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Government Funding of Faith - Based Institutions: Justice or Temptation?
By Imad-ad-Dean Ahmad, Ph.D.
Minaret of Freedom Institute
11/05/2001
The separation of church and state is an oft-heard refrain, but rarely do the choir or the audience remember that Thomas Jefferson's famous "wall separating church and state" was meant to protect religion from government. Now that George W. Bush has proposed his faith-based initiative, it is a good time to review the dangers that government funding poses to faith-based organizations. Muslim NGO's in America, just beginning to firmly establish themselves, should pay particular heed.
President Bush's reason for the initiative is understandable. There is no doubt that private charities, especially faith-based charities, are more efficient than government welfare, which spends about two thirds of it expenditures on overhead. While crooked private charities may spend 90% on overhead, the honest ones do spend most of their money to the benefit of their clientele. The Combined Federal Campaign, a workplace campaign that allows government employees to designate contributions from their paycheck to private charities, will not admit a charity with a combined overhead/fundraising rate greater than 25% without a good explanation of the overage. Ironically, the government's welfare agencies would not qualify for participation in its own workplace campaign.
Lower overhead is not the only advantage that private charities have over government agencies. They are generally more personalized in their dealings with the needy. This is especially true of those faith-based organizations that seek to establish some sort of personal relationship with aid recipients. They are better able to gauge how to best target their aid to achieve the maximum effect. The Islamic-American Zakat Foundation (with which I am affiliated) makes a special effort to assist its recipients in attaining self-sufficiency.
But the most important benefit of private charities may be the implicit understanding their aid is a matter of charity rather than of entitlement. The danger of entitlement is the creation of welfare-dependency, especially within generations raised within the system. (Although Islamic obligatory charity is an entitlement program in a sense, it navigates this danger with the clear assertion that the spiritual benefits of Zakat go to the giver, and the encouragement of all Muslims to strive to become Zakat-payers.)
Unfortunately, much of the criticism of the Bush initiative has been based on a misunderstanding of its aim. Thus, John DiIulio, head of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, has spent most of his time knocking down straw men. The initiative has no new funding, but simply aims to facilitate competition for existing funds by including bids from organizations with religious affiliations. Nor does the initiative involve any new Constitutional precedents, since religious groups have been eligible to apply for government funds since the charitable choice initiative became law under the Clinton administration, well establishing that religious organizations ought to have equal access to government funds for general purposes, even though misguided bureaucrats have often denied them in the mistaken belief that they are ineligible. Further, and perhaps even more prevalent, many religious organizations have never applied for such funds, erroneously thinking themselves ineligible. The aim here is to change the possibility of religious organizations receiving federal funds from theory to practice.
If the benefits of the initiative are so clear, and if so many of the commonly voiced objections are misdirected, why then has there been such an outcry from both the left and the right? The answer is that the soundest concerns about the initiative are the most subtle, and do not lend themselves easily to sound bites. Nonetheless, we can give them names: corruption, and channeling, strings and secularization, artificial overhead, divisiveness and diversion.
Corruption and channeling. The Federal government's welfare programs are at a great disadvantage compared to those run by private agencies and local governments in that they are so removed from the problems they seek to address - both physically and in scale. To ensure justice in the distribution of funds, only minimal federal input should be allowed lest the disbursers become liable to bias.
There is a concern that corrupt applicants will try to "milk the system" by designing their proposals to meet government specifications as opposed to the actual needs of the communities. The government would then gain a powerful mechanism for channeling the resources of charitable organizations into the directions it seeks to fund.
Strings and secularization. In order to be eligible for grants, organizations must agree to whatever strings the government may wish to attach. There are numerous dangers here, but for faith-based organizations the biggest danger is the temptation towards secularization. This is ironic, since it is the faith orientation that is the distinguishing factor in the success of such organizations. Say what you will about Louis Farrakhan; however, one cannot deny that his organization has effectively dealt with the drug problem in the black underclass. Only 38% of Americans, according to a recent survey by the Pew Charitable Trust, would be willing to see the nation of Islam receive federal funds.
Artificial overhead. Writing proposals is a tedious process, and government proposals are even more tedious than those to private agencies. In order to obtain these grants, faith - based organizations will have to devote many hours of time to proposal writing instead of providing their social services. Since the best proposals will be the ones to get funded, paid professionals will end up doing the bulk of the writing rather than volunteers.
Divisiveness. Although the purpose of the faith-based initiative is to give religious organizations the same access to funds as other private organizations now have, the initiative itself has sparked sectarian hostility. Already, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell have made hostile statements against Muslims (among others) receiving such aid.
Diversion: The greatest danger of all is that religious organizations will be diverted away from their missions. Once government funding becomes a significant source of their regular incomes, they will have a vested interest in the perpetuation and increase of that funding source. As a result, they and their members will spend an ever-increasing part of their time as advocates for government funding instead of on their core missions. I have seen this disease infect other aspects of society that receive federal funds. Consider, for example, academia: That the era of big government is over, was even attested to by such Democratic loyalists as William Clinton, but those universities that should be on the cutting edge of innovative social thinking, addicted instead to the drug of federal funding, remain mired in the "statism" that plagued most of the 20th century. May Allah preserve us from the threat of religious leaders following college professors down that path.
Charity for Muslims is either a religious obligation (zakât) or a voluntary act (sadaqa). Tax-funded expenditures are neither religious nor voluntary. Zakat is an act of purifying our own wealth. Taxation is the act of seizing the wealth of others.
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