Faith, charity, and the Constitution
Yesterday in Ohio, Obama delivered a speech on faith where he outlines his views on his version of Bush’s Faith-Based Initiative. (Policy statement here.) I have a lot of mixed thoughts on this, and some serious concerns about it. I should say up front that the separation of church and state is an issue about which I care very much, but I definitely recognize the complexities of this situation.
There is a large category of government actions that, similarly to this program, seem to put the Free Exercise Clause and the Establishment Clause in conflict. Anyone who hasn’t spent much time thinking or reading about constitutional law probably assumes that these two things, the freedom to your own religious choices and the separation of the government from religious matters, are two parts of the same thing. In many ways this is true. However, there are a lot of situations where the two are somewhat contradictory. For example, the government funding religious education/indoctrination in a particular set of religious beliefs seems obviously unconstitutional. However, the government is clearly on solid ground when it gives out Pell grants for people to attend college, and they sometimes attend religious universities or, in the more extreme example, study to become members of the clergy. Would the government be unacceptably supporting religion by funding the training, or would it be unfairly discriminating against religion by not funding it? Both things seem true, but they’re obviously contradictory. (For what it’s worth, the Supreme Court has come down on the side of funding the education.)
Funding for faith-based charities is a similar problem. I’m going to assume, for the purposes of discussion, that everyone agrees that funding groups that actively distribute material seeking converts or in other ways pushing their faith towards people they serve, or who mix the charity with religious practice (by say, asking the homeless to say grace with them before getting their food) should not get government funds. I know not everyone agrees with that, but I think it’s pretty obvious. So let’s talk about the groups that are willing to insulate the charitable arm from the rest of the organization with separate bank accounts, different hiring practices, and a complete lack of overt religious practice and proselytizing. In that case, it seems unfair to deny a charity funding in favor of a secular charity that is otherwise equivalent because of its religious affiliation. I can understand why people find the idea upsetting and refer to it as “discriminating” against those who are religious.
That said, I have serious trouble imagining that any of these charities are really, truly isolated. Money, of course, is fungible. If religious organizations are channeling money to a charitable arm already, they have no need to use the actual dollars from the government if they want to use its funding for religious activities — they could just reduce their other support for the charitable activities by the same amount and get an identical effect. I also think there is just a subtle form of advertising and pressure going on here. Imagine the summer classes that Obama wants to focus the program on happening in a church. The kids go there, into an obviously religious building, see religious imagery around, and take classes from a group run by Catholic Charities or something. They know the religion is there, get exposure to it, and the religious group gets free press for good activities that are really being done by the government.
These things are admittedly minor compared to most church-state infractions. They are nowhere near the idiocy level of putting prayer or the Ten Commandments in public schools. It’s easy to say that they are too minor to matter, or that they have no appreciable effect whatsoever. But try imagining a similar situation. Instead of a church and Catholic Charities, imagine an extreme and obviously dangerous religion. I don’t mean, imagine Jews or Muslims instead of Christians. I mean, imagine Heaven’s Gate. You can call them cults or whatever else you want, but until they do something illegal they still get protection as a religion. If the Heaven’s Gate Soup Kitchen opened up down the street, how would you feel? What if it was government-funded? If the dangerous views of the cult make you uncomfortable about the government funding its soup kitchen, it’s because you recognize that the government funding really does aid that religious group.
Of course, there’s another level of safeguards that could get rid of these concerns. The group would have to be forbidden from putting its religion in its name, or holding its events at a place of worship, or in any other way doing anything that would make it clear to those receiving the service that the group had religious connections. I just don’t think there’s any conceivable world in which that level of care will be taken. Even if someone was to try, it’d never happen. Even the more mild regulations are horribly difficult to enforce. Is the government going to have undercover homeless people to check and see if anyone hands out pamphlets at the homeless shelter? There is plenty of cause for the concern that many have expressed about Obama’s expanded version of this program.
That said, it’s also very clear that Obama’s version is much better than Bush’s. As someone who spent a while reading through the guidelines the programs had for what religious activities were and were not allowed for a charitable group to get funding, I can personally vouch for the absurdity of the “protections” that existed. (Read them for yourself.) Calling them “loopholes” would be to massively understate them. They seemed neither small nor unintentional. Obama seems like he at least will have serious efforts to make sure the religious activities stay reasonably separate.
Maybe he’ll do a good enough job that the Establishment Clause concerns will be very minor, and the Free Exercise concerns will be more important and make the program worth having. I’ve got to say, though, that any program that specifically tries to target faith-based groups seems automatically bad. Even if it’s just training on how to apply for grants that already exist, the idea that this training would be targeted towards religious groups worries me. If you really were just allowing the charitable arm of faith-based groups to have the same access as secular groups to funding for their secular activities, you wouldn’t need a special presidential council in order to do it.
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