Box Turtle Bulletin

My Concerns With Faith-Based Funding

Jennifer Venasco has a well reasoned argument why gay and gay-supportive religious organizations should step up and take our rightful place in the community of faith that is receiving federal assistance for charitable efforts. And while I agree with Venasco that gay men and women of faith should not be excluded from national efforts or programs generally, I hope that such churches and organizations refrain from joining and instead take a lead in resisting the continued intermingling of the political and the divine.

I do not support federal funding of religious charitable efforts for a number of reasons – all of them, incidentally, from a pro-religion perspective:

• This sort of program naturally gives preference to those large mega-churches that have the staff and the funding and the political access to go after government grants.
• All faith-based charity is tied to evangelism of that faith. Until such time as they become entirely impersonal (which is rather likely), it is the acting of their faith that motivates believers. They are “letting their light shine” and “living Christ to a hurting world”.

  And while they are doing good, it isn’t right that they receive credit or religious goodwill for spending my money. The government should not be funding any other religion’s evangelism – that is unfair to my religion.

• Churches that meet social needs do so as a form of worship. Part of Christian theology is that giving to the less fortunate provides a blessing to the one that gives. “It’s better to give than receive”, you know.

  But if the Feds are doing the funding, then the local person loses the blessing. God does not reward you for administering the largess of others.

  Or, in a less religion-talk way, being personally invested in the less fortunate around you builds community. You care about whether your money is doing good or ill, you begin to see the lives of the less fortunate, you begin to think about what you can do and how your world impacts that of others. If charity becomes nothing but the job of hired staff paid for by a distant government, social connections break down. Those who provide the caring may soon become no more invested than the most jaded social worker.

• He who pays the bills makes the rules.

  It is a matter of indisputable fact that federal governmental money comes with strings. And it is a matter of absolute certainty that in the future a great many of these strings will not be advantageous to the mission of those religious bodies that are currently lining up at the trough with their bowls out.

  An obvious example is in Venasco’s argument wherein she tells us that that under the Obama administration, those churches who object to homosexuality as a matter of their understanding of their ancient religious wisdom now cannot exclude gay men and women from being the voice and face of their religion-based good works. They must sacrifice their religious principle in order to receive the funds.

  And while some readers may think, “well, its about time”, I would caution that administrations change. In as little as four years, it could be possible that gay-affirming religious charitable efforts would be the ones to choose between upholding their religious principles or closing programs.

• Government does not have a very good history of connecting with the lives of individuals. Even in those institutions that seek to meet the needs of the most vulnerable and helpless, paperwork and procedure seem to rule the day. We all know – and shudder at – the way in which unwanted children get lost in “the system”

  Breaking the barrier between government and religious charity will not make bureaucracy more loving or personal. But it does have the potential of taking what is currently a hands-on caring effort and endowing it with all of the warmth of a DMV office with a cross on the wall.

• And finally, those of us in the gay community have been there before. We have watched community centers – those which at one time provided a common meeting place – turn into administrators of state-funded social programs with no use for gay men and women unless they have program-identified needs.

  We’ve seen AIDS groups morph from being the voice of an outraged people to pill distributors. We’ve seen community replaced with committee and know the dismal consequence of a message and method that is no longer able to see and reach those most at risk.

  We’ve have experience and we should know that there’s something about public money, however needed, that drains the soul from an organization. The best intentioned and most caring of volunteers soon begin to measure the needy against standards and quotas and tick-boxes.

Churches that are excited about this idea need to ask themselves whether they’d rather be churches or part of a defacto government bureaucracy; whether they want to meet the needs of individuals or impersonally process paperwork. Because once you have taxpayer dollars, you have forms and formulae, rules and restrictions.

If you take the public money, you answer to public administrators. And any religious leader that believes that politicians will make choices that are truly moral is deeply deluded or intentionally naive.

So while I know where Venasco is coming from and respect her opinion, I have to disagree. I would caution churches – affirming or rejecting, conservative or liberal – don’t sell your soul. And especially don’t sell your soul to Washington.