As someone who has run faith-based social service agencies, I agree with those who stress the separation between church and state. In fact, when I ran the Goose Hollow Family Shelter we took no government funding and relied on volunteers and community contributions. Faith-based agencies that receive public funding should be required to meet the same guidelines and standards as any other non-profit that takes government money. A new report agrees with the assessment:
The Charitable Choice Research Project, funded by the Ford Foundation, sheds new light on the effectiveness and constitutionality of hotly debated faith-based initiatives strongly supported by President Bush.After three years of study, project researchers have found evidence that is contrary to some long-held assumptions about faith-based initiatives, including the belief that faith-based organizations produce better results in providing social services than their secular counterparts.
"We found that states did not monitor constitutional violations and did little to educate contractors about constitutional compliance," said Sheila Suess Kennedy, the Charitable Choice Research Project principal investigator and professor of law and public policy at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. "We also found that congregational leaders had little familiarity with applicable constitutional constraints."
In other research, the Charitable Choice Research Project found that faith-based organizations operating job training programs placed 31 percent of their clients in full-time employment, compared with secular organizations that placed 53 percent of their clients. Less than 1 percent of the clients of faith-based organizations found jobs with health or other benefits, compared with 9 percent of secular organization clients.
Communities of faith should do more to help people. But they ought to play by the same rules as everyone else.
