Standing Up for Faith
It is the only honorable course.

By Hillel Fradkin, W.H. Brady Fellow, American Enterprise Institute
February 27, 2001 9:35 a.m.

n January 29th, President Bush announced a new White House of faith-based initiatives. Its stated purpose is to make it easier for religious organizations to receive government funds for programs designed to address persistent social ills — juvenile crime, drug and alcohol addiction, illiteracy, and family breakdown. The operative premise is that religious organizations may succeed where other programs, the Great Society programs, have failed.

In the weeks since Bush's announcement of the new office, its detractors on both the Left and the Right have been in a perpetual state of fermentation. Although they advance different versions of the specific liabilities of the Bush initiative — and the differences between them are important — naysayers of the left-wing and right-wing variety share one thing in common. Both fear that the Bush program will lead religious groups toward dangerous temptations that will be difficult if not impossible for them to resist.

On the Left, some have spoken as if the use of religious organizations in the provision of social services will unleash a theological crusade. But it is already the case that many religious charities receive substantial sums of government money for such services. And since this has not led to religious strife, discrimination, or persecution, still other opponents point to a different nightmare scenario: Under the new initiative, they say, recipients of these services may find themselves called upon to hear or read a prayer, study the Bible, or Qur'an, or to participate in some religious ceremony. If they are disinclined to do so, or so this argument runs, they may find themselves under great pressure and be unable to resist. In the old phrase of Irish-Americans who once faced these kinds of moral dilemmas, they may "take the soup" and abandon their convictions.

For the Right, both the temptations and its victims are different, but the corruption is the same. The Right sees the churches and other religious organizations as the ultimate victims; but the temptation is the increased money that such groups will now have at their disposal. The Rights fears that, in return for new monies, religious organizations will be forced by government fiat to do a great many things that they would not do otherwise — i.e., hire people who don't belong to their faith or tolerate a way of life of which their faith disapproves. Such religious groups, fear the rightists, might thus be forced to constrain themselves in ways that dilute their core principles.

It would be foolish to deny that these temptations, the temptations of comfort and money, are real and present. But these kinds of objections overlook one thing. Namely, both the recipient of social services and the religious organizations which provide them are free to walk away. The same freedom that exposes us to temptation also permits us to resist it. Critics of faith-based programs on both the Left and the Right assume, wrongly, that we will be unable to exercise that freedom.

If this is so then it is a counsel of despair. It means that those in need of social services are so far gone in their humanity that they have no resources to draw upon to make independent choices. It also means that our churches and religious institutions are extraordinarily frail. This is still more worrisome as they come to embrace a larger proportion of our population.

In a different but related context, President Bush has spoken of the "soft bigotry of low expectations." The critics of faith-based programs seem to be saying that we must accept the soft tyranny of low expectations. But this view brooks a temptation in its own right. It permits us the comfort of doing nothing, either for others or ourselves.

It is surely permissible to pray that we not be led into temptations. But until and unless that prayer is answered, our only honorable course as free citizens is to face them and try to overcome them. That seems to be what Bush has proposed not only through this program but more generally in his inaugural address where he called for a renewal of citizenship and its virtues. More prosaically, he has said that he is interested in "what works." Presumably, if this initiative doesn't work, he will abandon it. Only if it fails, will we then be free, if that is the right word, to submit to the tyranny of low expectations.