Working Constructively with Welfare Reform

November-December 1996

By Stanley W. Carlson-Thies

WASHINGTON, DC—State and local governments are now knocking on the doors of Christian social ministries, asking for help with public welfare. Why? The new federal welfare bill has a Charitable Choice provision that encourages states to spend their federal welfare funds with faith-based organizations. Evangelicals have argued that effective help for needy families includes a moral, even spiritual, dimension, and is best given by groups personally involved with the poor. Legislators have listened. So the ball is now in our court. How shall we respond?

Over the past two years, the Center for Public justice has worked with members of Congress, arguing that welfare reform should go beyond changing government programs to changing how government relates to non-governmental institutions. Our Welfare Responsibility project concluded that a key government task is to uphold the organizations—religious and non-religious—that serve needy families and communities (see Welfare in America, Eerdmans, 1996). Now, through our project on Government and the Religious Social Sector, we are working to clarify how government can best support faith-based service providers.

A Guide to Charitable Choice

The first thing we are doing, in cooperation with the Christian Legal Society's Center for Law and Religious Freedom, is to publish a guide to Charitable Choice. This provision, proposed by Sen. John Ashcroft (R-Mo.), forbids discrimination against faith-based programs if a state decides to work with independent welfare providers, and requires states to respect the mission of religious groups that accept federal funds.

State governments have long contracted with religious social-service providers. Too often, though, officials have pressured the providers to downplay or even eliminate the religious aspects of their programs. Our guide will educate government officials on the new requirements and show them how Charitable Choice simultaneously protects the religious character of ministries and the religious liberty of welfare beneficiaries.

The guide is also intended to inform faith-based organizations of the new opportunities for service created by Charitable Choice. Social ministries must always guard their mission, so they have to proceed with caution. The guide will help them decide whether to team up with public welfare programs and will serve as a charter of rights and responsibilities if they choose to do so.

Clarifying Church-State Relations

Officials who try to keep religion out of public activities and government-funded programs usually claim that the First Amendment requires it. In fact, government can only honor both the establishment and free-exercise clauses of the First Amendment by not discriminating against faith-based programs. That was the conclusion drawn by church-state expert Carl Esbeck (University of Missouri School of Law) in a workshop last summer sponsored by our Religious Social Sector project.

This clarification of the constitutional issues is a second major aim of the project. Esbeck's path-breaking analysis of the Constitution and Supreme Court decisions, together with supporting commentary by top legal scholars Douglas Laycock and John Garvey, will be published in the winter issue of the Emory Law Journal. Another version of the analysis will be published in a new Center for Public justice book on government and faith-based charities. The Center's Associate Director, Luis Lugo, contributes a key chapter on government's constructive but limited task in supporting nongovernmental organizations. A chapter by Stephen Monsma, a member of the Center's Board of Directors, analyzes what's good and bad in current government policy toward religious charities.

The project's third major goal is to show how government can best uphold faith-based providers. A workshop in February will bring together ministry leaders, policy experts, and scholars to consider the virtues and flaws of mechanisms like vouchers and grants, cooperation without government funding, and ways to ensure accountability without crushing diversity and initiative. Another key topic will be how far ministries involved in public service can and should go in using the Bible and prayer or in advocating conversion. The resulting book will help ministry leaders and policy makers work in fruitful cooperation.

[Dr. Carlson-Thies is Senior Fellow at the Center for Public Justice.]