Church
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.
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.
For three weeks in February 1998, a delegation of U.S. religious leaders made a historic visit to the People’s Republic of China. Selected by President Clinton and invited by President Jiang Zemin, the delegation’s unprecedented mission was to begin a dialogue with top government officials in China on the subject of religious freedom. The delegates said they knew the dangers of such a state-sponsored visit—especially the risk of co-option by their hosts—but felt they were able to voice criticisms, broaden awareness, and introduce a new perspective on religious freedom to many Chinese officials.
Rev. Richard Cizik, a policy analyst for the National Association of Evangelicals and a staff member for the delegation, said he has been preparing for this trip since reading Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth as a child. Cizik received a graduate fellowship to the National Political Science University in Taiwan in the early 1970s, and visited the garrison coastal islands of Quemoy and Matsu—the closest that an American with a Republic of China passport could get to mainland China at that time. "Looking through binoculars from one of the concrete bunkers built to house artillery batteries," he said, "I promised God that I would someday get to the mainland." This year he fulfilled that promise. —The Editors
"We’re here to build a spiritual bridge between the United States and China," the rabbi, minister, and archbishop calmly explained. At least a dozen reporters with cameras, including representatives of Xin Hua, the official Chinese News Agency, crowded the entryway of the White Cloud Daoist Temple to interview the highest level delegation of its kind at the start of a three week mission on behalf of religious freedom.
"Don’t you think you are being used by the Chinese government for propaganda purposes?" a reporter from Reuters inquired.
"Except my mother and me, the entire Schneier family died in Nazi concentration camps," the rabbi responded. "I know what it means to be manipulated by authorities, and that’s not going on here."
"What do you do?" It's taken me about nine months to come up with a short answer for that question.
A small group of twentysomethings can change the world. A generation of them can reclaim the cities of America for the kingdom of God. This is our calling.
A century and a half ago, a young congressman from Illinois became unpopular with his home constituency and was forced to leave office. It had been rumored that he had little respect for the church or religion; furthermore, he was obviously unpatriotic for opposing the U.S. war with Mexico.
A decade later the same man returned to political life, became a vociferous critic of slavery, and was eventually elected president of the nation. This is the man who in his second inaugural address made one of the most explicitly biblical statements in the annals of the American presidency:
Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war might speedily pass away. Yet, if God will that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn by the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether" (Psalm 19:9).
The life of Abraham Lincoln reminds us of two things about religion and American political life. First, they have always been mixed together. Second, church people do not have infallible political judgment.
As citizens of what the historian Sidney Mead called "the nation with the soul of a church," most Americans have thought from the colonial period on that their religious convictions had something very important to do with their political choices. The present highly visible involvement of Christian and other religious groups in political life, including presidential campaigns, is hardly novel.
