A Pluralist Vision of the Faith-Based Initiative

To the Center for Public Justice, what is most important about the faith-based initiative is not whether the government gives more money to faith-based social-service organizations but rather how well it respects the religious character and independence of such organizations as they serve their neighbors, whether or not they seek government funds. Protecting the integrity and religious character of faith-based organizations is the vital issue, not the distribution pattern of government funds, as important as government spending is. We are concerned, too, about the integrity and independence of secular nonprofit organizations. At core, what is at stake is the right relationship between government and civil society, between government and private organizations. In our view, the faith-based initiative can be best understood as the effort to secure the religious freedom of faith-based organizations when they are touched by government rules and regulations. This is a movement to ensure equal opportunity for faith-based social-service organizations, replacing governmental favoritism for secular organizations and governmental pressure on religious organizations to marginalize their faith.

The Center has been a primary champion of the faith-based initiative since the early 1990s, before the initiative even had a name. We have worked with Congress to shape legislation, advised federal departments and state governments, offered training and strategic counsel to faith-based organizations, conducted research, and helped craft legal defenses and strategies. The faith-based initiative has been a major focus of the Center’s work for more than a decade.  

Why so much attention and effort in this specialized area of public policy?  We are involved for the sake of:

•    hurting neighbors and neighborhoods, who should receive the best help available, without illegitimate restrictions on churches, Christian parachurch ministries, or other religious organizations;

•    faith-based service organizations, who should not feel pressured to abandon or suppress their faith character if they seek government support;

•    the government, which is required to protect religious freedom when it collaborates with private social service organizations, whether they are religious or secular;

•    the principle that the First Amendment of the U. S. Constitution requires of the government equal treatment of diverse organizations, not favoritism for secular groups; and

•    modeling in government practice the vital concept of principled pluralism—the norm or structure that enables the government to respect the varied private institutions of society as well as the diverse religious and philosophical convictions that citizens manifest in their lives and in their institutions.

The Faith-Based Initiative in Brief

The faith-based initiative is most closely identified with the administration of George W. Bush.  But it gathered momentum during the Clinton administration, when Congress adopted Charitable Choice legislation several times and the Department of Housing and Urban Development opened a Center for Community and Interfaith Partnerships.  “Faith-based legislation” can be dated even earlier, though.  In 1990, for example, Congress carefully designed the new federal child-care program to mainly use certificates or vouchers given to parents rather than contracts with child care centers.  Why this idea?  A state’s contract with a facility is an instance of  “direct” government funding, which carries the obligation that the supported services cannot include religious activities. When, instead, the state gives to the parents certificates or vouchers with which to buy child care services, then the government funding is “indirect” and the parents can select religious child care.

Yet government funding of religiously affiliated social-service organizations goes back much further than this.  Catholic Charities, Lutheran Social Services, Jewish Federations, the Salvation Army, and other less prominent groups with a religious inspiration have long been among the partners of federal, state, and local government agencies.  But this was a troubled relationship.  According to the old “no aid to religion” interpretation of the First Amendment, the government was not supposed to support any organization that looked obviously religious or “pervasively sectarian.”  Although practice was always less strict than required by this legal concept, the separationist constitutional doctrine hobbled officials when they were searching for private organizations to provide government-funded services, and government rules based on the old doctrine pressured the faith-based organizations to conceal or sideline their religious identity and practices.

Over the past few decades, the Supreme Court has moved to a new concept of government “neutrality” or “equal treatment.”  Now officials are required to give equal opportunity to all applicants for support, whether they are secular, religious, or even very religious.  Officials are not supposed to screen out religious groups, but instead to ask: Who can provide the services most effectively while respecting the necessary rules?  

The faith-based initiative is the reform movement that is bringing the government into line with this new equal treatment concept.  There are new federal laws and regulations, and new federal guidance to state and local governments conditioning how they spend the federal money they receive.  The federal requirement is a level playing field for faith-based organizations, protection for the religious character of such organizations, safeguards for the religious liberty of people who come for help, and assurances that social-service funding is not diverted to pay for religion.  There is no new “faith-based money.”  Instead, these equal treatment principles have been applied to all of the many billions of federal dollars spent by federal, state, and local officials to purchase social services.  

Because of these reforms, religious organizations that used to be excluded from government programs now have a chance to make their own decisions about whether or not to partner with the government.  Thanks to the rules, even if they receive government money they can with confidence continue to offer prayer and religiously based instruction to the people who turn to them for help, although such religious activities must be voluntary and separate from the social services funded by government.

