Shortly after George W. Bush announced the creation of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives--launched on January 29 to facilitate a new era of partnership between the government and religious groups--the nation's airwaves were filled with assertions about the unique capacity of religious organizations to solve our most intractable social problems. "Study after study shows these faith-based initiatives work better, much better in most cases, than government ones," declared CNN's Tucker Carlson on The Spin Room that night. William Donahue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, told The Washington Times, "Faith-based initiatives not only work better than their secular counterparts, they do so at a fraction of the cost."
It's a claim many politicians have come to embrace. "We will look first to faith-based organizations," President Bush has promised, "because private and religious groups are effective. Because they have clear advantages over government." The idea dovetails neatly with the long-standing conservative belief that social maladies like violence and drug addiction derive less from material deprivation than from spiritual and moral decay.
But many Democrats have become converts as well. Twice in recent years, Democrats and Republicans have joined hands in Congress to pass "charitable choice" legislation, which allows faith-based organizations to mix secular and religious activities while running certain publicly funded services--an approach President Bush promises to expand to every existing social program.
Relying on religious groups to perform an increasing array of social functions is typically presented as a matter of doing what a growing body of evidence suggests works best. "Churches do a great deal of good for considerably less resource investment than we pay via other institutional means," John DiIulio, the Princeton University professor whom Bush has appointed to head the White House Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, told Sojourners magazine. "That's the pure public policy analysis."
Given how frequently such claims are repeated, it may come as a surprise to learn that there is virtually no scholarly evidence to support them. "We don't have the research to tell us whether faith-based organizations are better or not," says Nancy Ammerman, a sociologist of religion at the Hartford Seminary who is in the process of completing a survey of more than 540 congregations. "Nobody has done the comparative research." Mark Chaves, a sociologist at the University of Arizona who has conducted numerous national surveys of church-based social programs, agrees. "It can't be said strongly enough how little we know about whether religion makes a difference in the effectiveness of delivering services."
This is not to deny the important civic and humanitarian function that many religious organizations play--and have long played--in our society, both through their social-outreach activities and by providing a moral community for their members. Several studies have shown that, all other things being equal, individuals who attend church are less likely to be arrested or to abuse drugs, and more likely to find jobs and escape poverty, than those who do not. But none of these studies tells us anything about whether religious organizations are more effective than their secular counterparts in delivering social services.
While the benefits of channeling taxpayer dollars to religious groups remain unknown, one thing is certain: Doing so will dramatically alter the relationship between church and state, in ways that concern not only civil libertarians but many religious leaders as well. How, for example, will public officials select which religious programs to fund without favoring some denominations over others? And how will federal agencies regulate religious providers without breaching the constitutional prohibition against excessive church-state entanglement? Proponents of charitable choice claim that the legislation merely "levels the playing field" between secular and religious groups by allowing the latter to compete on an equal basis for government funds. Yet the new laws actually grant religious organizations all kinds of preferential treatment, including the right to discriminate on the basis of religion in their hiring practices and exemptions from state licensing and training requirements that apply to secular providers.
This preferential treatment is unnecessary: A wide array of religiously affiliated organizations, such as Lutheran Services in America and Catholic Charities USA, have for decades been eligible to receive public funding, provided the secular functions they carry out are not intermingled with religious activities. Faith-based organizations that respect this distinction should by all means be encouraged to participate more actively in helping provide services for the poor. To the extent that these organizations are rooted in their local communities and staffed by dedicated and professional people, there's no question they can be effective providers of such services. But to expect that they can play anything more than an auxiliary role in combating major social problems is to ignore both what the existing evidence suggests and what many people within these organizations know from firsthand experience.
Expressing Faith without Preaching the Word
The Welfare Reform Liaison Project occupies a 16,000-square-foot painted-brick warehouse on a desolate commercial strip in Greensboro, North Carolina. Situated across from an auto repair shop and a Crown gas station, the building looks abandoned on the overcast December morning I've come to visit. But by 9:00 a.m., roughly a dozen women have gathered inside to participate in one of the state's most innovative welfare-to-work programs.
