Despite potentially monumental Mideast peace talks and increasing Jew-on-Jew violence in Israel, the predominant subject of conversation in Jewish communities for the past several weeks has centered on the National Conference of Synagogue Youth, the youth group run by the Orthodox Union, the central communal organization of Orthodox Judaism.
A spate of investigative articles, which first appeared late last month in New Yorks the Jewish Week, yielded accusations that Rabbi Baruch Lanner, a Jewish educator and NCSY official, had physically, sexually and emotionally abused kids in the group over the past three decades. The stories included the explosive news that the NCSY received numerous complaints about the rabbi throughout his tenure, but did little to investigate the accusations or control Lanner’s behavior, let alone take action to bar him from working with children.
As soon as the first article appeared, the Orthodox Union demanded Lanner’s resignation from the NCSY and appointed a panel of well-known Jewish figures to investigate the organization. Meanwhile, the Orthodox community, its leaders and laypersons were left to wonder how the NCSY could have looked the other way for three decades as Lanner supposedly kneed boys in the groin and kissed and fondled girls, to mention only some of the specific accusations. Lanner’s behavior may well be impossible to understand, but a compelling question remains to be answered by those around him: How could so many people have looked the other way while such improprieties were repeatedly committed?
There is, of course, plenty of blame to go around and many contributing factors to explain the seemingly inexplicable. But part of the answer, I believe, lies in the way the NCSY viewed its mission, and in Lanner’s unquestionable success at that mission.
The NCSY is focused on the concept of kiruv, or bringing unaffiliated Jews to a life of strong Jewish observance. When an organization pursues such transcendent goals, it becomes frighteningly easy to judge its missionaries (for that’s what Lanner essentially was, a missionary) purely by the success of their mission, and to dismiss all who speak or act against the missionary (Lanner’s accusers, and now the Jewish Week for its report) as enemies of the mission or its goal.
The NCSY has never tried to hide its mission. Its Web site explains, “NCSY is a leader in bringing unaffiliated youth an awareness of what Judaism is all about,” and claims that the group “is at the forefront of the battle against assimilation.” NCSY does not hope to just hold onto Orthodox youth and ensure their continued Jewish observance; it has, quite effectively, reached out to non-Orthodox and unaffiliated Jewish youth and led them to stricter observance of (Orthodox) Jewish law and custom. Essentially, the NCSY is a type of proselytizing organization, despite the fact that its target audience is Jewish.
Lanner was a star of the NCSY, a rabbi so successful in his mission that, even as an increasing number of Orthodox leaders have denounced him in the wake of the accusations, many have continued in their vocal support. One rabbi called Lanner’s removal from an NCSY summer program — a prelude to his ultimate dismissal — “a devastating loss” for Jewish youth. Letters to the editor printed in the Jewish Week have blasted the newspaper for supposedly endangering the NCSY’s kiruv potential, and lamented the fact that many unaffiliated Jews will likely be turned off to the NCSY and the Orthodoxy it advocates because of this news.
I attended several NCSY functions in grade school, and for a brief time was influenced by them. I was a non-Orthodox student at an Orthodox Jewish school and was forever struggling with religion and degrees of observance, having been exposed to Orthodoxy at school and Conservative Judaism at home. I was gradually moving toward stricter Jewish observance, and so the prodding of the NCSY made an impression, encouraging me to try harder to live the lifestyle it advocated.
In the end, despite my growing observance, I soured on the organization, put off by the way it went about accomplishing its goals. I was most uncomfortable with the NCSY ritual of reciting “success stories.”
At a typical NCSY Shabbaton (weekend retreat), the Havdala (a ceremony ending Shabbat) always loomed large. A short celebration involving a multiwicked candle, wine and a spice box, Havdala is usually a quick affair. But at NCSY events, leaders would pass around the candle, asking kids to say something meaningful when the candle was passed to them. The kids’ stories generally involved nonobservant youth who became observant, thanks to the NCSY. And inevitably, those teens and preteens would elaborate on the sacrifices they made for their faith: enduring hostility from their parents; refusing to eat at their parents’ not-kosher-enough home; refusing to spend weekends at their non-Shabbat-observant home.
