How Government Money Pulls Religion’s Punch

For those who would like a little more faith and hope in their government-funded charity, this ought to be a happy season. Presidential candidate George W. Bush makes the work of religious charities the engine of his compassionate conservatism. Vice President Al Gore, in his first major speech on religion, called for a “new partnership” between church and state. Both endorse charitable choice, the 1996 federal law that allows religious groups offering welfare services to take government money without sacrificing their spiritual mission.

Will any of this make a difference in the way government helps the poor?

Supporters of charitable choice hoped the law would add a moral and religious punch to government-funded assistance. Yet a University of Arizona study released earlier this year found that the most conservative religious groups were not likely to get involved with public money. With or without the law’s protections, they fear the strings that come with government subsidies.

This makes the attitude of some of the nation’s largest religious charities oddly provocative. Consider Catholic Charities, the 900-pound gorilla among private social service providers. Though the agency already relies heavily on government support--public dollars make up nearly 65% of its $2.2-billion budget--few officials expect the law to have any influence on their caregiving.

“It doesn’t mean anything to us,” says Sharon Daly, the group’s Washington-based lobbyist. “Our charitable organizations are structured in such a way that there is no church-state problem.”

Given the 1996 law’s new protections for religion, that raises questions about the seductive--and secularizing--power of government assistance. The charitable choice law states that faith-based groups getting federal dollars need not remove religious symbols from their facilities. They retain control over the “definition, development, practice and expression” of their religious beliefs. And they can make hiring decisions based on religious criteria, one of the keys to preserving religious identity.

None of that seems to interest Catholic officials, however. When asked if they planned to use the law to strengthen their agency’s Catholic mission, nearly all were happy with the status quo. Donald Ballentine, president of Catholic Social Services of Lansing, Mich., was typical: “I can’t think of a program or a service where we said we really need to think twice about this because of our Catholic identity.” Other charities on the dole, from Lutheran Social Services to Jewish Family Services, appear equally cool to the law.

It’s not as though religious agencies never scuffle with the secular state. Catholic Charities refuses to offer abortion counseling, and Catholic hospitals have resisted pressure to perform abortions. A few years ago, San Francisco threatened to cut off millions of dollars in contract money unless the charity extended health benefits to the gay partners of its employees, and Catholic officials relented. In the early 1980s, the New York chapter got into a major row with the city for matching foster children with parents of the same religious background, a debate still not fully resolved.

And therein lies an irony: It was the moral and religious education of Catholic orphans and delinquents that first propelled the U.S. Catholic Church into the business of social welfare. “From its inception, American Catholic social provision was anchored in child care,” Dorothy Brown and Elizabeth McKeown write in “The Poor Belong to Us: Catholic Charities and American Welfare.” “The leading motive was to save the souls of the children and their parents.”

It would be difficult today to find a religious charity beholden to its government benefactors that advanced such other-worldly concerns. Religious liberals, who tend not to believe that any souls need saving, think that’s just fine. But surely it’s not the role of religious institutions merely to help the needy more efficiently than the state. Traditionally, people of faith have attended not only to the physical, but also to the moral and spiritual needs of the poor.

So a question lingers: In the secular universe of social services, can government create space for groups with a conspicuous religious edge? So far, some of the nation’s most venerable religious charities appear uninterested in the answer.

And that seems nearsighted. Charitable choice supporters surely overestimate the law’s ability to revitalize--or remoralize--efforts to combat poverty and other social problems. But religious groups that enjoy the succor of the state may someday wish they’d fought harder for such protections.