A little history is in order. As a candidate, Obama pledged, “if you get a federal grant, you can’t use that grant money to proselytize to the people you help and you can’t discriminate against them — or against the people you hire — on the basis of their religion. Second, federal dollars that go directly to churches, temples, and mosques can only be used on secular programs.” Church-state separation advocates cheered; the center-right religious coalition Obama was assiduously courting objected mightily.

And yet, nearly four years after Obama’s campaign trail pledge to reform the faith-based office, beneficiaries of federally funded faith-based social services — people seeking drug treatment, mental health services, marriage counseling, pregnancy prevention services, prenatal care and more — have insufficient legal guarantees that their constitutional right to be free from government-funded, imposed religion will be protected. Today, your tax dollars can still fund, under a George W. Bush executive order, a religious organization that decides, for example, that it can fire the gay employee because its religion so dictates or that it will only hire people of the same faith. Its supporters call it “co-religionist hiring,” but that’s just a polite term for taxpayer-supported discrimination.

For three years the advocacy groups that make up the Coalition Against Religion Discrimination have prevailed on the administration to change this rule — after all, it would only take a stroke of the pen to undo the Bush executive order — and the president has done nothing. Obama has tried to claim the administration “has struck the right balance” by requiring a nebulous “case-by-case” review of instances of discrimination rather than prohibiting it altogether, an assertion the Rev. Welton Gaddy, president of the Interfaith Alliance (a CARD member) has called “misguided and untrue. There is no such thing as balance when it comes to discrimination supported by government funding.”

Instead of tasking administration lawyers to draft new regulations, shortly after taking office Obama appointed an Advisory Council of liberals and conservatives, which he dispatched to offer its own recommendations. Contentious issues, such as discriminatory hiring, were not part of its dossier. While the 2010 Advisory Council report addressed another contentious issue — whether religious organizations receiving federal grants should be required to form a separate nonprofit organization in order to segregate public and private funds — when Obama issued an executive order six months later, it was silent on that matter. Under the executive order, the Interagency Working Group, chaired by the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships and the Office of Management and Budget, was formed to draft uniform model regulations across the 15 federal agencies with faith-based offices. Because Obama left that crucial question out of his executive order, the Working Group, which included representatives from each of those 15 agencies, did not address it in its mishmash of model guidance and regulations.

By offering model “guidance” in some areas and model regulations in others, the Interagency Working Group’s report, church-state separation advocates say, actually weakens some of the recommendations of the Advisory Council in some areas.

“For a year and a half’s worth of work,” said Maggie Garrett, legislative director at Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, also a CARD member, “there’s nothing in there that says, ‘we’ve identified all the regulations that apply to faith-based social services. Here are all the regulations that actually conflict with the Obama executive order and what we need to do to conform.’

“Any time a difficult issue came up, or any time it seemed like there would be the slightest burden on faith-based groups in order to adhere to the Constitution, the issue was sort of dropped,” Garrett added. While the Advisory Council report said that beneficiaries must be given the option of an alternative provider, the model regulations in the Interagency Working Group report only require that the federally funded faith-based organization “undertake reasonable efforts to identify and refer the beneficiary to an alternative provider to which the prospective beneficiary has no objection.” That’s different, Garrett said, from saying, “You must have an alternative provider.” And what constitutes “reasonable” is left vague.

None of this, of course, is designed to accomplish anything before the election. Obama’s November 2010 executive order calls for another round of guidance from the Office of Management and Budget and the Department of Justice after the Working Group report. “It seems like we’re never going to get to rule-making,” said ACLU legislative counsel Dena Sher. “Meanwhile beneficiaries are left without important protections — the right to be referred to an alternative service provider, and improved rules on prohibited uses of federal funds that clarifies they don’t have to pray before receiving government-funded services.”

On the whole, Sher added, because the Working Group proposed only non-binding model guidance, rather than regulations, on crucial issues, the “teeth seem to be missing” from the report.

In attempting to clarify some issues (although not by regulation), the report further muddied the waters on how scriptural materials can be used in federally funded programs. In one example, in a question and answer appendix intended to clarify prohibited uses of federal funds, the report states:

[S]taff in Federally-funded programs may not provide devotional religious instruction, but, where consistent with the purposes of the program, they may teach about religion, such as the history of religion, comparative religion, literary and other analysis of the Bible and other scripture, and the role of religion in the history of the United States and other countries.  Such instruction may make use of the Bible or other scripture.  Similarly, it is permissible for staff in Federally-funded programs to discuss any topics consistent with the program’s purposes, including religious influences on art, music, literature, and social studies.