As disturbing as these narratives might have seemed (they certainly bothered me), the NCSY encouraged them. The organization openly disregarded parental concerns and prided itself on the courage of children who could make a complete lifestyle change overnight — the consequences be damned.
This situation creates an implicit paradigm in which kids see the NCSY and religion in opposition to their parents. They learn to believe that their new lifestyle has the authority of God’s word and 2,000 years of tradition, while their parents are enemy forces seeking to stymie their progress toward the Right Lifestyle. Under these circumstances, it is easy to see how even in cases of abuse, vulnerable children might choose to follow a charismatic religious leader and keep their parents in the dark about their lives — even if their lives were plagued by abuse.
I am more observant now than ever before, but it is only now that I realize the unhealthiness of such a situation, the importance of gradual change, the ethical necessity of parental involvement and familial discussion during a time of turbulence and transition in the lives of vulnerable youngsters.
The NCSY’s focus on kiruv may not have caused or influenced Lanner’s behavior, nor is kiruv — or proselytization in general — an inherently misguided action. But the NCSY’s attitude when it comes to kiruv and its sheltering of Lanner are rooted in similar, misguided values. When kiruv is king, problems often follow close behind.
It is clear from the stories in the Jewish Week that Lanner was a star at what he did. He was a hugely successful, charismatic and beloved leader who brought countless Jewish youngsters to Jewish Orthodoxy. For an organization that aims to win souls, such a leader is indispensable, and so it becomes easy to personalize that leader and ignore — or depersonalize — his accusers.
When the goal is recruitment to a “higher plane” of existence, every person you encounter can be viewed as a means to an end, as a soul to be saved, rather than an autonomous human being who has unique needs, who is immersed in a family and community of his or her own — a person who, by virtue of his or her age and aspirations, is tremendously vulnerable.
It is easy, in pursuit of this goal, to ignore or fight off anything that can be destructive or distracting — whether that be parental objections or abuse by a youth leader. Rabbi Yosef Blau, a highly regarded leader at the (Orthodox) Yeshiva University seminary who has become one of Lanner’s most vocal critics, told the Associated Press, “I think that they [Orthodox Union officials] were so enamored with his success and accomplishments that they didn’t want to hear problems.”
Many Orthodox Jews and many individual NCSY leaders have succeeded in their mission of kiruv, and they have done so while understanding each individual’s unique needs, problems and situations. But NCSY failed to see its non-Orthodox members as more than means to an end, as Jewish people who are all observant and dedicated to tradition at different levels and intensities. Success for an endeavor like kiruv relies on personal, psychologically deep connections between the missionary and the flock; religious leaders who build such relations have a grave responsibility, especially when they are working with children.
The NCSY, with good intentions perhaps, condoned family schism. In the case of Lanner, the organization also practiced wanton disrespect for its youthful targets, ignoring their reports of abusive and potentially criminal behavior by a leader who was hugely successful and widely loved, a man whose victories at proselytization spoke much louder than his improprieties.
As a Jew concerned about the future of our religion, I think it is vital that we (and our communal organizations) remember that every human being is created in the image of God. We must be as concerned about each individual human being as we are about the future of Judaism, and humanity, as a whole.
After months of trying unsuccessfully to have a child, Michelle Koh (not her real name) kept returning in her mind to the abortion she had had years before. Koh decided the reason she was unable to conceive was not physical but spiritual: God was punishing her for having had an abortion.
Thus for Koh, the only solution to infertility was penitence: “I would pray at night and cry at night, ‘I’m so sorry for what I’ve done; please don’t punish me.’”
In the two years since, Koh has come to a different understanding of God’s role in her infertility. “I’ve realized God doesn’t punish people,” she says now. But Koh’s two interconnected struggles — with infertility and with God — are representative of the issues faced by many other deeply religious people for whom the physical reality of infertility often precipitates a spiritual crisis as well.