"We work with the hardest to serve," says the Reverend Odell Cleveland, the program's founder and director, welcoming me inside an enormous storage room with bare cement floors that is cluttered with boxes of merchandise. A tall, broadshouldered man who spent 17 years working as a truck driver before becoming a minister, Cleveland launched this program several years ago after growing alarmed about the impact that the 1996 welfare reform law would have on the predominantly poor, African-American community of southeast Greensboro. Aware that the 1996 law included a "charitable choice" provision allowing religious organizations to operate welfare-to-work transition programs, Cleveland approached George Brooks, senior pastor at the Mount Zion Baptist Church (where Cleveland is now a minister), with a blueprint for establishing an education and job-training program targeting those who would soon be removed from the rolls.
Four years later, drawing on a mix of foundation and government grants, Cleveland's program has put roughly 80 individuals through a series of classes and provided many of them with on-the-job training at the warehouse, which now serves as a distribution center to disburse gifts from corporate America to needy families in the community. During my visit, the mostly female workforce--many of whom, Cleveland explains, are "second- and third-generation welfare recipients, people who society says have no value at all"--sorted holiday gifts for $8 an hour.
"This is my way of expressing my faith," says Cleveland, telling me that when he first got started, the warehouse didn't even have heating. Today, 80 percent of the program's graduates are employed--a record that would seem to offer at least anecdotal evidence in support of the familiar conservative refrain that, as former Mississippi Governor Kirk Fordice has put it, "God, not government, will be the savior of welfare recipients."
But Cleveland would be the first to tell you it's not nearly so simple. For one thing, the Welfare Reform Liaison Project, far from replacing its secular and government counterparts, actively collaborates with and depends on them. The vast majority of its clients, for example, could not enroll in the program (and subsequently hold down jobs) without securing child-care services from the North Carolina Department of Social Services. Moreover, the Mount Zion Baptist Church could never have taken possession of the warehouse without help from the Weaver Foundation, a secular nonprofit that provided financial support; nor could it distribute goods in the community without assistance from the United Way of Greater Greensboro, with whom the project collaborates. "I believe the faith-based community has a role to play," says Cleveland, "but we have to understand the limits of our capacity."
It's a point that Bob Wineburg, a professor of social work at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and a close friend of Cleveland's, stresses repeatedly in his new book, A Limited Partnership, which examines the role of religious organizations in delivering social services in Greensboro. Wineburg finds that while churches and other faith-based organizations participate in an array of social-welfare activities throughout the city, they lack both the administrative capacity and the expertise to play anything more than a subsidiary role within a broader network of care that would collapse were the bulk of responsibilities (health care, child care, job training) turned over to them.
National studies confirm this. In a 1999 survey of more than 1,200 religious organizations, Mark Chaves found that more than half of the congregations participated in social service projects of some sort, with African-American and liberal churches playing a particularly strong social-outreach role. The vast majority of these activities, however, were "short-term, small-scale" efforts, such as sending volunteers to help staff soup kitchens. And congregations devoted an average of 2 percent to 4 percent of their budgets to social service--figures that underscore the potential limits of a social policy that centers around private religious groups while ignoring the need for public investment in areas like health care and education.
Despite its affiliation with Mount Zion Baptist Church, the Welfare Reform Liaison Project is a separate 501(c)3 nonprofit corporation that does not discriminate in either whom it serves or whom it hires, and that keeps religion confined to an optional prayer each morning at 8:30 a.m. To Cleveland, separating prayer from service is not an inconvenience but a matter of principle. "I've had people tell me they have a Bible study as part of their welfare-to-work program," he says. "I don't think that's the way to go, because I don't think people should be asked to participate in something they don't believe in. The fact is, not everyone who comes through this program is going to believe in God, but if they are being helped, I believe God is being served." The program's success, in Cleveland's view, derives not from the magical powers of prayer but rather from the professionalism of its staff members (all of whom are trained social workers) and its connection to the community.
Of course, many supporters of charitable choice say that its main goal is to open the door to precisely those providers that directly incorporate prayer into their programs. "Religious groups must be able to refer to biblical principles in their job-readiness classes, to pray with program participants who desire it, to keep their religious character while offering assistance," writes Amy Sherman of the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank. By emphasizing "tough love" and "spiritual motivation," Sherman contends, such providers are able to command "moral authority and cultivate traditional values among welfare recipients in order to transform a 'culture of dependency'"--a form of compassion that instills a sense of personal responsibility and is therefore far more effective than mere government handouts.
