Equal Treatment Basics
Equal Treatment Basics
The goal of the faith-based initiative is to level the playing field—to ensure that faith-based and grassroots organizations have an equal opportunity with larger and secular social-service organizations to win government support. Federal, state, and local agencies commonly obtain social services from private providers—usually nonprofit organizations. Religiously affiliated organizations have always been among those private providers. Yet, older interpretations of the First Amendment, now superceded by the US Supreme Court, had cast into doubt participation by organizations that some officials thought were “too religious” or “pervasively sectarian.”
The faith-based initiative has crafted new rules ending that bias. The change is a response to the Court’s shift from a strict-separationist view requiring “no government aid for religion” to a “neutrality” or “equal treatment” doctrine that requires the government not to exclude providers simply because of their religious commitments or character. The initiative seeks, also, to change government practices that make it difficult for smaller and newer organizations to win support.
The faith-based initiative is most prominently identified with President George W. Bush, who began his administration in 2001 with an expansive statement, Rallying the Armies of Compassion. The Bush administration has established a White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, and counterpart Centers for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in 11 federal departments and agencies. It has introduced an extensive set of reforms to federal policies, programs, and practices.
Yet a determined effort to reform government rules to ensure equal access to government support for faith-based organizations began during the Clinton administration and has always had bipartisan support. Deliberate government action to enable faith-based participation goes back earlier, too—for example, to the 1990 federal child care law that encourages states to use their federal funds to provide certificates or vouchers to parents who may then select a religious provider. More than half of the states, under Democratic as well as Republican leadership, have established their own offices of faith-based and community initiatives, and the US Conference of Mayors has created a similar center.
The faith-based initiative is not a plan to steer government money to religious groups, to collapse government programs and turn the needy over to churches and charities, or to force the poor to “get religion.” Instead, it is a reform of the rules for how the government obtains social services, so that faith-based organizations have the same opportunity to be involved as secular groups, and smaller organizations are not unnecessarily hampered in their search for support. The goal is more effective help for individuals, families, and communities.
The faith-based initiative is concerned with private funding as well as government money, with coordination and not only grants and contracts, with secular and grassroots organizations as well as religious social-service providers. Still, the major controversies and confusion, and the hardest reforms, concern the church-state rules that should apply when a faith-based organization collaborates with a government agency. A major focus of the faith-based initiative, accordingly, is on reforming the church-state rules that apply to government grants, contracts, and vouchers.
What is Success for the Initiative?
Charitable Choice and Equal Treatment
Putting the New Standards into Practice
A Stage in America’s Church-State Experiment
