The Faith-Based Left
Getting behind the debate.

By Stanley Kurtz, a fellow at the Hudson Institute
February 5, 2001 8:45 a.m.

 

ll this earnest debate over government aid to faith-based social programs has missed a fundamental point.  We're warned by the Left that, along with the soup,

beneficiaries of faith-based charities will be spoon-fed morally unsavory and politically dangerous doctrines; that the fusion of needed benefits and unwanted proselytism will amount to coercion; that religious charities will engage in hiring discrimination against spiritual rivals or homosexuals; and that, however it is technically earmarked, the money pouring into these charities will ultimately constitute government support for religious activities.  But all of this is going on right now — big time.  It's only the artificial distinction between religion and the "secular" faith of the Left that prevents us from seeing it.  For years now, the government has been pouring millions upon millions of dollars into programs run by left-wing advocacy groups.  These groups are every bit as interested as any religion in promoting a particular moral orientation and worldview.

Conservatives and liberals alike have bought into the notion that we face a choice between value-free programs that ignore the individual and simply dole out material goods, and faith-based programs that look to transform character by instilling morality.  Certainly there are food banks and soup kitchens that fit the model of a strictly secular giveaway that makes neither moral nor behavioral demands on its beneficiaries.  (Ironically, many of these effectively secular programs are run by churches.)  But the government already gives legal and financial support to a raft of coercive and morally fraught leftist social programs that are religious in all but name.  These programs are designed to turn their beneficiaries into gender warriors and militant multi-culturalists — whether they like it or not.

It's impossible to make sense of the faith-based-charity issue without taking into account the cultural changes of the past 30 years.  Traditionally, government was small and community-based charities — many of them religious — did the work of social welfare.  In those days, despite sectarian differences, there was widespread national agreement on fundamental moral assumptions.   Nowadays, government is vast, while the country is culturally divided.  That means government is now effectively subsidizing one side of the culture war in its fight against the other — all on the grounds that only the Left is "secular." 

This is the unspoken reason for the battle over faith-based charities.  Government has been subsidizing Gore Nation.  Now Bush Nation wants in.  There are only two solutions: massive reductions in social programs, so that neither cultural camp disproportionately benefits from government support, or the rise of a religiously-based, government-funded "compassionate conservatism."  The old pattern of church/state separation depended on the combination of small government and cultural consensus.  Attempts to go back to the old church/state model, without taking account of our newly flourishing culture war, are naive and futile.

Superficially, the secular religion of the Left is about "rights."  But the eternal preaching about rights — and the miraculous discovery of new ones — only disguises the essentially religious nature of the enterprise.  That's because we're being urged to embrace our individual "rights" by identity groups that serve as de facto religious affiliations to the culturally deracinated Left.  Maybe that's why the individual right to equal consideration has morphed into a "right" to preferential group treatment.  Today's leftist identity groups give nothing away to the most orthodox of religions when it comes to claims of moral superiority, the establishment of group boundaries and rivalries, and the determination to impose a monolithic moral narrative on the world.  Fortunately, the "scary" side of traditional religion is redeemed by the ethic of personal sacrifice so essential to the success of faith-based charities.  The new secular religions of the Left, on the other hand, keep all the scary stuff, but unceremoniously discard the ethic of personal sacrifice in favor of an ethic of personal "liberation."  Instead of a self-sacrificing God, the holy warriors of the Left organize their crusades around images of mass-scale oppression — real or invented.  This interesting theological difference may allow the religious warriors of the Left to avail themselves of millions of dollars in federal subsidies, but it hardly relieves concerns about the moral-ideological coercion implicit in government support of liberal advocacy.

As NRO reported last month, the coalition of groups mobilized to block the Ashcroft nomination collectively receive literally tens of millions in federal dollars every year to run various social programs.  Does anyone really believe that programs sponsored by the Feminist Majority Foundation, the NAACP, the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund, and Planned Parenthood are morally neutral?  These groups are terrified that President Bush will divert a significant portion of monies from their own social welfare programs into faith-based charities that stress the importance of marriage in fighting illegitimacy and poverty.  This horrifies feminists because their own welfare programs preach a pro-divorce, anti-family message that is part and parcel of a larger worldview focused on the fundamentally oppressive nature of our "patriarchal" society.  We're not talking about religion versus secularism here.  Were talking rival faiths. 

A feminist opponent of faith-based charities gave the game away recently when she described her preferred alternative to religiously inspired programs that strengthen the traditional family.  Fearing that traditionalist men are just a step away from being wife-abusers, she argues that "men's belief systems must be rebuilt" to allow them to accept women as equals.  The result is millions of dollars in morally coercive, government-funded feminist re-education, much of which was documented last year in Christina Hoff Sommers's shocking book, The War Against Boys.  These government-sponsored feminist programs are far more dangerous than their overtly religious equivalents.  Precisely because they do not think of themselves as religious or coercive, they make no provision for their "beneficiaries" to opt out.  And the tens of millions of government dollars pouring into feminist coffers are all "fungible."  That is, although they don't pay directly for political activism and lobbying, they free up money for just those purposes — no more or less so than would government support for religious organizations indirectly facilitate proselytism.

But if you really want chapter and verse on government funding for the secular religion of the Left, just consult the sensational final chapter of Sally Satel's important new book, PC, M.D.  There, Satel describes government subsidized, "oppression-based" therapies, as politically tendentious as they are scientifically unsound.  There's the "trauma movement," based on a feminist form of psychotherapy that encourages women to "remember" questionable instances of early abuse, the cure for which is unstinting political opposition to our "patriarchal" society.  And don't think concerns about "hiring discrimination" allow male therapists to participate in such programs. [Editor's note: For more on Satel's book, see here.]

Then there's "multicultural counseling," which prescribes Afrocentrism and political opposition to "institutional racism" as the cure for drug-addiction.  The sad part is that many of the addicts forced by court order into "multicultural counseling" actually want to obtain a GED, or learn an employable skill.  Instead their government obliges them to color in maps of Africa and celebrate Kwanza.  How's that for religious coercion?  It's no longer merely a choice between the disease model of addition and the sin model.  The government has already thrown its legal and financial weight behind the "oppression model" — an explanation for disease as quasi-religious as Kwanza itself.  Far from ignoring the individual, oppression-based therapies seek deep personal transformation.  Of course, the attempt to transform drug addicts into leftist political activists is a waste of time when what they really need is a GED.  But let's not pretend that so-called secular government programs are uninterested in personal transformation.  Would that it were so.

Conservatives need to wake up on this one.  Every debate over government support for faith-based programs needs to be turned into a debate on government funding for the quasi-religious advocacy groups that make up the cultural Left.  We can solve the problem by scaling back government and de-funding the Left.  But the public seems to have rejected that option.  In fact, learning that lesson is what made George Bush president.  Worries about church/state issue are legitimate, but when it comes to the religion of the cultural Left, we're already at the bottom of the slippery slope.  So either pull the Left's hand out of the till, or let the saints come marching in.