Certainly infertility presents a crisis to any couple who wishes — and expects — to have children. But infertile couples who are committed to an orthodox religious ideology and who are part of a tightknit religious community may find that their faith presents additional problems in their quest for a pregnancy. They often face added pressure to have children, based on church doctrine. They may also have to grapple with rules that can inhibit certain fertility practices: Roman Catholics have prohibitions against in vitro fertilization; Jews have prohibitions against masturbation, which may be necessary for certain procedures.
Some may find solace in God and community, but for many, like Koh, God is seen as just another barrier standing in the way of a woman and her coveted pregnancy.
“The very religious patients or the ones brought up in the most religious homes have the hardest time with infertility,” says Alice Domar, director of the Mind/Body Center for Women’s Health at Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital. “Women who truly believe they are being punished for their sins, who believe in a punitive God, will be the worst off.”
Domar and Barbara Nielsen, an Episcopal priest and a fellow at the center, are launching a study to document the correlation between a couple’s religious commitment and their level of depression over infertility. Working with a Boston in vitro fertilization clinic, they will survey several hundred infertile women.
But they already have a strong hunch about what they will prove. Domar estimates that more than half of the hundreds of infertile patients she has counseled over the years said that their infertility evoked negative thoughts about God — a situation Domar says she felt “completely unprepared to deal with.”
Nielsen already has conducted a preliminary study, interviewing 12 infertile women. The results backed up the pair’s hypothesis that deep religious faith exacerbates depression in infertile couples. She found that infertility made these patients question virtually everything they had previously believed — making it the worst spiritual crisis of their lives.
“They feel as if they’d been robbed of their birthright,” Nielsen says. And being part of a large religious community often failed to help: Religious women often face implicit and explicit expectations — embodied in community standards and biblical commands — that they will have large families. Community members’ well-intentioned but ultimately insensitive comments to married couples — “When are we going to hear some good news?” — make the situation even worse.
The additional pressures imposed on infertile women by a religious community can be seen in a fact sheet on religion and infertility produced by Resolve, a national infertility organization, in which women of various backgrounds discussed their experiences. Women who were members of orthodox religious groups reported that their faith contributed to their sense that they were less of a person as a result of their infertility.
“Once I requested prayer from a women’s prayer group and was promptly told by these women that maybe it was not God’s will for me to have a child,” wrote a fundamentalist Christian woman.
“The concept of marriage in Orthodox Judaism cannot be separated from the concept of family,” wrote a Jewish woman. “A marriage without children is not considered a fulfilled marriage and as such is grounds for divorce. To ‘be fruitful and multiply’ is one of the first commandments found in the Old Testament.” And from a Mormon woman: “What a paradox that some of the very things which make me most proud of our religion are also such stumbling blocks for me. Our prophets tell us that ‘no other success can compensate for failure in the home.’ Children are desired above wealth, position, degrees or power.”
There are, of course, exceptions to the rule, people for whom religion works as it should — as a comfort and a strength in a time of need. One such person happens to be the rabbi of a synagogue in the Boston area.
“For me, it [infertility] enhanced my sense of God’s power, the idea that human beings are not in control,” said the rabbi, who asked that his name not be used. “It was a source of strength, rather than an object of anger.”
The rabbi said, however, that his experience with infertility helped him to understand how other infertile people could experience a harsh reaction against God and religion. And despite his philosophic approach to the problem, he found it excruciating to officiate at bar mitzvahs, circumcisions and baby namings in his capacity as rabbi — events that are virtually unavoidable for any active member of the Jewish community, rabbi or not. (Indeed, many of the rituals within any religious community are centered around birth and child rearing.)
The rabbi, now the father of a 1-year-old girl conceived with the help of technology, speaks out often about the responsibility of clergy and laypeople alike to embrace and offer solace to those who cannot give birth to children of their own. “The great mistake is that people assume one is entitled to have a child,” he said. “I’m not sure you ever come to peace with the idea. It’s about learning to live without a sense of control.”
