Charitable choice
Unleashing an ‘enormous force for good’?
by Camille Colatosti and Julie A. Wortman

Last summer, when the U.S. House of Representatives passed the "Community Solutions Act," (HR7), President George W. Bush issued a statement that called the move "a victory for progress and compassion" that would "increase the help available to poor Americans" and "end discrimination against churches, synagogues and charities that provide social services."

No one, the president added, "can love a neighbor as well as a loving neighbor and we must unleash good people of faith and works in every community in our country. By doing so, we can extend the hope and the promise and the opportunity that is at the heart of the American dream to the heart of every child in America."

The president then urged the Senate "to act quickly to unleash this enormous force for good."

Expanding charitable choice

Passage of the Community Solutions Act was a key step in the Bush Administration’s efforts to expand charitable choice (the provision of government-funded social services by religious organizations), an intention first signaled last January 29, when Bush announced the opening of a new administrative office – the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. The office opened on February 20, and is directed by John DiIulio, a former Princeton University professor.

DiIulio told Sojourners Magazine that his office’s mission included increasing charitable giving, promoting public/private partnerships and "making sure that religious and secular organizations in the community that traditionally haven’t been part of the federal funding loop get to be a part of it, if they so choose."

The concept of "charitable choice" originated with John Ashcroft, then a senator from Missouri, during the drafting of the 1996 welfare reform act. Previously, government funds could not be given to predominantly religious organizations like churches and synagogues (what are now being called faith-based organizations, or FBOs) because of the U.S. Constitution’s requirement that church and state be separated. In order to accept public funds, religious organizations needed to create secular non-profit 501(c)3 tax-exempt organizations, like Catholic Charities or Lutheran Social Services, that could meet government standards of non-discrimination, safety and licensing.

Ashcroft’s "charitable choice" amendment altered existing law to permit government funding of welfare reform programs provided by FBOs which, under Title VII of the U.S. Code, are allowed to discriminate in their employment practices on the basis of religion – discrimination that covers not only employees performing religious functions, but also extends to employees engaged in secular functions. According to a background paper prepared by the Episcopal Church’s Washington-based Office of Government Relations, courts have interpreted the Title VII exemption for church discrimination to also apply to aspects of an employee’s conduct that the religious organization deems inconsistent with its tenets and teachings.

Although welfare reform’s charitable choice, which is administered by the states, provides that FBOs cannot use government funds for religious missions or to screen the religious backgrounds of potential clients, it provides that they can deliver publicly funded programs that contain religious messages. However, under the 1996 welfare reform bill (and in several bills since then), states must provide beneficiaries with a secular program alternative should they choose not to seek services from the FBO.

Because the Clinton Administration never issued regulations for the charitable choice provision of welfare reform law, it was not widely implemented nor did it face constitutional scrutiny by the courts.

Taxpayer-funded discrimination

While the Bush Administration says FBOs have been unfairly eliminated from eligibility for federal funding, critics of charitable choice say the provision is an unconstitutional effort to eliminate the separation of church and state, pure and simple. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a "religious liberty watchdog group," says the legislative bills that would authorize FBOs to receive federal funds "subject people in need to religious coercion; they subsidize religious discrimination and undercut the integrity of America’s houses of worship."

Mark Stern, a lawyer at the American Jewish Congress, says charitable choice has been the cause of at least four lawsuits – including state funding for a Bible class in Texas and a Christian 12-step course for addicted fathers in Wisconsin. A lawsuit in California challenges the state government’s policy of setting aside money for faith-based groups only.

"Bush’s faith-based initiatives take an unconstitutional idea and compound it," Stern says. "The government cannot be in the business of engaging in religion. Where religion is pervasive in a program, the government can’t subsidize it."

Eyal Press, a reporter and a fellow with the Open Society Institute, a foundation based in New York City, agrees. "Charitable choice removes safeguards" that required religious groups to form separate secular organizations, Eyal says. This "allows groups to evangelize while providing publicly financed services," he explains. "It also permits groups to discriminate in hiring on religious grounds, despite financial support from the government."

Of particular concern to John Johnson of the Episcopal Church’s Office of Government Relations is that "the legislation could, in fact, trump state and local laws respecting anti-discrimination measures enacted at those levels." Indeed, says Johnson, "moderate Republican members of Congress delayed a final vote on the House bill to force its sponsors to ‘commit’ to ensure that the states’ rights issue is addressed when the legislation is conferenced with the Senate version."

