In his presidential campaign, president-elect Barack Obama supported President George Bush's faith-based initiative, which supports faith and community-based organizations with federal funding for their social services. Obama intends to continue this program, expressing that these organizations are ideally suited to helping the needy.
In his article, “Obama can't have it both ways on faith-based hiring,” Jim Towey, the former director of the White House Office of Faith-based and Community Initiative, praises Obama's support of the initiative, but he criticizes the president-elect's rejection of a “core principle” of the program. In contrast to Bush's initiative, Obama's plan will take away the faith-based organization's right to hire on a religious basis for these charities. Taking away this right, Towey argues, will lead to another example of religious charities yielding their rights to government pressure to obtain federal money.
Is hiring on the basis of religion truly essential to these organizations? Towey mentions that these groups need this right to “hire people who share their vision.” The initiative's goal, its vision, is to aid these charities so they can help the needy. Does one's religion really matter in order to help others? Understandably, if a church requires a role in which a background in faith is needed, such as a religious teacher, the right to hire on a religious basis is justified. However, this is not the case. Towey himself acknowledges a point voiced by critics of faith-based initiatives, which states that many religious charities already hire regardless of religious basis.
Towey's main objection is against government discrimination against faith-based organizations. After reading from Mark Noll's God and Race in American Politics, we discussed in class how powerfully religion influences political policies. In this article, the roles are reversed. Towey believes that the government has gone too far by interfering with religion, but his attempt to justify this right to hire, casting government discrimination as the villain, seems rather overdone. Obama's proposal is not a drastic change, nor is it incredibly demanding, and the right in question lacks the weight needed to warrant his argument. Rather, it is a larger opportunity for people who share a similar “vision.”
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David raises an interesting question---“Does one's religion really matter in order to help others?” In a more perfect world, the answer might be no. However, our world is far from reaching that point and the brutal truth is that while I think it would be great for people of different religions to come together with a common goal, this is not going to be universally accepted. Even non –radicals, while accepting having to work alongside people of other faiths, may feel more comfortable if their work is associated with an organization bound to their particular faith. The name “faith-based initiative” should indicate something about the nature of the program. By taking away the ability of organizations to hire people of similar faiths, it simply becomes an “initiative” staffed by people who are probably guided by their religion.
David brings up the point many critics make “that many religious charities already hire regardless of religious basis,” but I think the reasons for this happening are not so clear. Towney claims, and I agree, that until George W. Bush’s faith-based initiative, most faith-based charities were essentially forced to change their hiring practices in order to receive federal money. Under Obama’s plan, religious charities will again have to make the difficult decision between taking federal money or changing their hiring practices and perhaps losing the identities of their organizations. In this article by Ronald Kessler, Towney is seen making the very valid point that many non-religious organizations, like Planned Parenthood, are able to get away with hiring only “like-minded people.” As Towney says, “If you’re pro-life, try getting a job at Planned Parenthood. So why can’t faith-based groups hire on the basis of their ideology and vision?”
As a skeptic of President Bush’s Faith-Based Initiative I am inclined to disagree both with Jim Towey and with Katie and Amit. This program has been controversial since its enactment in 2001 (coincidentally, founded through Executive Order and not legislation passed by Congress, suggesting that the President knew he did not have the support needed to pass a program which so clearly walked a tight rope between constitutional and un-constitutional) and while Towey sites several of the programs successes, he neglects to mention many of its failures such as the clearly un-constitutional Federal funding of programs that included religious teaching in their ‘social-service’, such as the Silver Ring Thing Program which taught abstinence as sexual education to high school students. President Bush’s Faith Based initiative was not meant to be an endorsement of any particular religion nor was it meant to be an endorsement of religious teaching under the guise of social service. It was meant as a leveling of the playing field so that religious charities could provide legitimate social service to communities on the same level as secular charities and the discriminatory hiring practices of some faith based charities are just that—discriminatory. Towey writes that “either religious charities are going to be treated fairly by government or they aren’t” but I don’t see why government should treat religious charities fairly when they can’t even guarantee a fair hiring process. I disagree with the analogy of a religious charity to Planned Parenthood because while there is a separation of Church and State in this country, there is no separation between State and Health Care Provider. I would also argue that it is the height of injustice that a tax payer whose tax dollars went to financing the federal funding to these religious groups would then be deemed illegible for a job there on the basis of his or her religion. Someone applying for a job at a religious charity clearly wishes to help people and I would ask if whether they accept Jesus Christ as our savior or not really effects their ability to feed the hungry or help the homeless. While Towey argues that “Telling church and synagogue groups that they cannot hire people who share their vision and mission risks sapping their life-saving programs of their effectiveness”, I would counter by saying if the identity of an charity is based more on its religious background than on actual charitable activity, then maybe its vision could use some altering. So, when Obama tweaked Bush’s program, saying, “If you get a federal grant, you can’t use that grant money to proselytize to the people you help, and you can’t discriminate against them – or against the people you hire – on the basis of their religion”, I think it was a huge step in the right direction.
I would be inclined to agree with Natalie as I also feel that an organization that receives taxpayers' money should not be allowed under any circumstances to practice any kind of discrimination. Furthermore, the author’s analogy with Planned Parenthood seems to me quite irrelevant in this case, though it does raise another interesting point. I don’t suppose Planned Parenthood has a hiring policy that forbids pro-life supporters to take jobs there. It is simply taken for granted that a pro-life supporter would never take the job, because if he were to take it, he wouldn't last long in such a hostile environment. I imagine that in the same way, working in a religious charity of a different faith may not be a job most people crave for, though in this case the environment would hopefully not be hostile, simply less pleasant then if one were instead to work in a charity of one's own faith.
In addition, though I may be wrong, I feel like a lot of fuss is being made over a change that is difficult for the organizations to swallow in principle, but that is not going to have much of an impact on their actual hiring. As I mentioned above, the introduction of non-discriminatory practices to all state funded religious charities is unlikely to bring much change to what kind of people work there, (why would a Jew want to work in a Catholic Charity, even if he were allowed to, if he could instead work at his local synagogue?) at least certainly not to the point where these organizations would risk losing their identity, as Towey argues they would.
Furthermore, even if that risk were not exaggerated, the government’s primary concern should not be whether those organizations are able to conserve their identities, but rather if they are in fact able (or unable) to aid people in a way that is more effective then secular organizations. If in organization is more concerned with its workforce’s religious homogeneity than it is with its social mission, as is apparently the Saddleback Church of California, (who “would rather disband than submit to governmental approval on hiring”) what is the justification for it’s receiving even a single tax dollar?
Lastly, if I have just raised the question of these charities’ effectiveness, it is because I believe that more generally, government should not fund religious organizations, but if it does, this funding should be minimal and only justified when every dollar spent is spent better then it would otherwise have been by non-religious organizations. This is because the very notion of faith-based initiatives seems to me contrary to the idea of separation between church and state. In this case, the very fact that there exists a “White House Office of Faith-based initiatives”: a direct association between the President and religious organizations, is a violation of this principle. And if such a violation must exist, then in my mind it can only be justified in purely economic terms: if financing those organizations is significantly more effective than working with their secular counterparts.
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