The Tragedy of Marvin Olasky
The argument that spiritual care is uniquely effective forms the centerpiece of what, at least in conservative circles, is the most influential book behind the current turn toward providing faith-based social services: The Tragedy of American Compassion, by Marvin Olasky. Hailed by conservative commentator William J. Bennett as "the most important book on welfare and social policy in a decade," Olasky's book (originally published in 1992) argues that history shows religious institutions to be the best vehicles of compassion. From the colonial era until the late nineteenth century, Olasky argues, social care in America was effective because private and religious charities tended to the poor in a manner that "stressed man's sinfulness, which only God's grace could change." This "early American model of compassion" worked, Olasky contends, but was eclipsed by the rise of the welfare state and the Great Society programs of the 1960s. These initiatives replaced true compassion with government handouts, in Olasky's view, fostering a culture of dependency that led to an explosion of social problems while failing to address spiritual needs.
Packed with footnotes that lend the work an air of scholarly rigor, The Tragedy of American Compassion caught the attention of, among others, George W. Bush (who has since dubbed Olasky "compassionate conservatism's leading thinker") and Newt Gingrich, who urged his Republican colleagues to read the book following the 1994 election. It was at this point that Olasky came to Washington and watched as a group of Republican politicians, including Congressmen Steve Largent and J.C. Watts and former Senators Dan Coats and John Ashcroft, launched the Renewal Alliance, an organization dedicated to promoting faith-based solutions to social problems. As Coats explained at a Heritage Foundation symposium in 1995, "Families, churches and community groups were forced to surrender their authority and function to bureaucratic experts. Fathers were replaced by welfare checks, private charities were displaced by government spending." Calling for a return to the era of "true compassion," Coats proclaimed: "Every dollar spent by ... faith-based charities is more efficient and compassionate than any dollar spent by the federal government."
The trouble is, while Olasky purports to prove this on the basis of historical evidence, his book distorts far more than it illuminates about the past. The historian David Hammack has noted that Olasky's "'Early American Model of Compassion' was never uniformly accepted and nowhere put comprehensively into practice." Colonial towns "often 'warned out' people who could not demonstrate a right to 'settlement,'" leaving the poor to fend for themselves, and established churches frequently mixed "compassion" with oppressive and exclusive policies that many colonists bitterly denounced.
While Olasky writes glowingly of the "Benevolent Empire" that extended compassion in the nineteenth century to "both black and white," he glosses over the history of slavery and the racism that pervaded many religious institutions. He claims that the poor were better off in 1890 (when charity was in private hands) than 100 years later, not bothering to address the consensus view among historians that, as James Patterson puts it in his authoritative study America's Struggle against Poverty, "the percentage of Americans defined as poor by consistent standards was as high in the late nineteenth century as it has ever been or was to be." And his account of the 1960s, when everything supposedly went awry, is curiously silent about Medicare, Medicaid, and the expansion of Social Security, which many scholars credit with all but eliminating poverty among the elderly.
That religious leaders and organizations have long been involved in various humanitarian causes, from abolition to suffrage to temperance, is unquestionably true; that the poor would be better off if we could only return to the model of compassion that prevailed in the colonial era is preposterous.
Fuzzy Regulation
But the dubiousness of Olasky's historical theory has not diminished its impact on contemporary policy. As Olasky himself notes in his most recent book, Compassionate Conservatism, published last year, the soon-to-be governor of Texas called him in 1993 "to discuss the policy implications of my findings." The opportunity to apply these findings came two years later: The Texas Commission on Alcohol and Drug Abuse, a state regulatory agency, threatened to shut down a San Antonio branch of Teen Challenge, a faith-based drug rehabilitation program with more than 120 branches throughout the United States, for failing to employ licensed drug counselors [see "Why Jesus Is Not a Regulator," on page 26]. Outraged that the state was unleashing its "regulatory dogs" on an effective faith-based program, Olasky helped organize a protest in defense of Teen Challenge. Bush promptly sided with the program, granting Teen Challenge an exemption from state regulation, and soon thereafter passed a law freeing all faith-based groups in Texas from state oversight and licensing requirements.
