Initiative, Enforcement and the Faith-Based Funding Program
It's nice to see a complex and important church-state issue like the government's faith-based funding program get as much attention as it has lately. First, President Bush recently spent a few days claiming his administration's initiative to be a rousing success, and then a presidential candidate got a day's worth of mainstream press coverage for declaring it to be an utter failure, though one he proposes to rebuild, not abandon.
A little perspective might be in order, inspired by the BJC's response today to Senator Obama's proposal, as well as an interview I just read with GW Law professors Robert Tuttle and Ira Lupu for the Roundtable, discussing a paper they have just published entitled "Constitutional Change and Responsibilities of Governance Pertaining to the Faith-Based and Community Initiative.” It's worth remembering - as a starting point - that religious organizations have been partnering with the government to provide secular services for a long time. That did not begin with the Bush Adminstration. What has been a recent development, however, is the specific effort - through offices in all executive departments - to target faith-based organizations for funding opportunities. The question is not the possibility of any carefully safeguarded partnerships with religious organizations. It is why the government is taking initiative to seek out and build more such relationships.
Along with that new emphasis came the normalization of a highly problematic arrangement: sending money directly to religious organizations, rather than to a separately created organization that could more easily and transparently keep religious activities separate from the secular services for which taxpayer money was granted. As Lupu says:
The larger principle is that the government may not be responsible for religious indoctrination. But the implementation changed over the last 20 years from a broad rule against funding certain kinds of entities to a narrower rule to funding certain kind of activities.Denying funding to certain kinds of activity rather than certain kinds of entity is a much more complicated process to administer. So long as Senator Obama's proposal emphasizes more funding directly to religious groups, the challenge of making sure the rules (against discrimination and proselytizing with public money) are not broken will be difficult. At the very least, his proposal acknowledges the existence and importance of those rules, though doesn't that seem like a low bar to have to cross? (Shows where we are these days, I suppose.) It would be an even more impressive plan by convincingly addressing how those rules might be enforced.