Leap From Faith

Charity thrives on zealous pursuit of church-state separation

Members of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, a charity that advocates

the strict separation of church and state, go by a variety of labels: atheists, agnostics, nonbelievers, skeptics, freethinkers.

But Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the organization in Madison, Wis., proudly calls them all the same thing: “A faithful group of the faithless.”

And that brand of faith is on the rise, she says.

Since 2004, membership in the nearly 30-year-old group has doubled to more than 10,000 people, and Freedom From Religion has raised more than $500,000 in each of the last two years — tens of thousands more than usual, and over and above the money it brings in from dues, which are $40 for individuals and $50 for households. Most of the donations come in small sums from individuals, although the organization does receive some large gifts and bequests.

Much of the group’s mounting fortunes are tied to its dogged battles against the Bush administration’s faith-based initiative, the White House’s effort to steer more government aid to religious groups that provide social services.

But even as its ranks grow, Freedom From Religion attracts fierce criticism from those who disapprove of its strong stance on the church-state divide, and its anti-religion bias.

‘Full Steam Ahead’

Five years ago, Freedom From Religion won its first court challenge of a grant made to a religious group, when a federal district-court judge ruled that giving government money to a Milwaukee organization that stirs religion into its alcohol- and drug-treatment programs was unconstitutional.

Now, another lawsuit pursued by Freedom From Religion, this one more broadly challenging the White House office that aids religious groups, has landed in the Supreme Court.

In just two weeks that coincided with the time the Supreme Court heard arguments in the case in February, and news-media coverage of the suit was at its busiest, 800 people became members of Freedom From Religion. To take advantage of such interest, the group is delaying its spring fund-raising appeal until after the court’s ruling — expected soon — so it can announce the decision and explain its impact to supporters.

“Win, lose, or something in between, we’ll have a story to tell,” Ms. Gaylor says. “Our strategy may shift depending on the decision, but we will be full steam ahead with our challenges [of the faith-based initiative] no matter what.”

Indeed, even as Freedom From Religion waits for word from the Supreme Court, it has sued an Indiana state agency, arguing its new chaplaincy position is unconstitutional. The lawsuit is the organization’s 10th court challenge involving the faith-based initiative, and it has won on at least some matters in each case that has been completed so far.

In January, Freedom From Religion was handed an unfavorable ruling in its lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs alleging that the department’s health-care programs wrongly promote religion — but it appealed the decision the following month.

Drawing Doubters

Such determination has been winning Freedom From Religion a growing number of supporters, but it has drawn plenty of detractors, too.

Some critics say the organization goes overboard in its interpretation of the wall between church and state, and has unfairly sought to keep law-abiding social-service groups from getting the money they need to run valuable programs.

Other people knock the group for staking out a too-radical position on secularism, arguing that it has made a religion out of nonreligion. Along with promoting church-state separation, Freedom From Religion’s stated mission is to educate Americans about nontheism, a range of concepts that reject the idea of a deity.

Ms. Gaylor shrugs off the criticism and condemnation, acknowledging that her organization is on a crusade of its own, keeping its eye on the prize made clear in the group’s no-nonsense name: not just freedom of religion, but freedom from religion.

From time to time, the group publishes in its newspaper, Freethought Today, examples of some of the negative correspondence it receives — much of it filled with threats and foul language — under the heading “Sharing the Nut Mail.”

It is that kind of bold, plain talk that Freedom From Religion’s supporters say they admire, along with the group’s surprisingly playful spirit.

Donors can become not just life members with a donation of at least $1,000 but “afterlife” members if they give at least $5,000. Dollar bills printed before 1957, when the words “In God We Trust” were added to the currency, are given out as door prizes at fund-raising events, and the organization’s co-president, Dan Barker, who occupies a second-floor office at the organization, is referred to as “the man upstairs.”

Legal Victories

Freedom From Religion got its start at the dining-room table of Ms. Gaylor’s mother, Anne Nicol Gaylor, who identified religion as the cause of much of the opposition to her advocacy on women’s-rights issues, like abortion.

Among the group’s early victories in the 1970s were putting a stop to the 122-year practice of prayers at the University of Wisconsin at Madison’s commencement ceremonies and ending government support for a nativity pageant held annually in the state’s capitol.

Since then, through ambitious efforts to lodge formal complaints and pursue lawsuits, Freedom From Religion has achieved other victories around the country, like persuading municipalities to take down Ten Commandments monuments and crosses in public spaces and ending Bible instruction in public schools.

Lawyers have donated their services to the organization, but, for the most part, it pays regular legal fees out of a specially designated fund that now stands at about $750,000. Last year’s legal costs were $120,000.

In recent years, the organization has concentrated much of its legal efforts on contesting programs and grants related to President Bush’s faith-based initiatives. Its challenges have led to, among other actions, the revocation of a grant to a Christian mentorship program in Arizona and pushed the Department of Justice last year to cancel plans for a religion-based program to rehabilitate prisoners.

In 2004, Freedom From Religion sued the government not on a specific grant or program, but to protest the White House’s Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives itself. The lawsuit claims that the office, created by executive order in 2001, along with its satellite offices within federal agencies, violate the First Amendment provision that prohibits Congress from making laws “regarding an establishment of religion.”

