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« Back to Are the feds keeping the faith? main page   Transcript for: Are the feds keeping the faith?MR. WATTENBERG: Hello, I'm Ben Wattenberg.President George W. Bush has touched off a firestorm of controversy with a plan to support social service programs run by religious groups. Critics on the left have been quick to warn that this so-called faith-based initiative blurs the line between church and state. But many on the right are also complaining, including Reverend Pat Robertson. They worry that the president's proposal will place the cold hand of government bureaucracy on vibrant religious belief, and further fund some religions they find distasteful. Just what is Bush's plan? Can it work? To find out, Think Tank is joined by three distinguished experts, Michael Horowitz, senior fellow and director of the Project for International Religious Liberty at the Hudson Institute; Wendy Kaminer, affiliated scholar at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies and author of Sleeping With Extra-Terrestrials: The Rise of Irrationalism and Perils of Piety; and Joseph Loconte, the William E. Simon, fellow in Religion and a Free Society at the Heritage Foundation, author of Seducing the Samaritan: How Government Contracts Are Reshaping Social Services. The topic before the house: 'Are the Feds Keeping the Faith?,' this week on Think Tank. (Musical break.) MR. WATTENBERG: Until the 20th Century, organized aid to the poor and needy had mostly been the responsibility of organized religion and private charities. But the economic depression in the 1930s was so deep and so long it overwhelmed the ability of such groups to respond. Since then, government has increasingly stepped in with needed funds and services. Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, and later Lyndon Johnson's great society were the high points of such a campaign to beat back poverty, drug and alcohol addiction and other problems. Now, President Bush wants to forge a new strategy, one that would supply federal dollars to help support and expand social service programs run by religious organizations. John DiIulio, director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives,argues that such religiously oriented programs get much better results at a fraction of the cost, more bang for the buck. Opponents warn the government will destroy the religions that make such programs effective and worse end up funneling tax dollars to cults. Lady, gentlemen, thank you for joining us. What is the faith-based initiative about? Joe, why don't you start, and let's try to understand it. MR. LOCONTE: Ben, it's important to keep in mind here the big picture with this Bush initiative, and the big picture is, let's try to undo the anti-religious bias that has infected the political culture, it's infected the social service provision culture. Let's welcome aboard faith-based organizations as equal partners, not as doting handmaidens to the state, but really as equal partners, to what end? So that more needy people can be helped in ways that are more humane and more effective. That's the end goal. MR. WATTENBERG: Michael, what are the specific provisions? MR. HOROWITZ: One is ending regulatory discrimination against faith-based groups. The idea, if you're a church daycare center, you have to jump through hoops to get licensed where a secular one is not. The president is deaf on that, was as Governor of Texas, will be as president. The American people on the whole are with him. The second is greater charitable contribution to all nonprofit groups, including faith-based groups. So that people, for example, who do not itemize their deductions, who today are not allowed to deduct for charitable contributions, would under the president's plan, and faith-based groups and non-faith-based groups would be the beneficiaries of that presidential initiative. MR. WATTENBERG: And what's point three? MR. HOROWITZ: Point three is the controversial one, and that's bringing discretionary federal grants to faith-based groups. In doing so, though, under the terms of a 1996 law that would be expanded, the so-called Ashcroft Amendment, that says that we'll give grants to religious groups just as we now do to non-religious, nonprofit groups, with one exception, that the religious groups in exchange for taking the money would not be able to engage in sectarian worship, instruction or proselytization. MS. KAMINER: I disagree with Michael when he says that the first prong of this initiative that would relieve faith-based groups from state and federal regulations is uncontroversial. That's extremely controversial. The advocates of these charitable choice provisions -- that's what the Ashcroft bill was called -- say that they really just want to level the playing field, and to allow faith-based groups, sectarian and religious groups, to compete for funds on the same basis that secular groups do. That's rather disingenuous because secular groups that get federal funds are subject to federal and state laws, health and safety laws, laws about the kind of training that drug counselors have to have, and most importantly