New Archive:
August 2001 Issue
A Faithless Plan: Using Our Own Tax Dollars To Convert Us
By Aaron Schatz
Those of us who live in heavily-Jewish urban areas feel pretty comfortable as Americans by now. So a couple years ago when the Southern Baptist governing board decided to encourage its membership to proactively convert Jews to Christianity, many were surprised.
Turn ahead the clock to today, and many Jews sit silently while a group more influential than the Southern Baptist Convention--our government--tries to spend our tax dollars to convert us.
That's the only way to see the Bush administration's recent creation of the office of faith-based initiatives. While some Jews support the plan, it is very dangerous to both American Jews in specific and to the concept of religious liberty in general.
The idea is to spend government money to fund private social programs such as alcohol rehabilitation, job training, and domestic abuse counseling. In theory, it makes some sense. Social problems are out there. Government programs have failed to fix them, and many favor market-based initiatives that bring private groups into the battle against our nation's problems.
But which groups? Just as the Constitution does not allow for favoring one religion over another, neither should it favor irreligion over religion. If a program run by a religious group happens to succeed at solving social problems, that program should theoretically receive the same support as a secular program such as Big Brother/Big Sister.
The difficulty comes in the practice. It doesn't matter who runs the program, but it does matter what the content of the program is. Is it possible to have a social initiative run by a religious organization without having conversion as the central goal?
Right now there are plenty of government-assisted, "religion-based" programs, run by such organizations as Catholic Charities, Lutheran Social Services, and the Jewish Federation system. But these programs are not "faith-based" because they don't include religious content. It's when the content becomes religious that the problems begin. That's because of the difference between the red zone and the blue zone.
Remember that map from the 2000 election, of the areas that voted for Gore and those that voted for Bush? In the blue zone--the Gore zone--where many readers of Generation J most likely live, the prevailing forms of Christianity are Catholicism and liberal Protestantism. But in the red zone, the prevailing form of Christianity is Evangelism. And the evangelicals don't take the spreading of the good news of Christ lightly.
As North Carolina native Michelle Cottle asserts in a February New Republic article, "My Yankee friends assure me that places like Covenant House in New York and parochial schools all over provide secular services without forcing their views into anyone's soul. Which is fine; except that New York is not Greenville, and Catholicism or Judaism is not an evangelical faith."
Evangelicals are good folks. But they can't hide the strong push of their religious faith toward converting others. After all, the dictionary definition of the word "evangelize" is "the zealous preaching and dissemination of the Gospel, as through missionary work." They're not kidding about the zealous part.
For the evangelicals, the gospels are the answer to all problems. Drug addiction, work difficulties, and family problems can all be solved through the strength of Jesus. There is no doubt that transformative power of religion can be strong--particularly the transformative power of Christianity. After all, faith in Jesus turned our President from a compulsive drinker into a man who doesn't touch a drop. (If only Jesus would tell Dick Cheney to swear off the steak and eggs.)
In all seriousness, there is evidence that certain faith-based counseling works extremely well. There is also evidence to show that secular counseling can achieve the same results. Mark Chaves, professor of sociology at the University of Arizona, states that "the claim that religious organizations work better is completely without empirical basis." The rehabilitation rates of many religious programs are called into question by self-selection bias within the programs. In addition, many of them (particularly in Texas) exist without an organized secular alternative, and thus without a control group.
But let's accept that religious programs, including Christian programs, can have positive effects that may not be achieved through secular options. Nonetheless, is it the place of our federal government to teach us faith, particularly when one faith will undoubtedly be favored over others? We may need to give up government support of some programs that work, but this is the tradeoff we make to live in a free society with protection of minorities.
Many of us imagine a world of choices between a variety of religious programs and their secular counterparts. But as Cottle points out, "What about the poor and downtrodden in places where religious pluralism effectively means a choice between Southern Baptist and Church of the Nazarene?"
For those who believe that the purpose of faith-based initiatives is not to convert people, maybe it is a bit uncomfortable to point out that the Bush advisor who formulated this policy--as well as the phrase "compassionate conservatism"--is Marvin Olasky, a Christian convert from Judaism.
There are Jews who support the faith-based initiatives program. Many are Orthodox Jews who would like to see government money go to support Orthodox Jewish counseling and social programs. In the religiously diverse world of the Northeast, this might be a good thing. In small-town Alabama, where the New Testament is still taught in the public schools and Jews who dare leave Bible class are shunned, the OU is probably not coming to the rescue.
The fact is that many of us don't live in New York, or Los Angeles, or cities with vibrant, supportive Jewish communities. There are Jews in the hinterlands, in the South, in the red zone. There are Hindus there as well, and Muslims, and for that matter Unitarians and liberal Methodists.
Where the evangelical Christians are the majority, the rest of us are minorities. And the First Amendment is designed to protect the minorities from the establishment of religion.
It is good for government money to teach people to stop drinking and get themselves jobs. It is bad for government money to teach people that Christ is their only way to salvation, the only way to stop drinking and get themselves jobs. The problem with the faith-based initiative program is that for most who support it--including, perhaps, the President--there is no difference between the two.
Some quotes for this article were taken from the February 26 edition of The New Republic.
Aaron Schatz writes the Lycos 50, a daily report on the people and topics
most popular on the Internet. You can find his column at http://50.lycos.com , though the
Terra Lycos corporation has nothing to do with his personal views expressed
here. They only provide him with free sodas.
lifestyles
| fiction | politics
| daily buzz | relationships
| culture | social
action | spirituality
| chatroom | J-TV
giude | win stuff |
e-postcard | about
us | archive | disclaimer
|
|
