CHRISTIANITY is known for its paradoxes — the meek shall inherit the earth, the last shall be first, whoever loses his life will save it. Here’s another: Evangelicals who complain that government is too secular, suddenly fear it’s getting too much religion.
Despite their strong support for George W. Bush, a number of Christian conservatives have hurled stinging criticism at the president’s high-profile attempt to enlist religious communities to battle social problems. They agree with Bush that most faith-based groups have been unjustly shut out of government’s social service regime, but are resisting his plan to greatly expand a provision of a 1996 law letting them compete for federal anti-poverty money. While enthusiastic about the new Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, they seem to regard government support for the faithful as the eighth deadly sin.
Christian Coalition leader Pat Robertson fears that once faith-based charities accept public funds, they will “give up their unique religious activities.” Jerry Falwell, founder of the now-defunct Moral Majority, harbors “deep concerns” that government strings will come with government subsidies. Gary Bauer, former head of the Family Research Council, thinks the idea has “hit a big pothole.” Given the shifting fortunes of these contrarians — Robertson’s group is struggling with debt, and Falwell is more of a media target than a political player — they probably don’t pose much trouble for the Bush White House. But others might.
Richard Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention — the nation’s largest Protestant denomination — has “grave reservations” about public funding for religious charities. He especially worries about the future of church-state partnerships once Bush leaves office: “I wouldn’t touch the money with the proverbial ten-foot pole.” Marvin Olasky, whose ideas helped shape the president’s “compassionate conservatism,” sees in the Bush plan a bias against organizations that make religious conversion central to their mission. He has teamed with the Hudson Institute’s Michael Horowitz to rally other religious leaders around a document detailing their complaints.
It’s not clear whether the criticism has dampened congressional enthusiasm for the plan, which ultimately would allow church-based groups to bid on hundreds of federal programs, including job training, drug treatment, and after-school services. Leading supporters in the Senate, notably Rick Santorum, say they will wait several months before floating legislation, while in the House, J. C. Watts is expected to introduce a bill later this month. Nevertheless, the mini-revolt should come as no surprise. After all, government social policy has treated religious commitment with indifference or hostility for a long time. Reversing that pattern was never going to be easy or unproblematic.
The White House, meanwhile, is undaunted. While acknowledging the critics’ concerns as serious and legitimate, the administration sees no inevitable threat to religion. Take the issue of government oversight. Some worry that audits and bureaucratic scrutiny will distort the character of religious charities. But the plan’s supporters point out that eliminating intrusive regulations has been part of the initiative from the beginning: Bush immediately established offices in five federal agencies to remove regulations unfriendly to religion (the requirement, for example, that emergency shelters operate “in a manner free from religious influence”). Moreover, countless religious entities — hospitals, charities, community development corporations, international relief agencies — already receive government grants and contracts and have done so for decades. Financial and program accountability, it is argued, need not be an imposition.
More important, say the plan’s defenders, the 1996 “charitable choice” law, designed to end discrimination against religious charities in federal contracting, puts government officials on a tight leash: They may not meddle with the content of faith-based programs or the people who staff them. If a bureaucrat’s helping hand becomes a scolding finger, agencies can remind him of this existing law. At worst, recipients of public funds can terminate the partnership — which many charity leaders seem prepared to do.
One of them is Ed Morgan, president of the venerable Bowery Mission in Manhattan, a privately funded Christian shelter serving the homeless since 1879. Several years ago Morgan got New York City money to open another facility, where religious activities are available but must be run by volunteers. Today city officials rank the program their most effective in leading men out of homelessness and addiction. Nevertheless, if government regulators threaten the agency’s spiritual mission, Morgan vows to walk. “I’m ready to go to the board of directors any day and say, ‘I’m sorry, this is untenable. We can’t do this anymore.'”
The question of proselytizing is a touchy one for both Left and Right, for opposite reasons. John DiIulio, director of the White House faith office, angered some when he told a gathering of religious conservatives earlier this month that “conversion-focused” programs probably couldn’t receive direct grants. DiIulio tried to nuance his remarks: Although federal law prohibits nonprofits from using taxpayer money for religious instruction or evangelism, it allows those activities to occur on site — as long as they are funded privately and separated from the social-service aspects of the program.