Yet, despite the great gains, the reforms still do not go far enough.  State and local practice, and even federal practice, hasn’t always caught up to the new principles.  Even more important is the need for sweeping additional changes in government practice to convert government funding from “direct” to “indirect” support—from grants or contracts to vouchers or certificates—so that the government support can be used for social services like drug treatment that include religious activities.  (For more on this, see Stanley Carlson-Thies’ 2005 Kuyper Lecture.)  And much more needs to be done to protect the freedom of faith-based organizations to hire in accordance with their faith.  

Principled Pluralism

The faith-based initiative sometimes seems to be caught in a battle between advocates of sweeping secularism and proponents of a renewed Christian or Judeo-Christian America.  The Center favors neither of these views but advocates instead for movement ahead, toward principled pluralism.  Principled pluralism is a framework for the government’s relations with private organizations that respects those organizations’ appropriate independence and honors the religious and secular beliefs that they embody.  Principled pluralism is what the Center has always advocated as the fundamental reform needed for K-12 education:  instead of continued government funding only of secular schools that it operates itself, rather than seek only to press some religion or morality into those government schools by demanding school prayer and character education, we support full school choice—equitable government support of whichever kind of education (secular, Christian, or other) that various parents are convinced is best for their own children.

Principled pluralism has both a structural and a confessional dimension.  We believe that the government must honor the multiple confessions held by the citizens and embodied in the institutions they create, neither imposing secularism on all nor selecting one of the religious confessions as the standard required of everyone.  Conviction must be free of government coercion; the government is not empowered to determine the right faith.

The government must also rightly take account of the multiple organizations that comprise the structure of society.  Society is not a matter only of individuals, families, the economy, and government but also includes a wide range of nongovernmental organizations: churches and parachurch ministries, schools and broadcast stations, hospitals and mentoring groups, unions and chambers of commerce.  These organizations carry out many vital tasks, which the government should acknowledge and support.

Taken together, the two dimensions of principled pluralism provide a norm for government:  in its own actions it must respect and work with, not overlook or suppress, the diverse organizations of civil society with their varied religious and philosophical convictions.  Government action in areas such as education, social services, and health care is appropriate to overcome economic injustices and promote the common good, but such action should support and utilize, where possible, the institutions of civil society.  

Principled pluralism is another term for the neo-Calvinist concept of “sphere sovereignty” and the Catholic doctrine of “subsidiarity.”  These two concepts for the proper ordering of government and civil society institutions were developed in the latter 19th and early 20th centuries as Christians in the western world reflected on their rapidly industrializing and differentiating societies and crafted social and political action to respond to injustices and new possibilities.  The concepts are rooted in historic Christian thinking about church, state, and society—nearly two millennia of thought and action to acknowledge the vital and yet limited role of government, the obligation of Christians to obey God in every area of life, and the biblical teaching that ultimate judgments about good and evil, true faith and false, are God’s, not ours.

Although pluralism is often regarded as requiring a mushy consensus, as an obligation to pretend that everyone’s convictions are equally valuable, principled pluralism is designed to promote the opposite:  passionate beliefs lived out vigorously—yet with full respect for others.  Only a scheme that accords full respect to everyone else’s convictions can protect the full expression of your own beliefs; schemes that seek to privilege Christian views in modern society end up knocking down those beliefs to common denominator views supposedly not offensive to anyone.  

For more on these ideas and this perspective, read the Center’s Guidelines for Government and Citizenship, especially Political Community, Government, Welfare, and Education, along with Center President James W. Skillen’s reflection, What Distinguishes the Center for Public Justice?

The Center’s Leadership

The Center’s involvement in what has come to be called the faith-based initiative began in the early 1990s as an outgrowth of the “Welfare Responsibility” project, through which we sought to help Christians and other fellow citizens move beyond the fruitless old battles that pitted advocates of government welfare against advocates of personal responsibility and church service to the needy.  The Center helped to shape the “Charitable Choice” provision that became a key component of the 1996 federal welfare reform law, requiring states to include faith-based organizations when they sought providers of effective social services.  Through the 1990s, with the generous support of The Pew Charitable Trusts, the Lilly Endowment, the Smith-Richardson Foundation, and the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Center carried out and commissioned research and legal analyses about government policies affecting the integrity and religious character of faith-based organizations and published reports, articles, and books. 

