A Stage in America's Church-State Experiment
A Stage in America’s Church-State Experiment
One of the glories of the United States and its founding principles is the robust protection of religious freedom. Our governments are required to protect the religious freedom of individuals and organizations, ensuring that people and institutions of every faith and no faith can follow the dictates of their conscience, consistent with the common good. Part of that protection is the obligation on the government not to establish any official church or religion. Government officials are not our pastors, priests, rabbis, or imams!
But just what must government do to protect religious freedom while not establishing religion? What does that require in an area such as social services, when the government commonly turns to private organizations and awards them government funds so that they can provide the help people need? Is the government establishing religion if it awards money to a faith-based organization? Or, if it refuses to allow explicitly religious organizations to seek support, is it, instead, wrongly discriminating against religion?
As astute observers such as E. J. Dionne (Washington Post opinion writer) and James Skillen (the Center for Public Justice) have pointed out, the faith-based initiative is a stage in America’s long effort to craft a framework through which the government will treat equally people and institutions of every faith and no faith, promoting the religious freedom of both the organizations that serve their neighbors and the neighbors that are served by the organizations.
Under the US Constitution and state constitutions (sometimes only after they were amended, years ago), there can be no established church or religion in the United States. Nevertheless, during the nineteenth century and into the middle of the twentieth century, with most Americans professing some form of Protestantism, there was an “informal establishment” of a purportedly non-sectarian Protestant Christianity, evident here and there in public schools, government statements and symbols, and public social services.
However, as the nation became increasingly religiously diverse, courts and government officials responded by promoting an extreme separation between government and religion. If the government insisted that religion be excluded from its own agencies and from services it funded, then no one could accuse it of “establishing religion” or of taking the side of one or another part of the population.
By the later 1970s, scholars, courts, and policymakers began to question this solution to religious diversity, which in fact resulted in a government bias against the views and institutions of everyone—except those who favor secularism in public life. The result has been a rethinking of church-state relations and the redesign of the rules for the government’s relations with religious organizations such as parochial schools and faith-based social-service providers. The goal is to enable the government to ensure equal opportunity to all effective organizations that provide important services, while safeguarding the religious liberty of all citizens. The doctrine of “no government aid to religion” is being replaced by the requirement of “equal treatment”—government evenhandedness to all organizations, religious and secular.
Reading Resources
A Revolution of Compassion: Faith-Based Groups as Full Partners in Fighting America's Social Ills by Dave Donaldson and Stanley Carlson-Thies (Baker Books, 2003)
The Ambiguous Embrace: Government and Faith-Based Schools and Social Agencies by Charles L. Glenn (Princeton University Press, 2000)
"Charitable Choice: Bringing Religion Back into American Welfare" by Stanley Carlson-Thies in Religion Returns to the Public Square: Faith and Policy in America (Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2003)
When Sacred and Secular Mix: Religious Non-Profit Organizations and Public Money by Stephen Monsma (Rowman and Littlefield, 1996)
In Pursuit of Justice: Christian-Democratic Explorations by James W. Skillen
Chapter 4: E Pluribus Unum and Welfare Reform (Rowman and Littlefield, 2004)
"A Shift Looms: The President Sees Consensus, While Religious Leaders Disagree About the Church-State Divide" by E. J. Dionne in The Washington Post (October 3, 1999, page B1)
Equal Treatment of Religion in a Pluralistic Society by Stephen V. Monsma and Christopher J. Soper, eds. (Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1998)
