Budget

The charitable choice provision of the 1996 federal welfare reform law makes Christian ministries and other faith-based organizations eligible for government funds to provide welfare services, without requiring them to form separate corporations or remove religious content from the services they offer. We asked two experts on charitable choice to explore the issues of church-state relations raised by the provision.
—The Editors

Cooperation between government and religious organizations to serve the needy is not new. But previous federal rules for such cooperation were often so restrictive, uncertain, or arbitrary that many Christian ministries rejected federal dollars for fear of losing their spiritual mission. The charitable choice rules for federal welfare funds are designed specifically to address this fear by protecting the religious integrity of participating faith-based organizations.

Charitable choice is built on four principles. It

  • encourages state and local governments to use contracts or voucher arrangements to obtain services for welfare families from non-governmental organizations;
  • requires the governments not to exclude faith-based organizations from competing for funds because they are religious or too religious;
  • obligates the governments to respect the religious integrity of organizations that accept government funds to provide welfare services;
  • protects the right of the needy to receive help without religious coercion.

The charitable choice provision is a set of conditions on how the federal welfare block grant that each state receives can be used, not a separate fund designated for churches.

Melissa Rogers 7-01-1998

Should houses of worship and other religious organizations increase their efforts to assist people moving from welfare to work? Absolutely. Should they do so by following the model established by the charitable choice provision of the welfare reform law? Absolutely not. Charitable choice is unconstitutional, unwise, and unnecessary.

Unconstitutional. Charitable choice ignores important legal distinctions that protect religion. For many years, groups that have ties to religious bodies, but are not pervasively sectarian (such as Catholic Charities and Lutheran Services in America), have received government money to perform secular social services, provided that they do not proselytize or discriminate on the basis of religion in hiring.

Courts generally have refused, however, to permit the government to subsidize pervasively sectarian entities, such as a church or a drug rehabilitation group that relies on acceptance of the gospel. Why? The Constitution recognizes that individual citizens, not the government, should choose whether their money supports the missions of Methodists, Mormons, Baptists, or Buddhists.

It doesn’t solve the constitutional problem to restrict the use of tax money for secular purposes. In pervasively sectarian ministries, it is almost impossible and always unwise for government to try to separate sacred from secular. When government attempts to do so, it becomes excessively entangled with the ministry, which is itself unconstitutional. Charitable choice attempts to obliterate the legal distinction between religiously affiliated and pervasively sectarian institutions, allowing both to receive tax funds.

Ronald J. Sider 1-01-1996
Budget cuts should make us weep--and rage.