What is the justification for such special treatment? A proven track record of success, supporters say. Teen Challenge views drug addiction not as a lifelong disease that requires professional counseling and medication but as sinful behavior that can be permanently cured through Bible classes and the teachings of Christ--an approach, its backers say, that is superior. "Studies demonstrate that Teen Challenge's success rates in curing substance abusers are seven to eight times higher than those of secular drug rehabilitation programs," says the Hudson Institute's Amy Sherman. Last year, Missouri Congressman Jim Talent, a Republican who at the time was co-sponsoring federal legislation that would allow religious organizations to compete for billions of dollars in federally funded drug-and-alcohol-treatment programs, posted a fact sheet on his Web site. "According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse [NIDA]," the Web site matter-of-factly proclaimed, faith-based programs like Teen Challenge "have a 60-80 percent cure rate," compared with the "6-13 percent success rate" for conventional treatment programs; they are also cheaper, costing "only $25-$35 a day," compared with "$600 a day for conventional treatment programs."
The numbers are impressive. They are also utterly baseless. As soon as it learned about the Web site, NIDA disavowed being Talent's source, noting that no evidence exists "to make any valid conclusive statements about the role that faith plays in drug addiction treatment." A 1998 General Accounting Office (GAO) report commissioned by, among others, Newt Gingrich and Dennis Hastert, the current Speaker of the House, concluded that "regardless of how faith-based is defined, there has not been sufficient research to determine the results of this type of treatment." Moreover, the GAO added, conventional treatment programs have a 40 percent to 50 percent success rate (defined as one year of abstinence following treatment)--hardly the "6-13 percent" claimed by Talent. Many of these programs also cost less than Teen Challenge: $13 per day for outpatient methadone treatment; $15 per day for outpatient drug-free programs.
And Teen Challenge's "60-80 percent cure rate"? NIDA did perform a small-scale study in 1974 and 1975 that found that 67 percent of Teen Challenge's graduates remained drug-free a year after the program; but the study also revealed that only 18 percent of clients who began the program actually graduated, making the "cure rate" meaningless. (Another religious provider that is routinely cited for its miraculous cure rate, Victory Fellowship, likewise claims 70 percent to 80 percent success among those completing its program--which is completely different from measuring those who enter the program.)
The NIDA study noted that Teen Challenge retains the right to dismiss clients along the way "for sufficient instances of inappropriate behavior," including "use of drugs" (that is, relapsing) and "rule breaking." What's more, NIDA found that more than one-third of the clients who dropped out of the program cited "an excess of religion" as one of the reasons.
Yet these factual deficiencies haven't seemed to matter. In an op-ed published last June in The Washington Times, Robert Woodson, president of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise (a conservative organization bankrolled by the right-wing Bradley Foundation), urged passage of the legislation co-sponsored by Congressman Talent and repeated the claim that faith-based programs succeed "at rates far higher than those of secular programs, and at significantly lower costs." In response, numerous organizations, including the National Association of Addiction Treatment Providers, jointly submitted a letter debunking the claim. Their letter was never published. Woodson's op-ed, however, was distributed to members of Congress, and last December the legislation was enacted into law. The bill includes a provision that not only makes faith-based programs eligible to receive public funds but exempts them from the state education and training requirements applied to all secular providers--a step many experts fear will create a dangerous two-tiered system.
"There is real concern about an erosion of standards for treatment," says Bill McColl, who until recently was the executive director of the National Association of Alcoholism and Drug Abuse Counselors. "When you come at alcoholism not as a disease but as a moral issue, and your counselors are saying, 'These people can withstand temptation if they just pray,' and they are not subject to the state licensing and regulatory standards that everyone else must meet, that is troubling. Because this is a disease, and it is in the proper domain of public health, and if you are out there promoting what you are doing as treating addiction, you should be properly licensed."
While President Bush has assured religious organizations that he will create "alternative licensing procedures" so they are not "buried by regulation," some within the religious community have acknowledged that regulation is both inevitable and appropriate when government funds are involved--which is why they are wary about the current direction of policy. "When citizens pay tax money, they have the right to insist that it is used efficiently and fairly," notes Melissa Rogers, former general counsel for the Baptist Joint Committee, which represents one of numerous mainline churches that oppose charitable choice. Government regulation is particularly unavoidable under charitable choice, Rogers notes, because while the legislation allows the government to fund "pervasively sectarian" institutions--an activity courts have generally prohibited in the past--it restricts these institutions from using tax dollars directly for "sectarian worship, instruction, or proselytization."