Liberals see a slippery slope toward coercing participants into religious activities. Conservative detractors see a slouching toward secularization, denaturing religious charities at their core. “Unless an organization can strictly segment its religious and non-religious work with an army of accountants and lawyers looking over its shoulder, it would not be eligible to participate,” says Olasky, a senior fellow at the Acton Institute. “And that seems to be patently discriminatory.”
Many ministers and other leaders, however, take a different view. Charles Ballard, president of the Institute for Responsible Fatherhood in Washington, D.C., for example, already gets federal money for fatherhood programs and job training. His organization moves married couples into blighted neighborhoods, where they befriend men and help them reconnect with their families. The strategy: Build trust through service, sacrifice, sweat — and time. “There’s plenty of preaching the gospel, but not enough living the gospel,” Ballard says. “But people will follow you into the fire if you know how to create relationships.”
The Reverend Luis Cortes, president of Nueva Esperanza, a community development corporation in Philadelphia, looks forward to tapping new sources of public funding. His organization constructs housing for low-income residents, offers job training, and operates a charter high school. Cortes says his agency — supported by about 40 local evangelical churches, all in low-income neighborhoods — has no qualms about segregating the religious and secular aspects of its programs. “We believe we will not lose our independence, and I know that we will not lose our faith.”
A final worry among conservatives is that expanding government support for faith-based charities will mean backing for unpopular religious sects — including Wiccans, Hare Krishnas, and the Unification Church. White House officials say they cannot discriminate against any religious groups, so long as they are effectively helping the poor. For Robertson and Falwell, that creates “an intolerable situation.” Other Christian leaders, however, are perfectly at home with the ground rules of religious pluralism. Ronald Sider, the president of Evangelicals for Social Action, sees Robertson and Falwell as “confused about the First Amendment” — and playing straight into the hands of their enemies, who caricature them as closet promoters of “theocracy.”
Even amid the brickbats of the last few weeks, a consensus is emerging over a way to transform the critics into converts: vouchers. Already many states subsidize day care through vouchers redeemable by church-run centers. And last year, President Clinton signed an initiative allowing drug addicts to use federal vouchers in faith-based treatment programs. These programs may be as religious as they want to be: Federal law — admittedly, as yet untested in the courts — places no content restrictions on religious programs helping individuals who participate freely and who pay with vouchers. If the administration proposes a comprehensive voucher scheme, Olasky says he will happily join the parade.
Meanwhile, in addition to the funding idea, Bush is pushing a broad faith agenda that enjoys bipartisan support: Reform tax laws to stimulate charitable giving, and encourage a climate of church-state cooperation — open public schools to after-school tutors sent by churches, for example, or allow congregations to befriend and assist welfare families.
Even the contested funding concept has plenty of backers. It has been embraced by some of the nation’s leading black ministers, including Walter Fauntroy, Frank Reid, and Eugene Rivers. The board of the National Association of Evangelicals, representing 51 denominations, also has endorsed it. Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of evangelicalism, gave the idea its editorial blessing and chided congregations who “may be enticed to use any regulations on evangelism as an excuse to exempt themselves from social services.” While the Southern Baptist Convention — historically committed to strict separation of church and state — will likely remain wary, it does not control (though it will influence) the decisions of Baptist charities. And at least one influential evangelical leader, Chuck Colson, a Baptist, has praised the plan.
Even the president’s critics on the right admit that his initiative represents a stunning repudiation of a political culture hostile to any but purely private religion. That, of course, explains the outcry from hard-line separationists, who resist granting religion any public support. Conservative criticism itself reflects a lively — and healthy — concern to guard the independence of churches and other religious entities.
Still, it would be strange if evangelicals joined with secularists to block Bush’s overture to people of faith who are addressing our social problems. “Yes, there are risks, but they are risks worth taking,” says Michael Cromartie, director of the Evangelical Studies Project at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. “There are lives at stake. The opportunities to expand ministries to the poor, the alcoholic, the drug abuser, the homeless, the needy are just too great to not find a way to make it work.”
Joseph Loconte is the William E. Simon Fellow in Religion and a Free Society at the Heritage Foundation. He is the author of Seducing the Samaritan: How Government Contracts Are Reshaping Social Services (Boston: The Pioneer Institute, 1997).