Last summer, an article by Washington Post staff writer Dana Milbank (July 10, 2001) spotlighted this concern. The article stated that, according to an internal Salvation Army document, "the White House has made a ‘firm commitment’ to the Salvation Army to issue a regulation protecting such charities from state and city efforts to prevent discrimination against gays in hiring and domestic-partner benefits," in exchange for promoting Bush’s faith-based social-service initiative (an increasing number of states and municipalities have laws prohibiting such discrimination).

The article quoted George Hood, a senior official with The Army, as saying that hiring gay employees "really begins to chew away at the theological fabric of who we are."

Although administration officials said the Salvation Army’s claim of a "firm commitment" overstated the case, Milbank noted that The Army document "suggests President Bush is willing to achieve through regulation ends too controversial to survive the legislative process. It also underscores the close allegiance between the administration and conservative groups."

Likewise, funding houses of worship for the charitable services they provide, but insisting that these same religious organizations not use funds to proselytize, is "a distinction without a difference," says Americans United’s Lynn.

Transforming lives

Proponents of Bush’s Faith-Based Initiative dismiss these concerns. In a July 2000 campaign speech, Bush said, "I’m told by the legal experts that my initiative will pass Constitutional muster. We will send money to fund services. But the money does not go to fund the religious programs within the institution."

Bush has made this initiative the center point of his social policy, stating that religious organizations are more effective in providing the services that poor Americans need. In his foreword to Marvin Olasky’s book Compassionate Conservative (2000), Bush wrote, "Government can do certain things very well, but it cannot put hope in our hearts or a sense of purpose in our lives. That requires churches and synagogues and mosques and charities."

Religious organizations, proponents also argue, are less bureaucratic than the government and can provide services for less cost.

Don Ebberly, from the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, told Insight Magazine on March 26, 2001: "We are going to be spending a lot of taxpayer dollars on social programs in America. Take your pick: either through traditional distant bureaucratic systems or small-scale loving and caring services. Traditional programs do not have the capacity to transform lives and don’t even pretend to promise that result. Faith-based programs do and thereby engage in serious prevention that will have the result of reducing the need for costly government spending."

Likewise, CNN’s Tucker Carlson has reported that "study after study shows these faith-based initiatives work better, much better in most cases, than government ones."

But are these claims true? Reporter Eyal Press says, for example, that there is no "strong evidence to indicate that faith-based organizations are more effective than their secular counterparts. This doesn’t mean that they are not more effective, but there is no evidence."

Press points to Nancy Ammerman, a sociologist of religion at Hartford Seminary, who states, "We don’t have the research to tell us whether faith-based organizations are better or not."

Mark Chaves, a sociologist at the University of Arizona, adds, "It can’t be said strongly enough how little we know about whether religion makes a difference in the effectiveness of delivering services. Several studies have shown that, all other things being equal, individuals who attend church are less likely to be arrested or to abuse drugs – and more likely to find jobs and escape poverty – than those who do not. But none of these studies tells us anything about whether religious organizations are more effective than their secular counterparts in delivering social services."

Do religious organizations even have the capacity to undertake the social service work of Bush’s initiative? In a 1999 study of faith-based charitable work, Chaves surveyed 1,200 religious organizations. "More than half of the congregations participated in social service projects of some sort, with African-American and liberal churches playing a particularly strong social-outreach role. The vast majority of these activities, however, were ‘short-term, small-scale’ efforts, such as sending volunteers to help staff soup kitchens. Congregations devoted an average of 2—4 percent of their budget to social service – figures that underscore the potential limits of a social policy that centers around private religious groups while ignoring the need for public investment in areas like health care and education."

In a July 17 report in The American Prospect, Maia Szalavitz, co-author of Recovery Options: The Complete Guide, questioned the Bush Administration’s confidence in "faith-based treatment" for addiction and juvenile delinquency and its desire to recognize religious training as an alternative form of qualification for treatment providers.

"Over the past 10 years," Szalavitz writes, "more than two dozen teenagers have died in so-called ‘tough love’ rehabilitation facilities that use violent confrontation and exposure to primitive living conditions as means to a cure."

Competition among religions

But Terri Schroeder, a First Amendment legislative analyst for the national office of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), sees the question about the effectiveness of the faith-based social services as irrelevant. "The real question is: What does the relationship between government and religious organizations need to look like if there are going to be partnerships? Religious diversity has thrived because of tolerance. If we forget this, we could be opening the door to chaos. This may lead to competition among religions and to government evaluation of religion, the government saying that one religion is better than another."

Indeed, Bush has already said that the Nation of Islam will not qualify for funds because he believes it is a religion that preaches hate. But, according to The Interfaith Alliance, a national organization "dedicated to promoting the positive and healing role of religion in public life," it is not clear "what the criteria would be for determining which religious programs qualify for funding and which don’t. Government officials will be put in the position of labeling some value systems better than others and relegating the rest to second-class status."