How will the government ensure that tax dollars are used for acceptable activities (say, rent and utilities) rather than unsuitable ones (Bible study materials, the salaries of ministers) without violating the Constitution's ban on excessive state entanglement in the affairs of religious organizations? If public agencies are rigorous about enforcement, Rogers notes, religious groups may soon find themselves "filing annual compliance reports, waiving rights of confidentiality, and submitting to governmental investigations"--consequences that not only will undermine religious autonomy but will divert time, energy, and resources away from worship. If they are not rigorous, on the other hand, taxpayers will have no idea how their money is being spent and recipients may be tempted to misuse it. Direct government funding of sectarian organizations, Rogers concludes, is "the wrong way to do right," since it will ultimately inhibit religious freedom.
The Case of Eugene Rivers
The Reverend Eugene Rivers, pastor of the Azusa Christian Community, a Pentecostal church in the Dorchester section of Boston, offers a powerful counterargument--an argument many liberals might find convincing. A self-described "New Leftist" who converted a former crack house in one of Boston's poorest communities into the headquarters of his now-celebrated activist ministry, Rivers is among the founders of the Ten-Point Coalition, a group of churches that came together in 1992 to combat the gang violence that was claiming the lives of a growing number of the city's black and Latino youths. Less than a decade later, Boston's homicide rate has plummeted 80 percent, turning Rivers's faith-centered, street-level ministering into the stuff of legend. "Savior of the Streets," proclaimed a 1998 Newsweek cover story on "God vs. Gangs" that hailed Rivers's Christian style of social outreach as "the hottest idea in crime fighting." The Ten-Point Coalition has been the subject of a PBS documentary, a glowing Joe Klein article in The New Yorker, and stories in publications ranging from The Weekly Standard to Time.
Rivers deserves the praise. An exceptionally dedicated and charismatic figure, he combines the missionary zeal of an evangelist with the intellectual acumen of a Harvard professor. Rivers told me that his typical day, which takes him from prayer sessions with ex-offenders to meetings with the police department's gang unit, begins at 5:00 a.m. and ends well after midnight. "What I have discovered in doing this work is that I have run into no secular agnostics or atheists in the trenches when the bullets began to fly," he says. "My house has been shot into twice and burglarized six times. But in communities like this, all the high secular liberals have evacuated." Were it not for his faith, Rivers joked, "I'd be sitting someplace writing books--in Vermont, with my family, watching black people on BET and doing talk shows with Cornel West."
Rivers's work has begun to attract the attention not only of journalists but of scholars, although what they're finding complicates the often simplistic lessons drawn in the media about the miraculous powers of faith. Christopher Winship, a sociologist at Harvard University, has argued that while the Ten-Point Coalition has indeed played an important role in the Boston miracle, its contribution had less to do with "ministering" than with serving as the key intermediary institution between Boston's inner-city communities and the city's police force, which in 1996 launched an aggressive community-policing initiative against gang violence.
"In every poor community in this country, you have ministers who have a genuine concern for kids," Rivers says. The left, he notes, has no problem recognizing the efficacy of black churches during the civil rights movement. So why not now? Those who oppose charitable choice on First Amendment grounds, he charges, are "upper-income liberals" who care more about whether a social service provider has a cross on its door than whether the institution is doing an effective job serving the poor.
But Mark Stern, a lawyer at the American Jewish Congress, points out that while many religious groups that receive public funds will respect the ban on proselytizing, charitable choice has already spawned four lawsuits that raise serious constitutional questions. Among these are a case involving state funding for a Bible class in Texas and another involving a Christian 12-step course for addicted fathers in Wisconsin. The government has yet to clarify how it plans to determine whether a pervasively sectarian organization has used public funds for direct proselytizing. And although Congress has mandated that a secular alternative be provided to recipients of services who raise objections in such cases, states are not required to inform beneficiaries of their right to seek an alternative.
Virginia Democrat Bobby Scott, a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, notes that charitable choice also raises serious civil rights concerns, since the legislation allows faith-based groups that receive public funds to discriminate on the basis of religion in their hiring practices. "We are allowing groups to practice religious bigotry with federal funds," asserts Scott. "I think that's turning the clock way back to the days when it was considered okay to say, 'We don't hire your kind.'"
For Rivers the prospect of revitalizing inner-city neighborhoods through church-based activism understandably outweighs such concerns. The black community would be foolish, he says, to dismiss the opportunity to work with the government simply because of ideological discomfort with the Bush administration.
