Around Easter I was really thinking about the church and all it does. Rick Warren was recently interviewed by Jake Tapper of ABC News and made the following comment:
“I think it’s disingenuous that magazines like Newsweek know that their circulation goes up at Christmas and Easter if they put a spiritual issue on the cover, but it’s always bait and switch. They never tell the stories, never tell the stories of what the good — what good the church is doing. Never. It’s always some obscure scholar, who’s debating something that kind of supposedly disproves this or that, or Andrew Sullivan — I don’t consider Andrew Sullivan to be a religious authority, okay?”
That got me to thinking about church and state, and the role that the state is playing in church with the Faith-Based Initiatives.
It upsets me to no end when I hear Obama say “Jesus did this” or “Jesus taught that,” and the media, the Left, and social justice preachers jump all over the comments to throw it in the Right’s face, screaming “See what Jesus did?! Why do you hate Jesus?!” But when Bush created the Faith-Based Initiatives by Executive Order back in 2001, it was the end of the world, the sky is falling, church and state are coming together, OHMYGOSH! You would have thought Bush was making himself the first American Pope with the way the Left was running around screaming. Then in 2009 something amazing happened; Obama comes into office and instead of undoing the Executive Order that created the Faith-Based Initiatives, he expanded the program. Holy Heaven, Batman! Do you mean to tell me we’re spending more money on churches? If the media thought Bush was the first Pope, Obama must really be the Messiah. Heck, in the stimulus, Obama set aside another $140 million for faith-based programs just to top Bush. The funny thing about 2009 was that there was no outrage from the media, and nothing but crickets from the Left.
While we could sit here and cry about unfair treatment of Bush, it’s really not worth the time, effort or text. The problem we have is the addiction that religious organizations now have to government money. Religious organizations now have to listen to the state and have to make compromises on their faiths based on that addiction. Just look at Obamacare and how Health and Human Services is mandating all it wants. Can you blame the government? All they did was take what Bush did, expand it, spend more on it, and get religious organizations hooked just like a drug dealer does. The government tossed religious organizations a bunch of cheap and free hits of their drug (money) and now these faith-based programs are all hooked and craving more and more.
The government, like a dealer, is pulling back and saying, “Nope, now you have to pay for this.” Now the church is screaming at the state about mandating things, just like a drug addict does when he needs another hit. The strings are being pulled, the addicts are being pushed around, and they don’t like it. Well, the best way to help an addict is to get him off his drug, and allow him to heal and move forward, realizing he doesn’t need the drug.
Conservatives love to talk about cutting spending and preserving individual liberty, so my questions to conservatives are: 1) Why in the world are we supporting a program that was not created by Congress but by a president, and 2) Why are we forcing atheists to pay for groups with which they disagree? We conservatives can’t scream about how we don’t want our tax money spent on abortion and then tell atheists that they have to accept having their tax money spent on religious groups. Conservatives need to end faith-based funding; we need to make sure we are respecting individual freedom, even atheists’ freedom and then as an added bonus, we’ll have $2.2 billion we can then cut in spending. This is something that our nominee could cut on his first day in office, and he wouldn’t need to wait on Congress.
The pusher needs to be stopped. Conservatives need to stop the pusher.
First, thanks for posting about this. As someone who served in the Bush administration at the HUD Faith Based Office no less, I think there needs to be some perspective. The program in question actually dates back to the Clinton administration (please see this link: http://www.irfalliance.org/president-obamas-fbi.html). It’s short, ugly history is not unlike much of the ugly history evolving out of social spending from the Great Society era departments. The twist of course is that religious charities were motivated by different forces.
Before I go any further I want to make clear that the notion of “funding” any of these charities is tied up solely in the government. It relies on the government to teach charities how to write grant proposals. It is not the block granting of funds directly to religious institutions but rather charities. The need to “build capacity” is a popular idea at Faith-Based Offices.
Unfortunately, like far too much government tries to do, if you account for all the overhead spent on employing bureaucrats to achieve this transformation of religious institutions is largely wasted or used on groups one might never suspect of being eligible for Faith-Based funding, like Habitat for Humanity. In the brief–and I might add disillusioning and demoralizing–time I spent with the administration I learned (or rather learned what I had suspected to be true) that the government was broken beyond repair, when it came to the Great Society mentality that remains entrenched there to this day.
We shouldn’t be shocked or even remotely surprised that the anti-theists fell silent in their criticism or for that matter that president Obama expanded a “compassionate conservative” idea, which itself co-opted many a Democrat before his ascension. It fufills the almost unwritten rule that government will expand entitlements to a constituency it believes will expand its electoral coalition.
Thanks! Learn something new everyday!
If these orgs can not survive on the generosity of willing public donors, they should not be propped up on the public dime.
Amen! I could go on a religious rant about the church but will spare you the theology
but agree with you completely! Thanks for reading!