laws that prohibit religious discrimination in employment. Now, private religious groups do have an exemption for religious discrimination in hiring and firing, and I support that. But imagine if you're trying to get a job as a social service provider, and it's a job on a federal payroll, and you're told that you can't have that job because of your religious beliefs, and then remember that this exception for religious belief has been construed by the courts very broadly, so that it also allows for discrimination on the basis of sex, or sexual orientation, and can allow for discrimination on the basis of race. MR. LOCONTE: Think about this for a minute, why should every social service provider on the map be able to access public funds, government funds, except those who bring with them the love of God, and belief of God as they help the poor? Why should religious groups be discriminated against? This is, my friends on the left here are arguing for discrimination. The organizations that seem to be more effective than the secular government counterparts at really lifting the poor out of poverty are being excluded from this funding scheme. MR. WATTENBERG: But they are effective because they inculcate religious beliefs. Are you saying that the federal government should be funding groups that inculcate religious beliefs MR. LOCONTE: What the law says, what charitable choice says is that the government can fund organizations that are committed to a common civic or public purpose, lifting the poor out of poverty, getting people off of drugs, getting kids out of gangs. We will fund, the government will fund, not the religious activities that go on in those organizations. Those religious activities, like prayer, bible studies, or evangelism, they can occur in the context of that program as long as they're separated from the secular parts of the program, and they're privately funded. MS. KAMINER: Can I just get back to one more point that Joe made about discrimination against religious groups. You've left out the point that right now, and for a long time, religious groups have been eligible for federal funds, and they have been receiving federal funds so long as they channel the funds through secular affiliates that administered services in a secular way, and that didn't deny services to people for religious reasons, and that didn't engage in religious proselytizing. MR. WATTENBERG: But then we get back to this idea that the only way you can allow it is by denying the religious aspect of it, and what you're trying to promote is the religious aspect of it. MS. KAMINER: That's the dilemma. That's the dilemma for religious people. MR. HOROWITZ: Joe talks about quarantining the religious component of these faith-based programs in a separate prayer, time out, now we're going to have a prayer. That's not how the successful programs work. I'm Jewish, but I see the success of programs with drug addicts, the faith-based programs that perform miracles on a shoestring by telling their clients that you have to accept Christ in your soul and that's the way to get out of the drug culture. And they've been remarkably successful. What we've got now is a federal statute that says, you can't do that. If the federal government is paying for the drug counselor, and the federal auditor sees that that counselor is engaged in religious worship or instruction, not even to speak of proselytization, well, by God, that group is going to have to give a refund to the federal government of that portion of the instructor's salary. That's the problem here. And what we've got here is this right and left coincidence. There are some of us who believe that the First Amendment is there to protect us from religion. Others of us believe that the First Amendment is there to protect religion from us. We both agree, Wendy and I, that these grants both subsidize prayer and, in Justice Brennan's terms, secularize creed, and in both cases they're violations of the First Amendment. MR. WATTENBERG: Joe, you know what they've done to you, they've said you're going to take the money and you're going to use it for religious purposes, in any event, and if it's not a trick, it's going to destroy that which it needs to love. MR. LOCONTE: Both of the extreme views are mistaken. There's a middle way. Charitable choice has found the middle way, and it's happening on the ground. MR. WATTENBERG: Charitable choice is the law that was passed in-- MR. LOCONTE: In 1996, [it was] part of welfare reform and basically said that religious organizations, even if they're thoroughly religious, they can contract with government in anti-poverty efforts and still maintain their religious integrity, their spiritual mission, right? Now, since that law has been passed, we have had hundreds of new partnerships that have emerged on the ground -- churches working with welfare families in all the states, thousands of congregations involved. We've had four lawsuits, I think, in five years. This idea that somehow if a dime of public money goes to Mother Teresa's Sisters of Charity, we're on a slippery slope to a theocracy, that doesn't make any sense. That's not what's happening on the ground. MS. KAMINER: