Misguided Good-Faith Efforts Will Lead to Bad Consequences

To the Editor:

I read with interest the cover story on “charitable choice” (“Good-Faith Effort Off to Slow Start,” April 8), which cites the valuable research by Professor Mark Chaves on the policy’s early impact, as well as public attitudes toward the policy.

Among the several controversies raging around charitable choice, certainly the most lively and potentially divisive of those cited lie in the areas of church-state separation and religious liberty. While the provision of community services by religious institutions to needy people is almost universally applauded, many fear that in the absence of appropriate safeguards, direct government financing of religious institutions providing such services will have deeply troubling consequences.

By subsidizing pervasively sectarian institutions, charitable choice could underwrite discrimination in hiring, result in religious coercion of employees and service recipients, fund extremist and racist groups, and diminish the independence of religious institutions as they bow to increasing governmental interference in their affairs. (“With the king’s shilling comes the king.”) The debate over charitable choice also threatens to further divide people of good will who recognize its potential benefits but who differ profoundly on the constitutional concerns it raises.

To seek elusive common ground on so-called charitable choice, the Pew Charitable Trusts have made a major grant to the American Jewish Committee, in partnership with the Feinstein Center at Temple University and in conjunction with Catholic University. Pew is underwriting an 18-month deliberative process, bringing together legal and constitutional experts, advocates from a variety of religious denominations, and those who deal with the issue on an everyday basis: legislators, social-service providers, faith-based activists, and media personnel.

If the process leads to sufficient consensus, the group will publish a set of guidelines regarding charitable choice at a major public conference. If consensus does not emerge, Pew’s grant will, at a minimum, clarify the positions of key voices in the debate, promote greater mutual understanding among faith-based groups, highlight key areas of agreement and disagreement, and contribute to knowledge and understanding of the current perspectives of critical national constituencies on the proper relationship between religion and government.

Stephen Steinlight
Director, National Affairs
The American Jewish Committee
New York

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To the Editor:

The U.S. Congress’s “charitable choice” initiative is nothing more or less than a license for churches to choose not to be charitable. …

Under the influence of this manifestly misguided scheme, an entire generation of Americans will soon come to see that compassion consists of demanding that taxpayers — under threat of imprisonment — give money to charities they have never heard of and don’t believe in.

Long forgotten will be the root meaning of compassion — “to suffer with.” Long forgotten will be an awareness that a gift is voluntarily sacrificed by an informed, discriminating, and, yes, even demanding benefactor. Soon we will all know that gifts are merely prizes extracted from the diligent, for the benefit of the indolent, all as supervised by the presumptuous. …

If anyone believes that these “gifts” will be extended with the demanding eye required for the recipients’ best interests, let him observe how drunkenly government spends even the resources entrusted to it for much more precise missions than, in the words of one of the featured schemers, creating “an opportunity for the church to rise up and really become relevant in our culture.” …

We will waste not only the funds extended to these “charities” that are too unprincipled or unworthy to raise their own money, but additional public fortunes on a regulatory scheme and bureaucracy to run it, on court battles over the law’s dubious constitutionality, and (if all goes well) on legal-services attorneys litigating why one religion received 12.38 per cent more funding than another in a particular city in one year.

And waste will be the least of our losses. As we get further into this experiment, it will be the destruction of lives that marks our counterfeit compassion. Having not financed the charity ourselves, we will inevitably extend it where it should be withheld. We will forget the admonition that the withholding of charity, like charity, is a blessing.

The scheme will further one of the chief reasons that so much charity, including all government welfare, causes manifestly more harm than good: It separates, rather than unites, donors and recipients. … The scheme will do for churches and charities what 40 years of welfare has done to individuals — teach that compassion consists of getting someone else to shoulder our responsibilities.

It will lead to the secularization of our charities, maybe even our churches and synagogues. … It will seduce churches and charities to abandon their conscientiously and independently formulated missions in favor of hiring grant writers to instruct them on navigating the latest federal regulations standing between them and the cash. It will, as President Pierce warned in 1854, prompt those who would have otherwise volunteered their resources to look instead to the government, causing “the foundations of charity” to be dried up at home. …

Somehow we think all of this will be acceptable for one reason: The money will come cheap. Resolving to rob Peter to pay Paul, the scheme figures to count on the undying supporting of Paul.

But we fail to notice that that is one of the most fundamental problems with it. … All that’s required are clever appeals to government officials who, like the beggar charities, have no legitimate claim to the resources they covet.

God bless the churches and synagogues that refuse to sample this drug.

Charles A. Asher
Barbara W. Asher
Freedom 22 Foundation
South Bend, Ind.
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To the Editor:

I was troubled by the comments of volunteer Holly Schwartz in your article “Good-Faith Effort Off to Slow Start” when she says, “I can feel free to suggest to [a social-services client], when she’s down in the dumps, something like, ‘Do you want to go to church on Christmas, because it might make you feel better?’” Ms. Schwartz apparently doesn’t understand that simply asking such a question can be offensive — as it would be to me, for example, because I’m a Jew.

Religious individuals and organizations should, of course, feel perfectly free to be offensive on their own time and dime — that’s the meaning of the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. But they should not feel free to do so in the course of providing services paid for with my tax dollars. That is the meaning of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause.

The Rev. Henry Masters unintentionally makes clear the importance of the Establishment Clause when he remarks approvingly in the same article that “[the state] seems to realize that having some structure in place, having some [religious] discipline, may in fact help people turn their lives around.” In the United States, the government doesn’t get to prescribe the discipline of religion to me, even if I’m poor.

The “faith-based” social-services movement — which is nothing more than an effort to dump society’s responsibility for poor people onto the churches — will eventually topple of its own contradictions. But those of us who care about religious liberty should help to push it over as soon as possible.

Kelly Kleiman
Principal
N.F.P. Consulting
Chicago