Faith Plan Isn’t a Huge Leap

Religious groups already receive billions in federal aid, analysis finds

Supporters of the Bush administration’s proposal to funnel millions of dollars in federal money to faith-based groups hail it as a revolutionary way to deliver social services. But the idea is more an extension of existing policy than a bold new plan. Mainstream religious charities, including Catholic Charities USA, Lutheran Social Services, and Jewish Community Services, already receive at least $3-billion annually in federal money, and hundreds of millions more go to other religious groups that provide services to the needy, a Chronicle analysis of government records shows.

Those payments account for about 6 percent of the $55-billion the federal government spent on social services last year.

The level of existing federal support for religious groups has not gotten much notice in the debate over the Bush policy. Still, many small religious institutions, most notably black and Islamic groups, say they have had trouble gaining access to federal money in the past, and they are counting on the president’s proposal to open that door in the future. Other groups say they fear that most funds for faith-based programs will continue to flow to the same large Catholic, mainline Protestant, and Jewish organizations that have been receiving it.

“When the pie is divided, I don’t think minority groups will get a fair share,” says Maher Hathout, who leads the Islamic Center of Southern California, in Los Angeles.

$258-Million Proposal

Since January, when the president created a White House office to encourage greater involvement of faith-based groups in providing social services and announced that he wanted to establish programs to encourage partnerships between government and religious groups, the administration has provided few details of its plan. It remains unclear whether the amount of federal money available to religious groups would grow under the new proposal. The president’s budget plan would provide $258-million for several social-service programs for which faith-based groups would be eligible to compete, including efforts to help the children of prison inmates, promote “responsible fatherhood” by helping fathers who are unemployed or have low incomes, and set up group homes for teenage mothers.

Also uncertain is whether the government would disburse money to individual churches, synagogues, and mosques, or only to separate religious charitable organizations, like Catholic Charities, that receive it now. To ensure separation of church and state, federal rules now prohibit any funds from going directly to houses of worship.

Range of Services

Whatever the outcome, however, the federal government already has dispensed billions of dollars in recent years to faith-based groups for such programs as teenage-pregnancy counseling, emergency soup kitchens, mental-health services, and low-cost housing. Since 1996, faith-based groups that include religion in some aspects of their social programs have been able to receive government funds to provide job training, drug-abuse treatment, and a few other services.

In the 2000 fiscal year, Lutheran Services in America, an alliance of nearly 300 human-service organizations affiliated with the Lutheran denomination, received $2-billion in federal funds, half from grants and contracts directly with the federal government and half from programs administered by state and local governments.

Catholic Charities received more than $1.5-billion in all government funds; the organization does not keep track of how much of that is federal money, a spokesman for the organization said.

However, The Chronicle estimates that Catholic Charities affiliates nationwide may be receiving more than $1-billion annually in federal money. An informal survey of a dozen of the largest Catholic Charities affiliates shows that an average of one-third of their government money comes from Washington. Applying that ratio to the $1.5-billion in all government funds that Catholic Charities’ 169 affiliates receive nationwide suggests that at least $500-million in federal funds flows directly to Catholic Charities. When federal dollars that pass first through state and local governments are counted, the total amount of federal funds received by Catholic Charities is between $750-million and $1.2-billion, according to The Chronicle’s analysis.

A Fight Over Funds

Volunteers of America, a nondenominational charity that emphasizes spiritual counseling in conjunction with all of its services, received $178-million in federal funds. The organization offers a wide range of programs for troubled and abused children, the elderly, the homeless, and others in need of social services.

Other faith-based groups, including Jewish federations, charities affiliated with Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian denominations, and the Salvation Army, also receive hundreds of millions of dollars in government funds, records show.

Many religious leaders argue that unless the Bush administration significantly increases the amount of federal money for social services — something the president’s 2001 budget did not do — the faith-based plan will set religious groups in competition with one another for the same pot of money that exists now.

“It definitely would pit different churches against one another, because we’re not talking about increasing the funding, we’re talking about increasing the number of recipients,” says the Rev. Leonard Jackson, associate minister of the First African Methodist Episcopal Church, in Los Angeles.

Some Muslim leaders also express concern, partly because they feel that Islam, the faith of an estimated four million to six million Americans, has been excluded from the Bush administration’s discussions about the faith-based proposal.

