Your Tax Dollars At Work

Christianty Today has a report on a study of 500 welfare-to-work programs in five cities by a former Pepperdine professor who is now a fellow at the Paul B. Henry Institute for the Study of Christianity and Politics at Calvin College (a 4-year college operated by the Christian Reformed Church). (If it sounds familiar, George W. Bush was their commencement speaker last year.)

This researcher found that, of the 500 programs he studied, 117 were faith-based, and of the 96 Protestant programs, 61 were evangelical and 35 were "mainline." From an interview:

What did you find regarding evangelical programs?
Both from the surveys and the visits, it was clear that evangelical programs tend to integrate religious aspects into their services, whereas in mainline programs, Christianity tends to be more implicit.

For example, 48 percent of the evangelical programs reported that they encourage their clients to make personal religious commitments. And an impressive 77 percent reported that they would use religious values or motivations to encourage clients to change their attitudes or values.

What did that look and sound like?
In some classes, evangelical staff would talk about how God loves persons who are out of work, who are on welfare, who are trying to become economically self-supporting. They would talk about work as a way to honor God: that Jesus himself had been a carpenter and worked with his hands, and that work is more than just a way to earn money—it's a way to honor the Creator. Social Justice Surprise

Now, this should be a red flag. I don't know everything about this, but it was my understanding that some of these programs received money from the government...

Oh yes:

What percentage of evangelical programs receive government funding?
One of the surprises was that more evangelical programs were receiving government funding—51 percent, versus 40 percent of the mainline programs.

This carried through also when you looked at the amount of funding: 38 percent of the evangelical programs reported receiving more than half of their funding from the government, compared to 31 percent for mainline programs.

The interviewer suspects that someone like me just might hear about this:

What do you say to critics who see incorporating evangelism and religious values as a violation of church-state separation?
Many evangelical programs, when they have Bible studies or devotional activities, make them voluntary. Many of these efforts to encourage clients to make religious commitments are done with private money at a time separate from the other services. That's a partial answer.

But even more fundamentally, we know that government funding cannot be used for sectarian worship, instruction, or proselytizing. Yet those words are not self-defining. If welfare-to-work staff reassure recipients that Jesus loves them, that work is a way to honor God, and that we all have a calling to fulfill in life—is that sectarian instruction? I think not.

Now the ACLU might disagree with me on that. But to me, this is using broad Christian values to help people overcome tremendous obstacles in becoming economically self-sufficient. I attended similar classes at secular nonprofit organizations. They also used values -- non-religious values. They would talk about earning the respect of your family by going out to work or feeling better about yourself. But both evangelical and secular programs use values to motivate and improve the self-esteem of their clients.

Wow, can you remember the days when "that depends on what is is" sounded evasive? These guys know that what they're doing is right, that God wants them to do this, and so they have figured out all these ways to explain their proselytizing so that it sounds -- to themselves -- like they're obeying the law.

They're not.

How do the government and faith-based agencies get along?
Whether or not evangelical programs receive government funds, they seem to be part of an informal network of consultation and referral.

A majority of evangelical programs indicated that they sometimes referred recipients to government agencies. And government agencies refer clients to them; sometimes, evangelical agencies are contacted by government agencies just for advice.

Warning bells should be going off like crazy as you read this. This is one arm of a theocratic movement that is going to be extremely difficult to trim back, even after sanity returns to America.

It is fine for religious institutions to provide aid to the downtrodden. It's great for them to help people get off welfare, get them off the streets and back into living a good respectable life. That has been an important function of the church for thousands of years.

In fact, this is one thing that Jesus would have approved of, even encouraged.

But they should not be using government money to do it. It is obvious that this little thing, letting faith-based organizations take government money, is getting to be very thick, a tight underground connection is growing between religious groups who are trying to add new members and government organizations that have a public emergency to deal with. We'll be spending a long time undoing this.

(Hat-tip to Red State Rabble for catching this.)