Domar and Nielsen aim to return to their patients that sense of control. They help their patients come to an understanding of God that is more benevolent than the one they may have grown up with — even going so far as to directly challenge, if necessary, their patients’ belief in a punitive God.
Koh was a beneficiary of Nielsen’s spiritual help, which has brought her to speak about God in entirely different terms from those she employed before.
“He is a supreme being, all knowing, there as a comfort and a support. I don’t think he doles out punishment — or miracles, for that matter,” Koh explains.
In other words, the continuing struggle to have a child is between Koh, her husband and her doctors, with God left to the role of cheerleader and comforter. Koh’s new vision of God is a far cry from the angry divinity she once believed was punishing her for her youthful abortion.
But Koh is, in many ways, in a lucky spiritual category. Although her mother was a practicing fundamentalist, Koh herself belongs to the category of the “moderately religious” — people who consider God to be an active presence in their lives and to whom prayer is important, but who do not subscribe to an orthodox theology or belong to a sheltered religious community.
Moderately religious people, according to Domar, seem to be in the best position: They can find the necessary comfort from God and religion when they cannot give birth, but they do not take biblical commands to reproduce and communal expectations of large families as direct prescriptions for how their own lives should be lived.
Some orthodox women may find it impossible to surrender their notion of a personal God who is often judgmental. Religious communities, however, are beginning to take note of their failures toward infertile couples and are working to correct their mistakes.
In the Boston suburb of Brookline, Kahal Hannah, a monthly support group, reaches into Jewish tradition to find comfort for its members’ infertility. The group takes its name from Hannah, the biblical heroine whose prayer for an end to her infertility ranks among the most touching pieces of biblical poetry (she later gave birth to a baby who would become the prophet Samuel).
The Christian group Hannah’s Prayer Ministries, based in Auburn, Calif., offers support to Christians coping with infertility. The organization was founded by Jennifer Saake, who says that her seven-year battle with infertility brought her to the brink of suicide; she is now seven months pregnant.
Hannah’s Prayer aims to help infertile couples come to terms with whatever choice they make: high-tech fertility measures, adoption or childlessness. With such strong religious and communal pressure to have children, many religious people fail to understand their alternatives and continue to believe they have failed spiritually if they do not conceive children of their own in the traditional manner.
“We live in a messed-up world,” Saake says. “Yes, God can prevent this, and sometimes he chooses not to and we don’t understand his reasons.”
Like Nielsen, she counsels people to take God to task for their plight — without losing their faith. “Yell at him. Get it all out,” Saake advises.
Walking to synagogue on the High Holidays in my grandparents’ Brooklyn neighborhood as a child, it seemed strange to me that the business of the world continued swirling, even as my family put its regular schedules on hold. As we went to synagogue and lingered over long family meals, the postal workers still delivered mail, the superette still received its deliveries and the Post headlines still screamed the latest Mets victory.
Yet not everything was the same. The noise of weekday city life was enhanced by the sounds of children playing outside because public schools, like my Jewish parochial school, canceled classes for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.
And that, to me, was thrilling.
I felt the same thrill whenever I read the president’s annual High Holiday greetings in the Jewish newspaper or heard the traffic reporters on WINS radio mangle the transliterated names of Jewish festivals when explaining why alternate-side parking rules were suspended. To this young Jew, it meant we had made it.
I never felt the sting of anti-Semitism or the slightest alienation from American life and, like my friends, I was able to proudly rattle off a list of American-Jewish heroes, from Albert Einstein to Sandy Koufax. Yet, there also was no mistaking that we were, when all was said and done, a religious minority group in America, which was to me a Christian country despite the First Amendment.
