The Bush administration’s effort to increase federal government assistance to the charitable efforts of faith-based institutions should be evaluated by Christians as Christians, that is, precisely in the light of our faith. We may be surprised at the conclusions that will result. But the policy decisions ultimately reached may be closer to the truth if we, at least, have paused to ask what Jesus would do.
The Bush Administration’s initiative to expand government funding of helping programs conducted by religious organizations ran into heavy fire in Congress recently, when John J. DiIulio Jr., director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, attempted to clarify how the program would handle the ideologically charged question of combining government money and religious faith. Liberal opponents of the Bush plan clearly intend to demand that federal aid money be restricted to groups that agree to scour all their activities clean of religious implication or content. DiIulio, to his credit, seems determined to insist that some recognizably religious character may remain in the activities of government funded groups. DiIulio defended the right of actively religious groups to have access to federal money on the same terms as secular organizations, and to retain their religious character even as they apply for and use such funds. According to the New York Times he said that, “[m]erely because a faith-based social service delivery program receives Penny 1 of public funds, its leaders and volunteers need not remove religious iconography from their walls, need not refrain from parking their housing rehab lumber in churchyards, need not cease humming hymns while hammering nails.”
It is certainly worth pointing out that government discrimination against church groups is offensive and unconstitutional. Such discrimination is a large part of the modern world’s resolve to make believers ashamed of God. But I wonder if those who are not yet ashamed of God have adequately thought through the implications of the demand for equal treatment in the pursuit of government money. After all, sometimes the worst fate is to get what you want.
Mr. DiIulio may possibly succeed in getting a majority in Congress to understand that it is unreasonable to ban “humming hymns while hammering nails.” I still am not sure that the goal of seeking increased government funding of church helping programs is a good idea. I think it is likely to kill the charity that is the life blood of such programs. We should ask whether, in fact, government funding is really beneficial either to the charitable organizations that seek it, or to the people whom such organizations “help” with it.
Let me make a comparison to the income tax. I believe that the income tax system substantially reduces even the possibility of charity. The offer of a tax deduction for charitable donations introduces a shadow of mercenary self-interest into our motive that compromises what ought to be our right action. We may resist this analysis, but in fact it is very difficult to sort out the ambiguity of motives that underlie tax-privileged donations.
I think that is one of the reasons that Christ always told us we had to go one better when people ask us for assistance. When we are financially enticed to help our fellow human beings, it becomes quite unclear whether we are doing it for the money or because God wants us to. But pure, single-hearted love of God and of our neighbor for the sake of God is the essence of real charity.
The crucial point is not that an income tax deduction for “charitable” organizations means that fewer people receive material assistance than would otherwise be the case – although I believe that is true. More important is the accumulating evidence that giving people material assistance that is not true charity is often more destructive than simply leaving them alone.
The history of the past half-century of American welfare proves this. Government programs that were supposed to help the poor, raise up families, change lives and end poverty have been funded to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. And yet there has, it seems, been a curse on the work from the beginning. When the government showed up to help, things not only didn’t get better, they got worse than they had ever been.
Government programs to help families led to regulations that broke them apart and destroyed them. Government programs to help people become more sufficient led to rules that destroyed their incentives to work. Government attempts to help children have so damaged the family structure that millions of children no longer live in families where mothers and fathers can work together as God intended for their true welfare.
But let us leave aside the undeniable fact that secular government assistance has meant material harm to millions. The real problem has not been that misguided people have mishandled government power. The real problem is that the work of God cannot be accomplished where the motive of serving God is systematically forbidden. But this has been the case in “helping” programs that have been scoured free of the name of God according to the corrupt notion of “separation” of government and morality.
The danger that increased government funding of church-based programs poses is to charity itself. In the general parlance, “charity” means private and institutional good works to help the poor. But this is not what charity means to the Christian. All of those sorts of thing are not charity – they are the fruits of charity, which result from the overflowing of real charity. Over the course of time we have, more and more, mistaken the results, the fruits, the outward sign of charity for the reality.
