As many already know, President Bush started a “faith-based initiative” to use federal tax payer money to support religious organizations - and causing more cracks to appear in the already fragile wall of separation between church and state. Theocracywatch.org contains numerous links on this program here. None of this is, at this point in time, new or surprising. The question now becomes, essentially, what will the next president do with this initiative?

A new article from the Christian Science Monitor reports on what Obama plans to do with it. Obama has no plans to phase it out, rather, he intends to overhaul and expand it:

His plan would overhaul and expand the controversial faith-based initiative that was an early cornerstone of President Bush’s domestic program, which Obama said had “never fulfilled its promise.”

Now, what is troubling about the current initiative is simply that it uses tax payer money (whether religious or not) to fund religious activities - activities that non-believers would not likely endorse on their own.The article continues:

The senator was careful to highlight key areas of difference between that initiative and his own proposal for a Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.

“Make no mistake, as someone who used to teach constitutional law, I believe deeply in the separation of church and state, but I don’t believe this partnership will endanger that idea,” Obama said.

He emphasized that those receiving funds could not proselytize the people they help nor could they discriminate in hiring practices on the basis of religion. Faith-based groups could only use federal dollars for secular programs. And he committed to ensure that taxpayer dollars would only go to “programs that actually work.”

Now, this actually sounds rather good to me, at least on paper. I am okay with tax payer money being used to fund secular social programs that do not push a particular religious view or discriminate on the basis of religion. In other words, this could be a fair compromise. However, I still see two potential problems with a plan like this:

(1) I find it difficult to believe that many religious or “faith-based” groups would be willing to accept these conditions. After all, these groups are “called” forth to spread their religious views, are they not? While I would like to think that any charitable religious group would be willing to completely shed their religious identity to involve themselves in secular social programs, at the same time I am doubtful that many would so so enthusiastically.

(2) In practice I am skeptical at how well this might work. Who is going to be responsible for policing the use of these funds? How much extra time and money will it require to make sure that religious groups are only using the federal funds in a secular manner? Maybe I am over-reacting, but this sounds like more trouble than it is worth.

The problem is that we are looking for help in the wrong places. Rather than turing to “faith-based” solutions, what we reallly need to be doing is looking for “reason-based” solutions that are not premised on unsupportable religious claims, no matter how sincere. But then again, I am not a politician pandering to the large number of Christian voters in this country…

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...