Bush's Payoff: Funding Faith-based Charities

by Coleman Kitchin

When Spanish anarchists murdered priests and burned churches in the 1930's, they were reacting to centuries of oppression by an unholy alliance of sexually corrupt clergy, large landowners and small government officials. The movement had started out peaceably enough in the late 19th century, with abjectly poor Andalusian peasants learning to read, reading books on muleback, practicing vegetarianism and abstaining from alcohol. In opposition to the church, they converted their sacred marriages to "companionships," refused to baptize their children, and drew up plans to burn down the local church. Now that they had finally revolted, under the banner of an anarchism imported from Barcelona and Italy, they saw their feudal enemies clearly. It was a fight against the black robes.

The same tradition of state-sponsored European clergy oppressed the young Thomas Jefferson at William & Mary College. In his case the priests were Anglicans, bitter at having been transferred to teach in the colonies. His experience in the hot, closed building that constituted the campus in low-lying Williamsburg made Jefferson a champion of religious freedom. And even freedom from religion. When he founded his open-air university in upland Virginia, he specified that no chapel be built.

Churches are strange beasts. The same W&M Jefferson found so oppressive had also as its mission the social improvement of American Indians. The sons of the colonial gentry long remembered rubbing shoulders with the other student body there, a group of Native Americans engaged in a program of Western education (in separate classrooms). Jefferson's elitist university never saw that!

G.W. Bush's great payoff to the Christian right, a proposal to shovel hundreds of millions of dollars to "faith-based" social welfare programs is a similarly mixed bag. No one can doubt that the dead hand of bureaucracy might be livened up a bit by public-spirited voluntary groups, as long as they keep their bibles (and korans and torahs) under the desk. Bush has larded his meetings on this initiative with religious and charitable folks left and right, Christian and not, from Habitat for Humanity and Covenant House to Young Life and the Association of Gospel Rescue Missions; from the Salvation Army to the Islam Center of America.

Notable is Watergate figure Chuck Colson, long a leader in prison fellowship. Conspicuous is Bush's Texan confidant Marvin Olasky, who wrote in 1996 that government should "put welfare entirely in the hands of church and community-based organizations." (He is also reputed to have come up with the term "compassionate conservatism.") But Bush avoids this extreme no-government position.

For their part, many Democrats avoid the opposite position, that only government should provide social services paid for by taxes. The Clinton administration supported some "faith-based" involvement in these programs, and centrist Democrats are likely to hop on board Bush's new plan creating a "White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives."

Bush did not give Marvin Olasky a job in the new program, instead appointing two men with more moderate reputations: Stephen Goldsmith, former mayor of the model city for privatization of municipal services, Indianapolis; and John J. DiIulio, Jr., Ivy League academic. Interestingly, each actually has a background in law enforcement. DiIulio was a prominent proponent of massive prison construction and Goldsmith was a prosecutor. Let us hope this speaks more to career opportunism than any mindset of social control! Or more hopefully: they've concluded that punishment will not solve social problems.

Bush's proposals are notable for including non-religious charities, and for restoring the tax deduction for charitable donations taken away from non-itemizers by tax simplification in the 1980's. He also claims there will always be a non-religious alternative to any services provided. It is difficult to see how this would work in small towns and rural areas.

In Washington, D.C., itself, privatization of social services has been a sickening disaster. The mentally challenged were released from a public institution (under court order), into the clutches of unqualified for-profit group homes, often to live in fetid conditions, and even sent to horse farms as unpaid servants. Only after extensive newspaper investigations spurred by concealed deaths was the system brought under some control.

While Bush's plan is restricted to non-profits, its essence is to call upon the entrepreneurial sprit, so that the best providers will win the contracts. Comparison to the Washington group home scandal is sadly appropriate. Bush's program for faith-based services in Texas has provided plenty of scandal, including arrests in connection with alleged "sadistic" punishments at Christian juvenile and young adult facilities in Corpus Christi. One of those arrested, Wiley Cameron, Sr., had been encouraged by then-Governor Bush to lobby for laws easing the regulation of such facilities, according to a Washington Post article of April 11, 2000. In fact, Cameron had insisted his company would not come back to Texas unless it was protected from laws which had caused it to leave in 1995, under allegations that teenage girls had been "whipped and denied food." The company had been founded by a radio evangelist in a "'holy war'" against the state."

Some churches fear corruption by the lure of government money. Perhaps more they fear what other groups calling themselves "religious" or "community-based" might do. In Texas many charities were proud enough of their high quality of services to oppose Bush's untoward weakening of standards.

Most troubling is the possibility that Bush is pandering to a force inimical to American traditions against church-state entanglement. On the other side of the world another nation founded on the ashes of an exhausted empire, Turkey, our NATO ally, has suffered through four years of political crisis. The issue: separation of state and religion.