Public-school closings, like parking rule suspensions and presidential proclamations, were a sign of Jewish strength and importance, a signal that we were important enough to the fabric of our civic society to warrant special arrangements for our holiest of days. So it is no surprise to me that Muslim and Hindu parents in Ohio are going to court to seek the same special arrangements for their children. The American Civil Liberties Union is suing the Sycamore school district in Blue Ash, claiming that its decision to close for Jewish holidays unfairly favors that religion. The suit seeks to have all religions treated equally in the district.
Considering the dramatic changes in America’s religious makeup, it makes sense that a growing number of Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and Sikh schoolchildren are experiencing the opposite emotions from my childhood thrills. They are forced to choose on their holy days between school or religious observance. And their parents resent it.
“I see Sycamore as the future,” says Gino Scarselli, associate legal director of the ACLU of Ohio, which filed the federal lawsuit late last month.
Only in the course of the last century did our Protestant nation finally acknowledge the Catholics in its midst and then integrate Jews into its consciousness. And now the old Judeo-Christian paradigm no longer fits. With the number of Muslims in America estimated to be around 6 million, they now surpass Jews as the largest religious group in the nation after Christians.
Adding to the religious mix are large numbers of Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs and others. These groups have established houses of worship, community centers and political organizations in communities across the nation.
As this demographic change accelerates, schools will increasingly face questions about much more than just holiday closings. Muslims, for example, are required to pray five times a day, attend services in a mosque Friday afternoons and fast from dawn to dusk during the month of Ramadan. Schools must figure out how to accommodate these needs or justify their decisions not to.
The court-approved justification for closing school on religious holidays is that it is nearly impossible to teach on days of widespread absenteeism. But few, if any, districts have enough Muslim or Hindu students to justify closing on those grounds. New immigrants are not as concentrated in certain cities as Jews and Catholics once were, and even when a specific urban school has a large percentage of Muslims, the district as a whole may not have enough to justify closing.
And besides, closing schools, regardless of the legal justification, is about more than empty desks, as I learned as a child. Closing schools is inevitably taken as a sign of communal priorities, values and self-identification. “It is recognition of religious diversity and a sign of respect for people’s faith to acknowledge a religion’s seminal day of the year or a religious holiday by closing schools,” says Shirin Sinnar of the American Muslim Council.
If you doubt that school closings convey a larger cultural message, try holding classes on holidays for which schools previously closed. According to Marc Stern, a lawyer with the American Jewish Congress, when a New Jersey school district faced with waning numbers of Jewish students reinstated classes on Yom Kippur, it raised a ruckus from the remaining Jews. For them, as it was for me as a child, “These closings had become proof that they were significant in the school district,” Stern says.
The irony of closing schools for religious holidays because of absenteeism is that, while it may satisfy the court’s test of church-state separation, it also sends the inevitable message that our public schools favor Christians and Jews — exactly what the First Amendment seeks to avoid.
In the case of Sycamore — a diverse, upper-middle-class district of 6,000 students — officials decided in 1995 to close school on religious holidays if absenteeism increased 18 percent above the average 3.5 percent rate. Good Friday was not considered because it is already written into the teachers’ contract as a day off. Absentee rates on Muslim and Hindu holidays were just 2 to 3 percent above normal.
Absenteeism for Jewish holidays was about 15 percent above the norm — short of the 18-percent criterion — but the district decided to shut down schools on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur anyway because “they were not quality days,” according to Superintendent Bruce Armstrong. “I just want to make sure we are using tax dollars with the best possible result,” Armstrong says. To the ACLU, though, the district’s failure to stick to its own cutoff is proof that its “true motivation” was the “desire to favor Judaism over other faiths,” according to the lawsuit.
But what is a pluralistic school district to do? Shutting down for all religious holidays is hardly a solution because it would lead to schools being closed virtually every day to honor the religious leanings of every student. Closing for no religious holiday would satisfy very few and would leave the problem of empty classrooms on days like Good Friday. Marci Hamilton, a church-state expert at Cordozo Law School, argues that an even higher standard of absenteeism, such as 50 percent, is the only viable solution. But that still would leave schools closed in most districts only for Christian holidays.
