Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

The Big Problem w/ Barack Obama’s Faith-based Initiative

Joseph M. Knippenberg explains:

There is one wrinkle in Obama’s faith-based proposal—a wrinkle that has always been there in his thinking—that distinguishes him from all his predecessors, Republican as well as Democrat. He has always professed a professorial respect for our First Amendment, which—he seems to say—forbids “discrimination,” both in the provision of government-funded services, and in the hiring of those who provide them.

The former position is genuinely non-controversial. No one I know supports federally-funded confessional self-help, where a religious group uses public money to help its members (and no one else).

The latter, however, is a matter of some significant disagreement, not just in the corridors of Congress, but in the courthouses and law schools as well. Religious hiring rights are, many would argue, a matter of religious freedom. In its 1987 decision, Corporation of the Presiding Bishop v. Amos, the Supreme Court agreed, as did Congress, which exempted faith-based groups from the religious discrimination provisions of the 1965 Civil Rights Act. Indeed, the 1996 welfare reform legislation, signed into law by President Clinton, explicitly extended this exemption to faith-based federal contractors.

The argument for this exemption is that it protects the distinctive mission of religious groups as they cooperate with government. Government support doesn’t have to secularize its recipients. Government support can uphold diversity, rather than impose homogeneity. Government can respect and extend the distinctive contributions that religious groups can make to addressing our many social problems.

... Obama’s faith-based initiative would mean that every federal dollar would in effect be a secularizing dollar, a dollar than encouraged conformity to a public bureaucratic template. An Obama Administration would cooperate with faith-based groups, but exclusively on its terms. This is a faith-“based” initiative with which the secular Left could be happy. It is most emphatically not a move to the center or even a return to the legacy of the Clinton Administration.