Faith No More

The Bush Administration has proven once and for all that church and state must be kept far apart. A response to Mary Jo Bane.

Discussions about the role of faith in specific political decisions, as distinct from the general “faithiness” embodied by the phantom crucifix in Governor Mike Huckabee’s now-forgotten Christmas campaign commercial, have been conspicuous by their absence from the recent presidential primary campaign. Although nearly all of the Democratic and Republican candidates have spoken in glowing terms about the importance of faith in public life, they have avoided addressing the complexities and pitfalls of using personal faith as a guide to public policy.

These are omissions with potentially serious consequences, because George W. Bush’s most important legacy may be a Supreme Court only one vote away from endorsing Associate Justice Antonin Scalia’s absurd assertion, in McCreary County v. American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky, that the Constitution protects monotheists but permits “disregard of polytheists and believers in unconcerned deities, just as it permits the disregard of devout atheists.” But no one is talking about this, because secularism–for Democrats and Republicans–has become a dirty word.

For those who understand the gravity of the church-state separation issues in this election, it is therefore tempting to overlook the modest and seemingly reasonable argument on behalf of increased government support for faith-based social programs made by John DiIulio, Jr., in his recently published Godly Republic: A Centrist Blueprint for America’s Faith-Based Future, and supported by Mary Jo Bane in the last issue as “a plan rooted in principle, not politics” and an “attractive vision” of a “faith-friendly civil society” [“Keeping the Faith,” Issue 7]. But friendly to which faiths? And at what cost to the religious neutrality mandated by the world’s first secular Constitution?

DiIulio, the first director of Bush’s White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives and a Roman Catholic, resigned from his White House job in less than a year because he did not think that the Bush Administration was delivering on its promises to foster “compassionate conservatism.” His book is, in part, a brief in support of what he would have liked to accomplish in his White House job. It is an idealistic manifesto for targeted grants to urban churches committed to addressing social problems, such as the plight of families left behind by the disproportionate number of African-American men in prison. Such programs, Bane argues, “are not casual, relatively low-interaction weekend activities like soup kitchens and clothing drives…Rather, they rely on a smaller number of motivated volunteers to spend the immense amount of time needed to build the sort of committed, respectful, one-on-one relationships that are crucial to the programs’ success.” Who but someone with a heart of stone could argue against federal grants for African-American churches whose volunteers wish to mentor the children of African-American prisoners?

Nevertheless, I will try. Godly Republic, and Mary Jo Bane’s stated sympathy with the faith-based initiatives detailed in it, are perfect examples of the failure by so many well-intentioned, moderate religious believers to acknowledge the existence of a slippery slope that begins with seemingly small violations of the separation of church and state. Bane accepts DiIulio’s premise that “secular concerns over an erosion of church-state divisions could be overcome by forbidding discrimination in service provision and hiring along with requiring that public funds be both scrupulously accounted for and segregated so that they are not used for religious purposes.” But it defies common sense to think that money paid to religious institutions can somehow be restricted to non-religious activities.

Faith-based social funding, initiated during the Clinton Administration but vastly expanded and politicized under Bush, cannot be separated from the overall attempt by the religious right to hack away at the wall of separation between church and state, until no one remembers that the Constitution was intended not only to protect religion from government interference, but to protect government from religious interference.

And while the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives may be out of the news, the conservative effort to expand faith-based funding in all federal programs is expanding. According to a recent analysis published by Roll Call, earmarked grants to proselytizing religious organizations can be found throughout the federal budget. Earmarks by individual members of the House and Senate, which avoid the usual vetting process that takes place when organizations apply through a government agency, are particularly capricious (and often inserted into the budget at the last minute to avoid scrutiny by the public or Congress).

One of the most recent earmarks, finally withdrawn, was the brainchild of Senator David Vitter of Louisiana, who had sneaked in $100,000 for two religious organizations promoting the teaching of creationism in public schools. Many other earmarks, totaling more than $500,000 over the past few years, have benefited Teen Challenge, a right-wing Christian drug rehabilitation program. The program encourages conversion to fundamentalist Christianity as a way of maintaining sobriety. Teen Challenge’s founder, the Reverend David Wilkerson, has described Jewish teenagers who have converted to Christianity as “completed Jews.” World Impact, an organization with an explicit mission statement endorsing fundamentalist Christian proselytizing, receive $1.9 million last year. These are our tax dollars at work.

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