Fortunately, for those seeking a less stringent test of church-state separation, a federal appeals court last month ruled that a Maryland school district may close for Good Friday and even the Monday after Easter. The decision re-affirmed previous rulings that established a three-pronged test for school closings: They must have a “plausible” secular — though not necessarily entirely secular — purpose, which can be satisfied by something such as the desire to give a day off “on a convenient and low traffic day”; they must not advance one faith over another (satisfied, in this case, by closing on Good Friday for everyone, not just Christian students); and they must not represent excessive entanglement between church and state.
This solution doesn’t necessarily work for Muslims or others. Are there any other options?
One possibility is to schedule a single day off per year for each religion whose numbers in the district’s schools surpass a cutoff that is significant but not huge, such as when absentee rates double for their holidays. The secular justification would be that instances of higher-than-usual absences reduce the quality of education and force teachers to repeat material for the absentees.
As I listen this afternoon, as I do every Friday, to the call to prayer coming from the mosque in my neighborhood, I look back and know that had I been a public-school student, I certainly would not have been scarred if New York schools had remained open for Jewish holidays. I never felt like my opportunities were diminished or my religion disrespected by American society. The generations of my grandparents and great grandparents forged the way for me to be fully American and fully Jewish at the same time.
But most of today’s Muslims are just starting out in this country and their struggle will be more difficult as they attempt to integrate into a society unfamiliar with, and often hostile to, their traditions and observances. Our schools have an opportunity to show Muslims — as well as Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs and many others — that America truly is a land for all people, regardless of their faith. And someday, perhaps, their children will walk to mosque on Eid, marveling at the sight of their schoolmates playing on their day off while the Post hits the stands as always, screaming the latest victory of the Mets.
Cleveland’s City Mission, located in the rough-and-tumble East Side neighborhood, offers a powerhouse of social services for the city’s poor. City Mission spends more than $3 million each year on programs ranging from housing to job training to drug and alcohol rehabilitation services.
With goals that mirror the welfare-to-work ethos of today’s politics, City Mission bears a remarkable resemblance to the faith-based organizations (FBO) Al Gore and George W. Bush are touting on the campaign trail. But it’s not likely to come in for big government funding no matter who becomes president, because Christian evangelism comprises the core of City Mission’s social service programs — and the law still prohibits proselytizing at taxpayers’ expense.
“We believe God wants us to help the whole person — it’s not just soup, soap and salvation,” said the Rev. Robert Sandham, City Mission’s assistant director.
As they make their way through City Mission’s programs, participants are required to attend daily worship, Bible studies, one-on-one counseling and peer spiritual discussions. If they are unwilling to participate, they will not be accepted into the program.
“Really, the church is the goal,” Sandham said. “We want them to have a relationship with God, so they’re not dependent on us, but dependent on God, as all of us are. We’re real up front with people about that. No one is forced to come here and no one is forced to enter the programs.”
Al Gore and George W. Bush both say they plan to help faith-based social service organizations take center stage in providing support to the needy.
FBOs are a safe, poll-tested issue for both candidates. A recent national poll found that three-quarters of Americans are in favor of providing taxpayer money to private organizations that tackle social problems, including religious organizations.
Barring passage of a Constitutional amendment, however, Bush and Gore may be making promises they’ll be forced to break.
The great quandary of the current debate on the relationship between FBOs and government is that the Constitution prevents the government from using taxpayer money to fund FBOs that explicitly link personal faith with government-sponsored social programs. But a recent study of American churches showed that less than half supported compartmentalizing evangelism and social services in order to qualify for public funds.
The issue also pervades Bush’s campaign Web site: “In every instance where my administration sees a responsibility to help people, we will look first to faith-based organizations, charities and community groups that have shown their ability to save and change lives.”
Bush’s spokesman, Dan Bartlett, was more aware of the quandary but insisted that both the FBOs’ religious missions and the constitutional separation of church and state could co-exist legally. Bush has said that, if elected, he would institute a program with $8 billion in tax incentives and grants to expand the role of FBOs. The program would include a White House FBO-outreach office to cut government red tape and help organizations smooth out barriers to church-state cooperation.