Charity is love of God, and of our neighbor for the sake of God. Unless we understand this, we can’t possibly appreciate the threat to true charity we face in America today. For the death of the spirit begins not with active sin, but with the silent failure to witness to the truth. For decades now, government has had a standing invitation to believers to mute the role of God in their love of neighbor while they accept more government money. Because we live in a society that increasingly invites us to be ashamed of the very name of God, we must actively resist the devil’s bargain of seeking the fruits of charity – external good works – even if they come at the price of leaving the name of God behind. Christ called works without spirit “whitened sepulchers.” The issue is not whether soup kitchen workers will be permitted to hum hymns, but whether they will be discouraged from telling the people they are feeding that they are doing it for the love of God, not for the sake of the perishable body.
The invitation to be ashamed of God is probably the most powerful tool that evil has in the world today. And it is a powerful tool, because by silencing witness, it leads many folks who, in their heart and in their inclinations, and even in their actions, want to follow the path marked out by God’s will, to forget why. And when they forget, the real work of charity becomes impossible.
The ultimate work of charity is not to alleviate suffering in the flesh. This task is ultimately doomed to defeat in any case, because all of us, rich and poor alike, will be borne down by the weight of our flesh to the grave. The objective of every true charitable work that is done – of every cloak that is shared, of every crust of bread that is given, of every good word that is spoken, of every moment of peace that is offered, of every grief that is shared, of every burden that is alleviated – is NOT just to make people feel better. A world without faith tries obsessively to believe that cheating the grave by a few moments, a few years, is a work that deserves the highest moral praise. But we are kidding ourselves – without God, there is no enduring reason to spend ourselves in such work.
The fruit of charity – love of God – is to do His work by seeking to give glory to God in the way He wills, which is also the only way that we can truly help our fellow man – by turning his eyes, his heart, and his spirit, toward the One who can truly save him from destruction.
In short, the works of charity are not merely diminished or distorted when the name of God is banned; they are fundamentally gutted if the name of God is not openly proclaimed as the reason for everything we do. We certainly cannot insist that non-believers recognize this. But those of us who strive to be “wise as serpents” in the service of the Lord ought to foresee clearly that any willingness to marginalize God’s role as the motivation for helping programs, in order to qualify for government money, is the death of charity.
We should NOT be seeking to convert church-based charity into government funded help. Rather, one of the chief goals of American life ought to be to get the business of “charity” out of the hands of the one institution which, according to the rules the ACLU has set down, is forbidden in principle from doing the works of charity. Here, the ACLU has – no doubt accidentally – stumbled near to the truth, because the federal government has no constitutional authority to fund or provide social services at all. But that’s another topic.
Whether or not Mr. DiIulio gains congressional approval for soup kitchen workers to hum God’s name quietly while they feed the hungry on the taxpayers dime, there is little or no prospect of achieving political agreement that true and open charitable work – service of the poor for the sake of the glory of God – can be supported by government money. Further, it is highly unlikely that such agreement would be healthy for true charitable work. President Bush is certainly right that the unconstitutional government prejudice against the charitable work of believers should be eliminated. But I contend that he is wrong to expect that its elimination would, over the long term, increase or strengthen the charitable efforts of believers. Rather, it would bring those efforts into a new era of temptation and ambiguous motivation that would diminish and weaken true charity.
Government aid to families, children, neighborhoods and most other institutions of human community has caused harm precisely because such aid was prevented in principle from offering people the moral truth they need most. Now that President Bush wants to offer government help to the churches themselves in the very work of charity, believers would be wise to consider whether accepting government help will be any safer than it has been in the past.
Faith-based initiatives, and only faith-based initiatives, can be truly charitable. It is urgent that believers ask themselves what government funded “faith-based” initiatives will really be based on, and whether there will be room left for charity when the money has driven the name of God away.
If the government wants to advance the cause of charity, it should simply work harder to get out of the way of a spirit-filled people already eager to do the work of the Lord. Abolish the income tax, and watch the citizens of America — unbribed — use their own money to remind the world that America, itself, is a faith-based institution.
(Dr. Keyes recently founded and serves as chairman of the Declaration Foundation, a communications center for founding principles. To visit their website click here.)