That's not what's being argued. MR. WATTENBERG: Or to destroying the religious aspects. MR. LOCONTE: Let's take that point. I visited the Bowery Mission in Lower Manhattan. It is a Christian mission. It's been around for 125 years, privately funded. City Councilman there in New York, Abe Gerges -- he's now a supreme court justice -- went around and visited a hundred different homeless shelters in New York, and found only a handful of them were doing an effective job of actually pulling people out of homelessness, and helping them with independent living. He named two that he thought were doing a great job, the Bowery Mission and the Salvation Army. So city funds now are going to the Bowery Mission to set up another program, not as religious as the private funded program, where religion is present, bibles are given to the men if they ask for them, there's a bible study there on site, it's voluntary, it's privately run, there's no chapel on site, and, guess what, that program is rated the most effective in the City of New York. MR. HOROWITZ: Guess what, Joe? What you're committing is what I would call the fallacy of the working model. We're in the experimental phase of this program where government is giving money, and as you point out, already, there is this secularization of the religious mission. It used to be that there were bibles, now we take the bibles out. It used to be that the prayer was an integrated part of the program, now it's a separate part of the program. To the extent it's working now, Joe, it's because lots of people are looking at it constantly. Work with me. Ten years down the road, there aren't 200 grants, but 100,000 grants, supervised by government GS-12s who have life and death power over these churches because a non-grant renewal is going to be death to the church itself. At that point, lawsuits are not going to help you. MR. WATTENBERG: How about the United States Congress, 435 congressmen and 100 senators, a president and a vice president, in a nation that, by every international standard, is very religious. Do you think that they're going to come down on the side of the GS-12 who is trying to break the back of religious faith as you see it? MR. HOROWITZ: They won't know about it. They won't know about it. MR. WATTENBERG: You won't tell them? MR. HOROWITZ: Listen, when 100,000 grants, or 200,000 grants are given out, and remember we're talking about discretionary grants, a raised eyebrow suggests to a group which direction in which to go, and which direction not to go. You had better believe that the pressure will be subtle and constant, and as the program becomes more routine, it will become more secularized. MR. WATTENBERG: So this is a slippery slope argument. It begins and it just gets worse and worse. MS. KAMINER: No, it's not just a slippery slope argument. And we've looked at something very important here, which is that when government gets involved in directly sponsoring sectarian religious activities, it comes under inevitable pressure from the majority to favor the popular or mainstream religions and to discriminate against the unpopular ones. So that, in some ways, this whole initiative is really a prescription for religious discrimination. We've seen evidence of it in recent weeks in the outpouring of religious bigotry from groups as disparate as B'nai B'rith Anti-Defamation League, and Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. MR. WATTENBERG: What did they say specifically? MS. KAMINER: Well, the ADL, according to the New York Times, went to visit John DiIulio to urge him not to provide any funding for the Nation of Islam. Now, here's a group that's devoted to lobbying-- MR. WATTENBERG: That's Farakhan's group? MS. KAMINER: Here's a group that's supposed to be devoted to lobbying against discrimination and is now advocating religious discrimination. We have Jerry Falwell saying that we shouldn't give money not just to the Nation of Islam but to Muslims generally, because the Muslim religion preaches hate. We have Pat Robertson making very disparaging remarks about Scientologists and Hare Krishnas and Wiccans, and other outre religious groups he doesn't approve of. It's been very interesting to see how free people feel to express their religious bigotry. And that is a very serious pitfall of this. It makes you appreciate the wisdom of the founders in separating church and state. MR. WATTENBERG: Is it going to be to anybody and everybody? What are you going to do with that? And I'm not talking necessarily about the ones you were talking about, but-- MR. LOCONTE: You're not funding religion, you're funding the common, civic, public purpose. You're funding what works, that's the second point, you're funding what works. Let's fund outcomes. So if that organization can show it can meet the grant requirements, it's fulfilling a common civic purpose-- MR. WATTENBERG: In other words, if a Nazi group can demonstrate that they can teach reading to little kids-- MS. KAMINER: Or keep people off drugs. MR. WATTENBERG: --or keep people off drugs you give them federal dollars? MR. LOCONTE: You know, the principle of nondiscrimination is what has to rule here. If