomy prevents state intrusion into a faith community in its private realm of worship. But when public money is involved, shaping an organization along exclusionary religious lines conflicts with democratic principles of equality. If a church decides that its tenets forbid an unmarried pregnant woman from teaching Sunday school, the wisdom of its decision is a matter for the congregation. But it is unconscionable for that same church to fire a pregnant teacher from its state-funded religious literacy program because her personal life offends its theological doctrine. The fundamental value that strengthens faith communities--shared belief--collides with the fundamental value that strengthens democracy--diversity. Church and state do not mix.

If these arguments sound familiar: they should. Two hundred years ago, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson warned that funding religions with tax dollars would violate individual conscience, impair religious freedom, interfere with religious autonomy and spark the kind of divisive religious schisms that settlers in America hoped to leave behind in Europe.

Their vision, embodied in the First Amendment, has created a society in which religion is a vibrant part of American life and people of diverse faiths live together in relative harmony.

James Madison and Thomas Jefferson had a more creative and enlightened concept of religious freedom than George W. Bush and John Ashcroft. With legal challenges launched to state-funded religion, the courts may have to teach our current leaders the constitutional lesson they apparently never learned in school.