Meg Riley, director of the Unitarian-Universalist’s Washington, D.C., Office of Faith in Action and the co-chair of Equal Partners in Faith ("a multi-faith, multi-racial network of religious leaders and people of faith committed to equality and diversity" founded in 1997), agrees. "Religious freedom is best served when faith communities are left to their own dictates, without governmental strings, on how best to serve their local communities."

Black churches divided

Bill Fletcher, the national co-chair of the Black Radical Congress, believes there is also "a Machiavellian component" to Bush’s initiative. The president, he says, is "trying to play upon splits in the African-American movement. This is especially important to Bush given his poor performance among black voters."

Founded in 1998, the Black Radical Congress, explains Fletcher, works "to forge African-American activists and scholars and various organizations into a national movement in order to rebuild a left presence in black America."

"After the election," Fletcher says, "Bush called a meeting of African-American ministers. It was not a diverse group and was aimed at further driving a wedge among divisions. Bush offered a carrot to a sector of the black community."

Eugene Rivers, pastor of the Azusa Christian Community, a Pentecostal church in Dorchester, Mass., was one of those who attended the meeting in question. A self-described "new leftist," Rivers converted a former crack house in one of Boston’s poorest communities into the headquarters of his Ten-Point Coalition, a group of churches that came together in 1992 to combat the gang violence that was claiming the lives of a growing number of the city’s black and Latino youths. Working with police and other neighborhood organizations, the Coalition boasts of the impressive 80 percent decline in Boston’s homicide rate.

Rivers hosted a March 19, 2001, press conference to proclaim his support for the Bush initiative, although representatives of the Congress of National Black Churches, who also met with the president, issued a statement to say that they are not in favor of the Bush plan. Rivers has accused critics of the Bush plan of being racist, or anti-religious. He told the Boston Globe: "The white fundamentalists thought the faith-based office would finance their sectarian programs, which primarily serve upper-middle-class suburbanites, and they are infuriated because John DiIulio wants resources to go to people who are poor, black and brown."

Of the left and liberals, Rivers said, "Those who oppose charitable choice are ‘upper-income liberals’ who care more about whether a social-service provider has a cross on its door than whether the institution is doing an effective job serving the poor."

For Rivers, "The black community would be foolish to dismiss the opportunity to work with government simply because of ideological discomfort with the Bush administration."

Charitable choice a distraction

Anti-charitable-choice groups like The Interfaith Alliance (TIA) believe the debate over charitable choice "distracts from a deeper examination of our nation’s budget priorities that has led to insufficient funding currently available to address America’s poverty crisis."

As Richard Wagner observes in What’s Love Got to Do with It? (The New Press, 2000), "The United States has the sharpest rates of income inequality in the Western world, the sparsest public social welfare system in the industrialized world, among the highest poverty rates in the Western world, and a host of festering social problems that produce more violence and prisons than elsewhere."

"In 2000," reports TIA, "Catholic Charities USA noted a 23 percent increase in the amount of food and shelter they delivered, and they remained unable to meet all of their requests. America’s Second Harvest, the nation’s largest network of food banks, reports that in 1997, 21 million people turned to the agencies they serve, a 17 percent increase over 1996 requests – 40 percent of those clients were from working families. Whether or not religious organizations have the capacity to effectively deliver social services, they clearly have been overextended in meeting the needs of the poor, including the increasing working poor. Increasing the number of competitors for stagnant funds while ignoring the fact that welfare roll reduction has not resulted in poverty reduction will not address this issue."

To many people, calling the government to accountability about social policy, in fact, is the faith community’s special, prophetic role – a role which could be seriously co-opted by charitable choice.

"Would there have ever been a Montgomery bus boycott if their hands had been in ‘Pharaoh’s kitty’?" Timothy McDonald, pastor of Atlanta’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, asked during the Progressive Religious Partnership conference in Washington, D.C., last April. "If Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Atlanta, under Dr. King, had received a $100,000 grant for poverty work, or if Ralph Abernathy’s church in Mississippi had gotten a $50,000 government gift for computer training, do you think they would have stood up and criticized that same government?"

As Paul Moore, the retired Bishop of New York, pointed out in a Living Church editorial last summer, "It is the responsibility of the state, not the church, in an affluent society, to provide for the basic human needs of its citizens: food, shelter, health, education and housing. These are issues of justice, not charity, and it is the duty of the state to provide them."

Camille Colatosti is a professor of English at Davenport University in Detroit and is The Witness’ staff writer. Julie A. Wortman is editor/publisher of The Witness.