they can meet the contract requirements--don't let tough cases make bad law. That's the point. We've got a lot of bad law when it comes to the participation of religious organizations and public funding in trying to help the needy. We're talking about the Mother Teresas in social outreach, stop raising the flag of the Nazis, for goodness sake. MR. HOROWITZ: Joe, what makes you--what gives you the confidence level that federal discretionary grants are now given on the basis of performance? One of the objections to the programs now which go to the secular nonprofit groups is that it's political considerations rather than performance considerations that apply. And of course that will be all the more true with politically popular and unpopular religions. Ben, there is no alternative way to give money to these faith based groups without strings attached to it, without constitutional problems. MR. WATTENBERG: Through an amendment in the tax process? MR. HOROWITZ: This is called a tax credit, and it works this way. After you've made out your taxes and you know what your tax bill is, $1000, you are given the choice of giving the first $200, $500, whatever the law says, either to Uncle Sam, or to the Wiccans, or to Planned Parenthood, or to a faith based ministry, so that the American people, not the government bureaucracies decide which charities work best for the poor. That's a way that joins us all, and the Bush administration has got us going down this road of fighting over federal grants, and I don't understand it. MR. LOCONTE: There's nothing wrong with that proposal, but how do you get there? How do you change the culture of care giving so that individuals now are more conscious about the charities in their neighborhoods, and they're ready to fund them. We're going to spend more than $200-plus billion this year in federal anti-poverty efforts, right, okay. Are we going to continue to exclude from that funding scheme some of the most effective faith-based organizations? MS. KAMINER: Joe, we're not excluding them now. That's a misstatement and you keep repeating it. We're not excluding them now just as we don't exclude the salvation Army or Catholic Charities. We give money to them now. But, I also want to get back to this question about successful outcomes and what works, because we're always hearing from advocates of Charitable Choice, we're not going to be giving money on the basis of theology, so discrimination against minority religions is not an issue. We're going to look at what works. That really underestimates the difficulty of measuring what works. It's very hard to measure outcomes, say, for a drug treatment program. It's not as if John DiIulio and other sociologists can take a look at all the groups around the country that are going to be applying for federal aid under this grant and figure out in six months-- MR. WATTENBERG: Let me ask you a question, a two-pronged question, do you think federal programs work well, and two, do you think these faith-based programs that are currently in existence do they work better? MS. KAMINER: I think it's impossible to generalize. I think that there is no conclusive hard evidence that looks at all the faith-based groups that are doing this and all the secular groups that are doing this. I think it depends on--I think it depends very much on the group. There's something else you have to look at. You can't just look at what's their success in getting people jobs, what's their success in getting people off drugs, you might want to look at what's the ideological indoctrination that goes along with that. If the Scientologists are successful in getting people off drugs is that still something that we as a society want to support? MR. WATTENBERG: Michael, same question. MR. HOROWITZ: Ben, the American people are right in believing that the current programs largely done through where grants go to secular nonprofit groups stink, they don't work, it's money that's often counter-productive. MR. WATTENBERG: Give me an example of the sorts of programs you're talking about? MR. HOROWITZ: Well, the whole complex of drug programs where we spend hundreds of millions of dollars and it does nothing. The whole complex of all of the social service-- MS. KAMINER: That's because we're spending too much money on law enforcement. MR. HOROWITZ: All of the social service programs that since the Great Society we've spent $5 trillion largely through grants to the nonprofit sector to ameliorate poverty, and problems of the underclass are greater. They're built on-- MR. WATTENBERG: If you're going to start throwing around trillions, the big monies go to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and those programs you're going to have to argue long and hard-- MR. HOROWITZ: I'm not--obviously. I'm talking about-- MR. WATTENBERG: That's the big bucks. MR. HOROWITZ: But, I'm telling you that we have spent enormous sums. And interestingly before the secular nonprofit groups got grants from the Great Society, when they were getting it from foundations, from private charity, they were performing miracles on a shoestring, too. And one of the ironies is now they have morphed into the