The faith-based initiative received a higher profile with the administration of George W. Bush.  Stanley Carlson-Thies went from the Center to be a part of the initial staff of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, serving there in 2001 and 2002.  Carlson-Thies rejoined the Center in 2002.  Together with his colleague, Stephen Lazarus, who joined the Center in 1998 to work on the faith-based initiative, he created the Coalition to Preserve Religious Freedom, a multi-faith alliance of social-service, education, and religious freedom groups that advocates for institutional religious freedom.  Carlson-Thies and Lazarus speak to many audiences about the faith-based initiative, and consult with federal and state agencies and with faith-based organizations.

Learn more about the Center’s work in this area by reading Stanley Carlson-Thies’ Spring 2006 convocation address at Dordt College, Iowa, "Abraham Kuyper in the White House? Why Dordt Isn’t So Far from Washington, DC,” in Pro Rege (March 2006). 

More on the Topic from Center Staff and Colleagues

Stanley Carlson-Thies, “Welfare Reform’s Challenge to the Evangelical Church” in Christians and Politics Beyond the Culture Wars: An Agenda for Engagement, David Gushee, Ed., Baker Books, 2000.

Stanley Carlson-Thies, “Charitable Choice” from Heclo and McClay, eds., Religion Returns to the Public Square, Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.

Stanley Carlson-Thies and David Donaldson, Revolution of Compassion: Faith-based Groups as Full Partners in Fighting America's Social Problems, Baker Books 2003.

James W. Skillen, “E Pluribus Unum and Faith-Based Welfare Reform”  in Pursuit of Justice: Christian Democratic Explorations, Rowman and Littlefield, 2004.

James W. Skillen, Recharging the American Experiment: Principled Pluralism for Genuine Civic Community, Baker Books, 1994.  (Chapter 6: Structural and Confessional Pluralism)

Stephen Lazarus, "Evangelicalism and Politics" in The Futures of Evangelicalism: Issues and Prospects, Craig Bartholomew, Robin Parry, and Andrew West, Eds. InterVarsity Press, 2003.

James W. Skillen and Rockne M. McCarthy, eds., Political Order and the Plural Structure of Reality, Scholars Press, 1991.

Luis E. Lugo, Equal Partners: The Welfare Responsiblity of Governments and Churches, Center for Public Justice, 1998.

Howard Dean Trulear, The African American Church and Welfare Reform: Toward a New Prophetic Perspective, Center for Public Justice, 1999.

Charles L. Glenn, The Ambiguous Embrace: Government and Faith-Based School and Social Agencies, Princeton University Press, 2000.

Stephen V. Monsma, When Sacred and Secular Mix: Religious Non-Profit Organizations and Public Money, Rowman and Littlefield, 1996.

Stephen V. Monsma, Putting Faith in Partnerships: Welfare to work in Four Cities, University of Michigan Press, 2004.

Stephen V. Monsma and Christopher J. Soper, The Challenge of Pluralism: Church and State in Five Democracies, Rowman and Littlefield, 1997.

Carl Esbeck, The Regulation of Religious Organizations as Recpients of Government Assistance, Center for Public Justice, 1996.

Carl Esbeck, "A Constitutional Case for Governmental Cooperation with Faith-Based Social Service Providers," Emory Law Journal, Volume 46, No.1, Winter 1997.

Carl Esbeck, Stanley Carlson-Thies, and Ron Sider, The Freedom of Faith-Based Organizations to Staff on a Religious Basis, Center for Public Justice, 2004.

Amy Sherman, The Charitable Choice Handbook for Ministry Leaders, Center for Public Justice, 2001.

Amy Sherman, The Growing Impact of Charitable Choice: A Catalogue of New Collaborations Between Government and Faith-Based Organizations in Nine States, Center for Public Justice,  2000.

Amy Sherman and John Green, Fruitful Collaborations: A Survey of Government-Funded Faith-Based Programs in 15 States, Hudson Institute Faith in Communities Project, 2002.

Amy Sherman, Restorers of Hope: Reaching the Poor in your Community with Church-Based Minstries that Work, Good News Publishers, 1997.

A Guide to Charitable Choice, Center for Public Justice and Christian Legal Society, 1997.

Charitable Choice for Welfare and Community Services: An Implementation Guide for State, Local, and Federal Officials, Center for Public Justice, 2000.