Got that? I’m sure the line between “analysis of the Bible” and “devotional religious instruction” is abundantly clear to a faith-driven provider, and to a client who is in many cases in dire need of social services.

Those clients, it should be pointed out, are frequently seeking intensely personal services, such as a variety of counseling, and may be in distress or in desperate situations. A government employee, even if there were resources to staff such a thing, cannot exactly sit in on a counseling session to make sure that the counselor is merely analyzing the Bible rather than preaching to her.

The reason why church-state separation advocates have pressed for bright lines — a clear prohibition on hiring discrimination, and separate incorporation to ensure federal funding is not mixed private funding that can be used to proselytize — is that once you start to blur those lines, the rules become far less clear. And when faith-based providers insist that their essential religious character must be preserved even if they’re receiving federal funds, you start to wonder: Which is more important, bolstering the faith-based organization, or protecting the rights of the clients it serves?

While the Advisory Council’s report addressed many of these issues imperfectly, at least it did so with some clarity. The Interagency Working Group’s report is a muddle that fails to track the recommendations it was ordered to follow. It seems unlikely that federal agencies will be implementing regulations any time soon. And it’s starting to feel like it was intended to be that way.

Colson is best known as Nixon’s hatchet man and Watergate felon turned prison evangelist. For his admirers, though, he was even bigger than his larger-than-life tale of redemption by salvation alone. He was not merely living proof of the salvific power of Christ; not merely a rescuer of the heretics; not merely a coalition builder of Catholics and evangelicals once divided by theological differences. He was nothing short of a battle commander in the cosmic culture wars, the manufactured showdown between the “Christian worldview” — the only “true” way to see things — and other “worldviews” he insisted were antithetical to it.

Colson is probably best known to the general public for his Prison Fellowship Ministries, but he has left an indelible mark on the culture-war battles that will define the 2012 election. It was Colson, after all, who helped forge the Catholic-evangelical alliance against abortion that is now finding enduring potency in fighting the HHS mandate. It’s a battle that is framed — as Colson would have it — as one waged by the voracious, anti-Christian government against the religious liberty of besieged believers.

“Government, theologically, has two major roles,” Colson told Jeff Sharlet, author of the book “The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power,” “to preserve order — we can only have freedom out of order — and to do justice, to restrain evil.” Colson did not invent this theological justification for this ideologically driven argument for small government, but he was articulating a religious-right article of faith.

In this telling, a government not operated according to a “Christian worldview” is not the defender of First Amendment freedoms but a violator of them. “Biblical disobedience,” writes Sharlet, distilling Colson’s work, “should be — must be — the cornerstone of ‘the West’s stand against the ‘new barbarians,’ whether they come in the form of Muslims or secular schoolteachers.” Or HHS secretaries or presidents or legislators crafting healthcare reform.

Colson was one of the drafters of the 2009 manifesto, the Manhattan Declaration, which, in hindsight, forecast how the religious right would react to the HHS mandate. Assembled by what was billed as an ecumenical group of evangelicals, Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians, it was released at the height of the legislative showdown over the Stupak Amendment, offered at the behest of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to eliminate nonexistent federal funding of abortions. The signatories — today they number over half a million — pledged unspecified civil disobedience in response to laws they assert violate religious liberty, the “sanctity of life” and “the dignity of marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife.”

In the Manhattan Declaration, victims are not women who can’t access healthcare or a gay couple that can’t get married. The victims are Christians, and their freedom from laws not crafted from a biblical worldview. (The website of the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview says its job is “to expose the Lie and replace it with the Truth of a biblical understanding of all of reality.”)

On the day the Manhattan Declaration was unveiled, to much fanfare, in a jammed room at the National Press Club in Washington, Colson released one of his popular weekly “Two Minute Warning” videos. In that video, he blamed government for the breakdown of  “the organs of civil society,” the “clubs, the political parties, the grassroots organizations, the local government, particularly the church and the family, those are the two most vital,” he said.  When those institutions break down, Colson added, “what you have is tyranny.”