Yet as Rivers himself concedes, there are sound reasons for such discomfort. For what most appeals to Republicans about faith-based compassion is the fact that it reinforces the conservative notion that our social problems are a product of poor people's own personal conduct and morality, not structural inequality that requires governmental action on any meaningful scale. Rivers dismisses this as "libertarian ideology masking in fundamentalist drag." But it is an ideology that many conservative advocates of faith-based initiatives fervently embrace. President Bush has sought to distance himself from this wing of the GOP by saying he does not believe religious charities can replace government. But he has also said that when it comes to helping the poor, "Spending large sums of money and building an immense bureaucracy" will only "hurt the very people we meant to help." Perhaps that is why, during his reign as governor, Texas ranked near the bottom in categories such as education, health care coverage for children, and (as a recent U.S. Department of Agriculture study found) the number of people suffering from hunger--a stark reminder of compassionate conservatism's limitations.
Dismantling the Safety Net in the Name of God
A more cynical reading of Bush's faith-based politics is that the policy enables the party that has spent the past few decades dismantling the social safety net to reclaim the mantle of compassion on the cheap--and, no less important, to curry favor among potential black voters (and other groups) by developing relationships with ministers like Rivers. This raises a larger concern: namely, that the decisions about which religious groups ultimately receive public funding will be shaped at least in part by politics. While the Bush administration claims it will base decisions purely on which programs are most effective, does anybody seriously believe that the Nation of Islam and the Church of Scientology will compete on a level playing field with conservative evangelical groups? It was only a few years ago that former Senator Bob Dole and several other members of Congress pushed the Department of Housing and Urban Development to terminate contracts between public housing authorities and security companies affiliated with the Nation of Islam, even though cities like Baltimore thought the group was effective. There is a built-in tension between the inherently political process of selection and the principle of government neutrality toward religious groups.
The danger cuts both ways. Just as government agencies may be tempted to favor some religions over others in disbursing grants, religious organizations may gradually sacrifice their independence to safeguard their public funding. Imagine if, during the civil rights movement, black churches at the forefront of the struggle had been dependent on the federal government for their financial survival. Would ministers have acted as boldly in bearing witness to the inhumanity of segregation? The specter of co-optation is the reason that some conservatives--including Michael J. Horowitz, director of the Project on International Religious Liberty at the Hudson Institute, and, it must be said, Marvin Olasky--are wary about direct government funding to houses of worship. In a supreme irony, Olasky recently expressed grave reservations about Bush's plan, fearing that religious groups could be forced to limit their evangelistic activities when they accept government funds.
The final problem is that in an effort to strengthen the role of faith in public life, advocates of government partnerships with religious institutions will actually diminish its role in our society. Those who favor such partnerships argue that the strict separation between church and state should give way to the notion of "equal treatment," which would allow religious groups to compete for public funds on a "level playing field" with secular organizations. In this view (and four current Supreme Court justices have signaled they agree with it), strict separation is not neutral but discriminatory, creating a "naked public sphere" that privileges secular groups over all religious ones.
But if we are to take the principle of "equal treatment" seriously, what exactly is the rationale for sustaining the various special privileges that religious institutions have long been granted in our society? Derek H. Davis, who is the director of the J.M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies at Baylor University and the author of many books on the role of religion in public life, points out that if there is nothing special about religious speech and practices, then "no valid reason remains for exempting churches and religious organizations from tax requirements or government regulations." The Constitution, Davis notes, deliberately specifies that religious speech and practice are different--not because the founders were irreligious and sought to discriminate against people of faith but in order to protect religion from state intrusion. And the policy has worked: By virtually every conceivable measure, religion is far more robust in the United States than in countries such as England, Germany, and the Netherlands, where church and state collaborate routinely.
Barring the government from funding pervasively sectarian organizations need not--and should not--mean deterring religious organizations from involvement in combating the nation's social problems. Churches and other religious organizations have long been free to spin off affiliated organizations that can apply for and receive government funds. The government can and should encourage them to do so. Nor would such a ban deter churches and other houses of worship from participating in a range of other short-term humanitarian activities that, as studies show, are what the vast majority of congregations actually do. It would mean barring the government from funding groups like Teen Challenge that link treatment directly with preaching the Word. Given how little we know about the effectiveness of such organizations, and how much we do know about the potential costs in terms of religious and constitutional liberty, this is a small price to pay.