government. They are indistinguishable from the government after ten years of taking grants from federal agencies, and my terror is that that is what will happen to religious groups. MR. LOCONTE: The fact is, churches and religious groups in poor neighborhoods are by definition poor. How do you get resources into their hands to help the people in their neighborhoods. I was down over in Anacostia last week and visited a program there, tough part of Washington, very impoverished part of Washington, Institute for Responsible Fatherhood. I spent the morning with a half a dozen of their staff members working with men disconnected from their kids and from their families. Urban missionaries planted there to be a good model of a good working family, they can't get private money to do it. They got a grant from the Department of Labor for Pete's sake. MR. HOROWITZ: Joe, you are right, if you're an inner city church performing miracles and you can't get money, as Joe points out, the assumption is that when middle class people pay out their taxes how are they going to give a credit to some inner city church that they've never heard about. What we need to be doing, Joe, moving away from those grants is creating umbrella groups, like we've got a United Negro College Fund, let's have a United Inner City Ministry Fund, and let's have the person say if there's a tax credit, that's where my tax credit designation goes. We can then have no controversy, billions of dollars to inner city ministries with no shoe strings. Just join me in moving away from grants, Joe. MR. PETERSON: All right. A point of information and then we have to get out. Joe, maybe you can tell me, where is the president's program now? Has there been legislation sent to Congress? MR. LOCONTE: They haven't sent their legislation to Congress yet. They've been watching to see what the House and Senate are going to do. MR. WATTENBERG: On their own? MR. LOCONTE: Yes. So much of what J.C. Watts, for instance, and Rick Santorum in the Senate matches what the administration has been talking about over the last year. MS. KAMINER: But, they've had bills kicking around in Congress for the last five years. MR. WATTENBERG: Let's go around the room quickly and conclude this. What do you think is going to happen? MS. KAMINER: I think that if the Bush initiative passes in some legislative form that we will be in court, and I think that the Supreme Court probably, unless Bush has a lot of appointees, will eventually strike down the part of the initiative that allows sectarian religious groups to get direct federal funding. MR. HOROWITZ: If we can get guys like Joe to realize that a tax based program can funnel money to inner city churches, if we move away from these controversial grants, the president can achieve one of the most stunning political and cultural triumphs of my lifetime. If he stays with these grants as a mode of giving money to church groups, he'll be in the Supreme Court, and in my judgment will lose, and we'll have massive controversy over what should be broad consensus. MR. WATTENBERG: They want to start everything out with if. What's likely going to happen? MR. LOCONTE: We're going to see more attention in the private sector, corporations, philanthropic giving directed toward effective faith-based groups. We're already seeing it with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, $100 million dollar grant they're going to give to faith-based groups. We're going to see more of that, because of the effective use of the bully pulpit, as Bush has been doing, as various government people are going to be doing. We're going to see the reestablishment of faith and virtue in this republic which is so crucial. This has been the eternal triangle of American politics. MR. WATTENBERG: What's going to happen to the legislation? That was the question. MR. LOCONTE: Charitable choice has already been passed four times, I think we're going to see it extended throughout various federal programs. So that level playing field through various federal programs, and we're going to see this review of the regulations in five federal agencies. We're going to really see how anti-religious the federal government has been. MR. WATTENBERG: What about the point at the nub of this fight about these discretionary programs, is that going to happen? MR. LOCONTE: I think we are going to see a greater move toward--I think we're going to see a greater move toward tax incentives and less direct grants, because that is the least safe way to get public money to these organizations, Michael and I agree. MR. WATTENBERG: Okay. We have to leave. Thank you very much, Wendy Kaminer, Joe Loconte, Mike Horowitz. And thank you. Please remember to send us your comments via email. For Think Tank, I'm Ben Wattenberg. ANNOUNCER: We at Think Tank depend on your views to make our show better. Please send your questions and comments to New River Media, 1219 Connecticut Avenue, Northwest, Washington, D.C. 20036, or email us at thinktank@pbs.org. To learn more about Think Tank, visit PBS Online at pbs.org. And please let us know where you watch Think Tank. 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