Colson didn’t stop there, though, nor did he stop at quoting de Tocqueville on the possibilities of the collapse of civil society causing “benevolent despotism.” Colson had the audacity to compare America to Nazi Germany, and to urge his listeners to read Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” which he called “prophetic in its application to today … The destruction of civil society has always been prelude to a totalitarian government.”

The website of the Manhattan Declaration has continued this tradition. The title of a post about protesting the HHS mandate, “First they came for the Catholics….” was a deliberate echoing of the pastor Martin Niemoller’s famous appeal against inaction in the face of Nazism. It linked to Colson’s video, in which he decried a “steady drumbeat of attacks on the Christian church and on freedom of religion.”

“We have come to the point,” said Colson, “where if there isn’t a dramatic change of circumstances, we, as Christians, may well be called upon to stand in civil disobedience against the action of our own government.”

Colson was hardly unaware of how actual abuse of government power happens — he did, after all, plead guilty to obstruction of justice in connection with the break-in of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office. Yet Colson did not devote his life to exposing actual exploitations of political power. Instead, he portrayed legitimate actions of a democratic government to advance the rights and welfare of its citizens as antithetical to Christianity and the freedom of Christians.

Colson’s legacy is far more than Watergate felon turned prison evangelist. Next time you see protesters against the HHS mandate, or a pundit claiming President Obama is waging a “war on religion,” or an activist threatening to engage in civil disobedience to a “tyrannical” law such as one permitting adoption by same-sex couples, remember Chuck Colson.

Channeling the worst of Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, Romney has accused President Obama of trying to impose the “religion of secularism.” He has signed the pledge of the anti-gay group the National Organization for Marriage and accepted its endorsement, along with endorsements from antiabortion groups. He has stumped for the position of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops framing insurance coverage for contraception as a “war on religion.” At the same NRA convention at which Ted Nugent reveled in violence against Obama and Democrats generally, Romney called contraception coverage under the Affordable Care Act a “threat and insult to every religious group.”

This transparent pandering is clearly aimed at the conservative evangelicals and Catholics he needs to energize in November, whose approval — and enthusiasm — is essential for a Republican presidential candidate to win. While Romney obviously doesn’t need to do much pandering to win over conservative Mormons, voters surely wonder: Once he brings up religion, where does his Mormonism fit?

Conservatives are starting to take notice of Romney’s mystifying refusal to highlight how Mormonism dovetails with their own ideology, leading some to suggest he should just “own” his Mormonism. Indeed you’d think that he’d take them up on it, since Mormon doctrine on motherhood, for example, shares some notable similarities with that of, say, the 19 Kids and Counting Duggar family, who stumped for Santorum (whom Ralph Reed says Romney should mimic), and have since thrown their support behind Romney.

Yet in the latest Mormon dust-up this week, the Washington Post’s conservative blogger Jennifer Rubin accused BuzzFeed’s McKay Coppins (who is Mormon) of anti-Mormonism after he wrote a piece, “Why Ann Stayed Home.” Coppins’ explanation of Mormon history and doctrine (and Mormon feminist objections to it) provoked Rubin, a Romney defender, to fret that it “foreshadows, I fear, of what is to come — effort to portray Mormons as weirdly out of step and unmodern, and by implication, Romney as being unfit for the presidency.”

Oh, but why single out Romney, or Mormonism, for being “weirdly out of step and unmodern”? It’s almost as if Rubin is unaware of what the Republican Party is.

The Daily Caller’s Matt Lewis came to Coppins’ defense, and even expressed admiration for Mormon ideals of motherhood. “I found the piece to be a positive portrayal of Mormon theology, motherhood and Ann Romney,” Lewis wrote.

That “positive” portrayal included a discussion of the late LDS prophet Ezra Taft Benson’s 1987 lecture on the role of women as mothers. In that “Fireside for Parents,” Benson echoed the teaching of former president Spencer W. Kimball, another LDS prophet, “whose counsel,” Benson said, “has gone unheeded, and families have suffered because of it.”

That counsel, of course, is that mothers should stay home. “The Lord has so stated,” Kimball wrote, that women “are to take care of the family,” and “be an assistant to the husband” but “not to earn the living, except in unusual circumstances.”

Kimball wrote those words in 1977, the same year in which the Church, in opposing the Equal Rights Amendment, worried that it would “stifle many God-given feminine instincts.”