Bush and Gore assert that any religiously oriented program will be voluntary, with secular alternatives available, allowing those FBOs to preserve their religious missions.
FBOs that, for whatever
reason, do not mix evangelism and social service may still be more effective than their government counterparts simply because they possess a determination to succeed.
“We feed and house and clothe and take care of people without trying to make people Catholic. We help people because we’re Catholic,” said Sharon Daly, vice president for social services of Catholic Charities. Still, Daly worries that her organization and other similar groups may be used as excuses for the government to abdicate virtually all responsibility for the poor and for all kinds of social problems. Daly also criticized the tone of politicians who imply that FBOs, unlike governmental welfare programs, would be able to make people “behave.”
The impact of Charitable Choice is difficult to measure since, as Greenberg and other observers have noted, very few FBOs have received any new funding due to it. There hasn’t been a rush among churches to seek out funds under Charitable Choice, either, since most FBOs either were already receiving public money or were unwilling to make the compromises required for government funding.
According to last year’s National Congregations Study, conducted for the Lilly Endowment, only 3 percent of congregations nationwide receive public funding for social-service programs, and less than one-quarter of clergy members were even aware of Charitable Choice.
The study, which surveyed 1,236 congregations, also suggested that no amount of legal tinkering will entice evangelical and other conservative congregations to join in a fiscal relationship with the government. Only 24 percent of congregations that describe themselves as theologically and politically conservative said they would be interested in applying for public funding under any circumstances — compared with 47 percent of all other congregations.
Although conservative politicians like Ashcroft have been among the loudest champions of Charitable Choice, Mark Chaves, the University of Arizona sociologist who conducted the survey, said that the results of the survey are in line with the “longstanding divide in American religion,” in which liberal congregations tend to engage the secular world while conservative congregations withdraw from it.
The study, therefore, suggests that even if the government was willing to write a blank check to any FBO regardless of its religious activities — which is not on the table — many still would refuse the money because of their historic wariness of the government.
The best place to gauge the potential of Charitable Choice is in Texas, where Gov. Bush has pushed for widespread implementation. One example is the “Coaching for Success” program run state-wide by Lutheran Social Services of the South (LSSS) in conjunction with the state Department of Human Services. The program matches female volunteers from local congregations with former welfare mothers. The volunteers work with the mothers as mentors, helping them with issues ranging from health and education to day-to-day living.
If the mothers wish, the volunteers will add a spiritual component, praying with them or introducing them to a church community. LSSS will partner women with volunteers from whatever religious tradition they need. While no non-Christians have requested spiritual help from the program, LSSS president Kurt Senske said that Jewish clients in other LSSS programs have requested and received spiritual guidance in their own religion.
“This could not have happened without Charitable Choice,” said Senske.
But the LSSS paradigm also exhibits the murkiness of the law and where the line is drawn between offering access to spirituality and blatant proselytizing. That murkiness has drawn fire from Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, which supported the pre-Charitable Choice standard for FBO funding. With Charitable Choice, enforcement is a problem, according to spokesman Robert Boston, who dismisses the no-proselytizing rule as “mere verbiage.”
The flexibility of programs like LSSS are impossible for Cleveland’s City Mission or other evangelical groups, for which social services and Christian ministry are inextricably linked.
At best, Charitable Choice seems poised to make it easier and more acceptable for churches, synagogues, mosques and other FBOs large and small to compete for government funds. Historically, perceived hostility or the difficulty of separating social services from religious activities and symbols kept many FBOs from applying for public funding.
Candidates who hope to invoke the power of FBOs, bask in the cheers, and then move on must step back at some point and consider the complexity of this issue. In the end, the much-heralded transforming nature of religion may for the most part have to remain outside the realm of governmental funding, even if it is an effective route out of chronic poverty, crime and addiction.
