[HPN] 'Charitable Choice': two views CON

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'Charitable Choice': two views

Con: A huge threat to religious freedom

Thursday, February 10, 2000

By ELENA MATSUI and JOSEPH CHUMAN

It will turn religion against religion. It will make religion a servant
of the state. It will let our government play favorites among believers,
and it will destroy the separation of church and state as we have known
it.

A scenario concocted out of the Middle Ages? A nefarious plot by satanic
evildoers? No, it's with us here and now! It's a centerpiece of George
W. Bush's presidential campaign, and Al Gore has signed on as well. It's
called Charitable Choice, and it's a very dangerous idea.

What is Charitable Choice, and why should every American who cherishes
religious freedom be alarmed?

The Welfare Act of 1996 replaced the old Aid to Families With Dependent
Children program, a federal entitlement, with block grants to be
distributed by the states.

Charitable Choice is a provision of the new law allowing the government
to contract with faith-based agencies serving single mothers with
dependent children.

Since then, Sen. John Ashcroft, R-Missouri, has introduced legislation
to expand Charitable Choice to every current and future health and
social-service program that has received federal funds, including drug
treatment, homeless programs, senior programs, housing, juvenile
services, substance-abuse treatment and prevention, and abstinence
education.

The aim of Charitable Choice is to divest the state of its social
responsibilities and enable the churches to become, in effect,
administrative arms of government programs.

Charitable Choice has become George W. Bush's signature campaign issue
in his effort to portray himself as a "compassionate conservative." Al
Gore, striving to outdo Bush as a friend of religion, also invokes
Charitable Choice in glowing terms.

But any true friend of religion would be very wary of Charitable Choice
for the threats it augurs for religious freedom. Scores of national
religious organizations and hundreds of religious leaders across the
religious spectrum, from conservative to liberal, have signed on against
Charitable Choice.

Among them are the Baptist Joint Committee, representing 11 Baptist
bodies, the Presbyterian Church, USA, the American Jewish Committee, the
Church of the Brethren, the Conference of Seventh-Day Adventists,
various Catholic organizations, the Friends, and the Unitarian
Universalist Association.

We strongly oppose Charitable Choice for many reasons. The most
important embraces matters of high principle and our passionate
commitment to both religious freedom and the preservation of the secular
state.

We ask that the thoughtful reader consider the following consequences of
Charitable Choice:

Proselytization will become rampant -- at taxpayer expense.

Today, religiously affiliated service-providers, such as Catholic
Charities, receive significant federal funding. Yet these groups have
independent boards, deliver services in primarily non-religious
settings, and minimize the religious component of the service to allow
all to feel comfortable. Their function is understood as primarily
charitable and not sectarian.

Charitable Choice would tear down these safeguards. Money will be given
directly to churches, and services can be dispensed in sanctuaries with
religious iconography and symbols defining the environment.

Although Charitable Choice bars federal funds to groups that are
"pervasively sectarian" and specifies that money not be used for
"sectarian worship, instruction, or proselytization," this buffer is
implausible.

Charitable Choice, at its core, emerged from the very notion that
faith-based services are allegedly more effective than secular ones.

While Charitable Choice bars federal money to be spent on proselytizing,
nothing in the law prohibits proselytizing with materials that have
already been paid for.

Imagine having to watch a missionizing video on the tenets of a faith in
which you do not believe accompanying your stay in a shelter or soup
kitchen, or before you receive assistance for your needy child.

Imagine the Christian Identity Movement preaching to blacks or Jews
their messages of racist hate as an implied condition of receiving help.

No human being should ever be placed in the demeaning position of having
to compromise his or her religious conscience in the face of neediness
and dependence on others.

Moreover, who is to decide which religions are "pervasively sectarian"
and which are not? This ugly conundrum will engender endless litigation.
It will coerce the courts to tread where they have wisely resisted going
-- right to the heart of religious doctrine.

The judiciary will be forced to pass theological judgment and draw
distinctions between one religion and another to determine which is
government-certifiable and which is not. Are courts competent to do
this? Is this what we want?

Church will be set against church.

Money corrupts. And lots of money corrupts even more. Charitable Choice
will have houses of worship competing against each other for bountiful
government contracts. Some will be selected by government and others
will lose out.

Churches will divert their energy and focus from their primary spiritual
mission as financial concerns occupy more of the agenda.

Religion will become accountable to government.

With funding comes oversight and control. Charitable Choice transforms
churches into agents of the state, to which they will be accountable.

If government regulation is lax, it will invite the use of funds for
narrowly sectarian purposes in support of the church.

If oversight is rigorous, churches will routinely have to explain and
defend their fiscal policies to government agents. It is not hard to
imagine government inspectors making surprise visits to churches and
demanding to review their books.

It was this type of subordination of religion to the state that the
framers of the Constitution feared most when they crafted the religious
freedom clause of the First Amendment.

Service workers will have no job protection.

Under Charitable Choice churches can hire or fire service providers for
reasons of their own, including religious reasons. If they so choose,
faith groups can refuse to hire applicants who do not share their
beliefs.

If religious doctrine prohibits drinking, dancing, divorce, or using
birth control, employees can be summarily fired for doing so.

If a person has a religious conversion out of the religion of his or her
employer, or dissents on a matter of belief, he or she can be dismissed.

Imagine, again, the employment practices of religious groups with
bigoted messages, discriminating against others whom their religion
counsels to hate -- and all this at the expense of the taxpayer.

Under Charitable Choice, employees of churches that hire them will have
no security, no federal protection nor redress.

Religious providers will set their own standards.

Charitable Choice doesnot mandate educational, licensing, or
certification criteria for treatment counselors. Churches are free to
hire "experts" solely on their religious devotion and zeal.

Many will, regardless of the training needed to carry on the skilled
work that providing such services often demands. Religion's prophetic
voice will be muffled.

We believe that religion plays its most important social role when
itstands outside the precincts of secular power, and critiques the
abuses of government from the plateau of higher moral ideals. Charitable
Choice will function to domesticate religion and render it harmless.

It identifies religion with its service role, and conveniently overlooks
its crucial role in demanding justice.

In short, will religion, dependent upon government funding, turn around
to bite the hand that feeds it? We are afraid not, and the moral voice
of religion at its best will grow silent. We note that we live in a time
of almost overwhelming religious resurgence. We are concerned that many
people, anxious about our nation's moral state, look upon religion as
the unblemished source of moral values and social cohesion.

With a certain blindness setting in, they might conclude that whatever
promotes religion must be good.

Our Founding Fathers knew otherwise. Experience had taught them that the
entanglement of religion with the state inevitably oppresses religious
freedom or elevates the power of the state to dangerous proportions.

Charitable Choice creates this fretful partnership more pervasively than
any initiative of the past 50 years.

The late Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, perhaps the greatest champion
of religious freedom the American people have ever had, once said, "A
union of government and religion tends to destroy government and degrade
religion." It is a message we forget at our peril.


Joseph Chuman is leader of the Ethical Culture Society of Bergen County.
Elena Matsui, a sophomore at Teaneck High School, is a member of the
Ethical Culture Society's youth program.

Copyright © 2000 Bergen Record Corp.


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