The suit says the government sponsors conferences and supervises federal spending that send the message that “religion is favored, preferred, and promoted over other beliefs and nonbelief.”

A federal district court ruled that the group did not have the legal right to sue. That decision was reversed by an appeals court, leading the government to ask the Supreme Court to hear the case.

The case before the Supreme Court hinges not on the substance of the lawsuit, but on a technical issue of whether taxpayers can sue the White House for using federal money to pay for programs that the taxpayers believe impermissibly promote religion. Still, scholars and other experts say the court’s decision will probably have a broader impact on the complicated and intensely political issue of church-state separation.

‘Willing, Able, and Eager’

Freedom From Religion is not the only organization quarreling in court over the government’s financing of religious organizations. Other groups, like Americans United for Separation of Church and State, have sued the government, too, but Freedom From Religion’s determined course has made it a leader among the opposition.

“The Freedom From Religion Foundation has been by far the most persistent litigating entity willing, able, and eager to tackle the faith-based initiative,” says Ira C. Lupu, a George Washington University law professor who is the co-director of legal research for the State University of New York’s Roundtable on Religion and Social Welfare Policy. “They’ve been a real thorn in the side of the government, and they have helped to shape the law regarding publicly financed social services.”

Mr. Lupu says that the lawsuits Freedom From Religion has pursued and the issues the cases have raised have led, in some instances, government agencies or nonprofit groups to more carefully consider their positions.

“Agencies looking at religious groups for grants might think twice about the religious activities involved, and religious groups might seek to change their ways before they apply for grants,” he says.

Picking Fights

But not everyone agrees that Freedom From Religion’s watchdog role has been a useful one.

Jay F. Hein, director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, says his office is vigilant about keeping religion separate from the delivery of social services, and that it preaches that vigilance to the government agencies, grant makers, and charities it works with.

Freedom From Religion’s challenges, he says, are frivolous and disruptive.

“I don’t see any value added,” Mr. Hein says. “I have never seen any communication from the Freedom From Religion Foundation that provides analysis or any helpful construct to administer human services in our communities.”

Mr. Hein and other critics say that Freedom From Religion and other organizations contesting grants to religious organizations are unduly picking fights and then leaving a void.

When a federal court directed the Department of Health and Human Services to revoke a grant it made to MentorKids USA, in Scottsdale, Ariz., in response to a Freedom From Religion lawsuit, as many as 70 kids lost the chance to be matched with adult volunteers.

“We made our program less Christian to fit in with the guidelines, but one judge didn’t feel we did that well enough,” says Keith Staser, executive director of MentorKids, which focuses on children whose parents are in jail.

After the 2005 decision, the organization ended up with only $80,000 of a promised three-year, $225,000 grant.

“I don’t have any animosity toward” Freedom From Religion, says Mr. Staser, “but you do have to ask: What are they doing to affect the lives of kids in a positive direction?”

Kevin J. Hasson, founder and chairman of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a Washington advocacy group, says he believes Freedom From Religion has been overzealous in its litigation and extreme in its position on religion in general.

“They are on the radical fringe of the secular movement,” he says, adding that the group has pushed the church-state debate into unreasonable territory.

Public Opinion

Wherever Freedom From Religion may fall on the continuum of the secular movement, however, the organization does appear to be benefiting from a growing openness among Americans toward secularism.

Surveys show that the ranks of people who identify themselves as nonreligious or nonbelievers have been slowly climbing over the last decade. At the same time, Americans have appeared increasingly willing to participate in discussions about key religious beliefs, such as intelligent design and even the existence of God.

Books like Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation have been national best sellers, and liberal alarm about the centrality of religious beliefs to the Bush administration’s positions on such issues as stem-cell research seems to be at a high.

“Nonreligious people are much more vocal now,” says John C. Green, a senior fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, in Washington. “Much of that has to do with the perception that religious traditionalists are strong politically. Nonbelievers of one kind or another have always been around. There are just more of them now, and they are more visible.”

Freedom From Religion has been working to make itself more visible, too. Last year it embarked on its biggest-ever national marketing campaign, which includes advertisements in left-leaning magazines and on Air America, a liberal talk-radio broadcaster.

One of the print ads inviting people to join the group features an image of the White House, accompanied by the query: “Should this be a faith-based office?”

The organization also last year started its own weekly radio program, Freethought Radio, hosted by Ms. Gaylor and Mr. Barker, who are married. The show, which bills itself as “slightly irreverent,” can be heard on a local Madison station or over the Internet.

Amid the talk-show format, the show features songs, with titles like “Beware of Dogma” and “Freethinker Blues,” written by Mr. Barker, a former evangelical preacher, who is a musician. His most recent piece, called “It’s Only Natural,” is a cross between a love song and a biology lesson on evolution.

Mr. Barker already has two songs about church-state separation in his repertoire, but he is considering writing another one geared toward kids. As for taking up in lyrical verse the more-specific topic of the Supreme Court case and the faith-based initiative, Mr. Barker is doubtful.

“What rhymes with ‘initiative,’” he asks in an e-mail message. “Propitiative …Novitiative…too clunky.”