May 2001

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Why the White House Faith-Based Initiative?

Paul Chapman is the Co-Director of The Employment Project, a program he started in 1994 to work for economic justice, using the new work place realities as a starting point. For two years he and his colleague Cathlin Baker have been studying Charitable Choice and other examples of the privatization of government responsibilities.

The White House has been saying that faith-based organizations do social services better than government. But you can be sure that the Bush administration is not turning to the religious community in order to improve the quality of social services being provided to poor people in America. Not only are there no studies showing that faith-based organizations (FBOs) perform social services better than the government, there is at least one study showing the opposite. Nina Bernstein's new book The Lost Children of Wilder (Pantheon, 2001) documents the negative effect of sectarian ideology on the delivery of social services.

Can the faith community possibly be as comprehensive in the social work as the US government, reaching into the hollows of Kentucky, the frozen wastelands of Alaska, the underpopulated prairie and mountain states of the West?

And what of discrimination? Can a sectarian agency that condemns homosexuality serve gay people without prejudice? A religious organization that does not receive federal funds is legally able to discriminate in hiring. But what happens when public funds are supporting that organization? That's the issue currently in the courts in Kentucky. When it was discovered that Alicia Pedreira was gay, the Kentucky Baptist Homes for Children, which receives three quarters of its funds from the government, fired her because her life style was contrary to Baptist Homes' "core beliefs." Will the White House initiative result in rolling back the hiring protections of Title VII of the 1994 Civil Rights Act?

If the Bush administration were serious about turning to the FBOs to improve social services delivery, it might have developed the policy in partnership with Jewish Family and Children's Services, the Salvation Army, Catholic Charities, Lutheran Community Services, and many others, with their vast network of social services, their thousands of volunteers, and their considerable experience. Evidently, however, the policy has not been based on good social service research and consultation.

The Bush initiative is primarily a political strategy. It is being pitched as an opportunity for black and Hispanic churches to get funds for their important work. The Charitable Choice provision, which first was included in the 1996 Welfare Reform legislation, allows local houses of worship to bid for government social service contracts on the same footing as not-for-profits. For decades inner city churches have been providing services in their needy and often neglected neighborhoods. Many black and Hispanic congregations are stretched to the limit with their emergency food programs, housing initiatives, drug rehabilitation and job training programs. They do good work. The possibility of millions of dollars pouring into these neighborhoods to help with this work is very tempting and it makes the administration look good. However, the black community is already divided over the initiative.

One of the posters available at the Peacework Silent Auction and Sale, May 17 (see Contents)

But remember, the Bush initiative does not include new money for human services. Charitable Choice simply allows local congregations, even without a 501 (c) (3) [the certification which permits donations to an organization to be tax-deductable], to participate in the bidding process to fulfill the work of the Department of Health and Human Services, HUD, the Department of Justice, and other administration departments. Since the 2002 Bush budget proposes cutting funds to many of these departments, the FBOs are being asked in effect to help Uncle Sam do more with less.

Government grants often come with strings attached. Decisions about distributing the funds to the faith community will not be made on the basis of need or the effectiveness of the service that a charity provides. Many of the small local congregations, often with less than 100 members, are simply not organized to fulfill demanding government contracts. While they do good work in their neighborhoods, they may not have the organizational capacity to manage the usual large government grants. It is largely mega-churches that will be favored--churches that have the resources and the infrastructure to implement the terms of contracts that may not be reimbursed by the government for months. Small organizations just don't have the up-front money to be able to wait. In addition, payments are sometimes contingent on successful results. If a job-training program does not result in permanent jobs for the clients there may be no reimbursements at all.

The larger grant recipients may in turn subcontract some responsibilities to smaller churches, but this complicates the monitoring and accountability process. Are the contracting religious organizations ready for the kind of scrutiny of their financial records that may accompany government contracts?

Charitable Choice appears to be a political strategy to move government money from the more liberal social service agencies that traditionally have had Democratic leanings to new conservative church agencies that are Republican. It is a policy that has been written by the Center for Public Justice, a Christian think-tank in Washington committed to more religion in the public square, and others who believe that Christianity should be the established religion of the US and who have said so in their writings. Note that the first six employees of the White House Office were all born-again Christians. Several of the 32 religious leaders appointed to the House Senate Republican Faith-Based Leadership Summit, gathered to advise the Congress, are notorious for their anti-Semitism and homophobia. Only two of the thirty two are women and there is only one non-Christian in the group.

Churches, synagogues and mosques need to take a long look at the goals and purposes of the 1996 "Welfare Reform" bill, which includes the first Charitable Choice provision, before they bid for government funds to participate in its implementation. They need to be clear that they want to participate in the dismantling of the nation's safety net. They need to be clear about the bill's moral agenda. The 1996 legislation blames poor people themselves for their poverty. The explicit goal spelled out at the beginning of that bill is to change moral behavior--reducing out-of-wedlock births and promoting two-parent families. The agenda is underlined by the recent appointment of Wayne Horn as Undersecretary of Health Education and Welfare. He has been a relentless promoter of two-parent families as Director of the National Fatherhood Initiative. Speaking in Milwaukee during the campaign, Candidate Bush promised $185 million "to strengthen fatherhood" if he were elected.

Since the religious community is thought to be the custodian and arbiter of moral behavior in this country what better group to help implement the conservative moral agenda. Let the churches take over the nation's anti-poverty programs, and if they fail, government will not be blamed.

There is no economic analysis in the Charitable Choice strategy--only economic prejudice. In reality, poverty in most cases is caused not by a lack of morals but by a lack of money. Simply put, poverty is an economic problem. Welfare was first of all a wealth re-distribution mechanism providing money for needy families in times of hardship. In some situations social services provided by faith-based organizations will be helpful, but poverty will not be eliminated until more equitable means of wealth distribution are instituted.

If churches are really serious about eliminating poverty and not just managing poverty by applying band-aid solutions like emergency food centers and homeless shelters, then they need to maintain their distance from the moral agenda of the White House Initiative. They must assert their freedom to speak out against an economic regime that perpetuates economic inequality. When the boundary between church and state is breached, and the church succumbs to the temptation of power and prestige, it sacrifices its true prophetic heritage. False prophets are those who cooperate with the powers, who enjoy the blessing of the realm, who are flattered by having access to those in authority and who in turn flatter the princes of the land. As the prophet Micah says, they "divine for money."

For those of us who believe that one of the tasks of the government is to do justice, there is great cause for alarm--health care and health research funds denied, housing subsidies reduced, education neglected, food stamps cut back, living wage bills stymied, welfare ended, public lands privatized for individual gain, inadequate legal services, prisons designed to punish and not to rehabilitate, the wealthy pampered, the poor blamed and neglected. Rather than reverse these conditions and improve the well being of this land, the Charitable Choice legislation, now being promoted by the White House, will have only negative impact in these areas. People of faith have but one choice: to maintain their freedom from unjust economic priorities and to work against the systemic economic injustice of this administration.

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