“There’s this appearance that they were maybe looking at some political agenda, looking to people with large churches or large congregations,” said Khalid Samad, executive director of Peace in the Hood, a violence-prevention program in Cleveland, referring to the Bush administration and Congressional supporters of the faith-based idea. “We should be at the table discussing these issues with the policymakers, not sitting on the sidelines until the policies have been established.”

The White House Office on Faith-Based and Community Initiatives did not respond to requests for response or for details on the proposal.

While minority religious leaders question whether substantially more money would be available to them under the Bush proposal, many nonetheless support the plan because they believe it enhances their chances of gaining access to money that in the past was out of their reach.

“More than anything else, brethren see an opportunity to expand their ministries, to reach more people, because of the possibility of more resources,” says the Rev. Herbert Lusk, pastor of the Greater Exodus Baptist Church, in Philadelphia. “The way the rules are now, it’s difficult for us to do that.”

Sharon Daly, vice president for social policy at Catholic Charities, says she does not believe that African American churches need new legislation to gain access to federal funds. They have not been very successful at that in the past, she says, because they have not created separate units to oversee the funds, as the federal government requires.

“Individual Catholic parishes have been doing this work for years, too, and not getting funded by the government,” she says. What is different about Catholic Charities, Lutheran Services, and other big faith-based organizations “is they have a regional structure that the black churches up to now have not adopted,” she says. Black churches “have really been fiercely independent, and that has handicapped them in terms of seeking government money.”

Views of Black Churches

Whether Ms. Daly’s analysis is correct, some black churches clearly do not support the notion of receiving federal money. Many fear that accepting it would leave them open to government intrusion into their religious practices, according to the Rev. R. Drew Smith, scholar-in-residence at the Leadership Center at Morehouse College, in Atlanta. A survey released in April by Morehouse found that only 21 percent of black church leaders polled said they strongly agreed with President Bush’s faith-based proposals, while 39 percent said they strongly disagreed.

Among churches that back the plan, however, enthusiasm runs high, Mr. Smith says. “African American churches have been at the forefront of providing quite a long list of social-service activities within the African American community for many, many years,” he says. “They have historically done that based upon their own resources. It certainly is appealing to many churches to be able to draw on a larger pool of resources for carrying out the work they have always done.”

Still, some black clergy members who support the Bush faith-based plan say that they are looking chiefly to other aspects of the administration’s policies for future financial support.

Bishop Harold C. Ray, senior pastor of Redemptive Life Fellowship, in West Palm Beach, Fla., believes that the administration’s goal of overhauling the income-tax system will lead to new incentives for individuals and corporations to donate money to charities, and it is those kinds of donations that he is counting on to help his church provide social services.

“The private and individual sector is the part that I am looking at more than the government part,” says Mr. Ray, who also is CEO of the National Center for Faith Based Initiative, a group he founded in the early 1990’s. “I don’t think the church should be co-opted to do what government should do, nor do I think the church should look to the government to be the source for what we need to do for ourselves in our communities or as individuals.”

Averting a ‘Colossal Failure’

No matter how the Bush administration’s faith-based proposal eventually takes shape, many clergy members say it must include money to help religious groups gain the expertise necessary to handle government grants.

The Rev. Floyd H. Flake, senior pastor of the Allen African Methodist Episcopal Church, in New York, and a former Democratic congressman, said the Bush plan will be a “colossal failure” unless faith-based groups set up separate charitable organizations to handle government grants. “That builds the firewall that keeps them from co-mingling the resources” with their religious activities, he says. Mr. Flake says the federal government should help churches pay the legal and administrative expenses associated with setting up such entities.

He also says the Bush plan will fail unless the government establishes a clearly defined system to evaluate the ability of individual faith-based groups to handle federal grants. It would be a mistake, he says, if the government winds up “just opening the door and saying, because you’re faith-based, you qualify.”

David Coleman, president of the Atlanta Union Mission, has yet another concern: that religious groups that accept federal money will come to rely too much on it, and allow other parts of their fund-raising activities to atrophy.

“What I’m afraid will happen in some of these organizations is that they will suddenly drop all of their local support base, and like a magnet run to the federal government for funding that will last for only two or three years,” he says.

“Government programs are timed,” Mr. Coleman says. “It is not an indefinite pool of resources.”