“Too many women,” Kimball scolded, “spend their time in socializing, in politicking, in public services when they should be home to teach and train and receive and love their children into security.”

Kimball, Benson declared 10 years later, “spoke the truth. His words are prophetic.”

Tresa Edmunds, a co-founder of the feminist group LDS Wave and a blogger at Feminist Mormon Housewives, told me this week that in Mormonism, motherhood plays a divine role in nurturing souls for eternity. “Over the years, Mormon women have felt — I would personally say a backlash is too strong a word, I would say, some friction, about their role in motherhood.” For Mormon women who work, she said, there is still “static” and “stigma” over it.

Given that so much of Mormon teaching on marriage and family — the core of the religious right’s incursion into politics — is in line with Republican orthodoxy, one would think that Romney would jump at the chance to demonstrate a Mormon-evangelical-Catholic alliance.

As Kathryn Joyce, author of the book “Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement,” which details the anti-contraception, uber-mothering movement within evangelicalism, has reported, such an alliance already exists. Religious right doyen Francis Schaeffer, an important driver of the antiabortion movement, advocated for ecumenical “co-belligerency” decades ago, and anti-feminist, anti-secularist religious activists have heeded the call. “A chief example of this,” Joyce has written, “is ‘The Natural Family Manifesto’ … [an] ecumenical call to arms [that] extols a conservative lifestyle where fathers lead and women honor their highest domestic calling by becoming ‘prolific mothers’ of ‘full quivers of children.’”

The unanswered question here is how much Romney adheres to his church’s teachings, and whether he agrees with the relationships some Mormons have forged with conservative Catholics and evangelicals on matters relating to the family, gender and sexuality. So far he’s jumped on the most obvious bandwagons of religious right causes. But as the campaign drags on, both progressives and conservatives will no doubt want to know more about where his own faith fits in the hot-button debates his party has placed front and center in the campaign.

Subsidiarity, Ryan contends, is nothing more than the theological justification for shrinking the federal government down to a size that will fit in Grover Norquist’s bathtub. If I were a cartoonist, I’d draw Ryan dreamily doodling Jesus’ name on the Federalist Society masthead.

For many Catholic scholars and theologians, though, Ryan’s views are both laughably and dangerously wrong. As Daniel Maguire, a Catholic ethicist, wrote even before Ryan’s interview with Brody, subsidiarity “means that nothing should be done by a higher authority that can be done by active participation at lower levels. Right-wingers like Paul Ryan grab that one word, ‘subsidiarity,’ and claim it supports their maniacal hatred of government. It doesn’t.”

Joseph Palacios, Adjunct Professor of Latin American Studies at Georgetown University, told me, “Historically, Christian Democratic parties in Europe and Latin America have used subsidiarity to highlight the need for a social safety net to guarantee the common good that gets organized and guaranteed through state functions such as healthcare, education, economic development, housing, transportation.” Here in the U.S., though, Palacios says, “a lot of progressive
Catholics are unfamiliar with this principle and have allowed it to be usurped by conservatives and libertarians in the Church,” who attempt to lend religious justification for the position of Catholic Republicans like Ryan.

These disputes — particularly for a religion reporter like me — are the stuff of fascinating and illuminating stories on religious history, theology and political gamesmanship. In a pluralistic democracy, though, they have no place in determining the federal budget.

No one’s religious view is entitled to preference when Congress is crafting the federal budget. To be sure, given the attention paid to the plight of the poor by the most prevalent religions in the United States, there are many politicians, and many citizens, whose faith would inform how they evaluate the priorities — or lack thereof — in the Ryan budget. At the same time, secular humanists, atheists, and other varieties of the non-religious also have a set of values on income and wealth inequality.

Progressives and conservatives should duke it out — but without invoking religion. The budget should be based on shared concepts of fairness and justice, not whether Jesus or God or Allah (oh, never mind, the Republicans would never go for that!) approves.

But Ryan, who did not invoke his faith when first offering his budget proposal, is now scrambling to devise a post-hoc theological justification for it. This week’s revelations to Brody were hardly his first salvo. Last spring, he and his fellow Catholic, Speaker John Boehner, sought approval from clerical authorities.

Boehner, for his part, already had come under fire from Catholic academics for his deviation from church teachings. In a May 2011 letter reacting to his upcoming commencement address at Catholic University, the academics told Boehner, “[f]rom the apostles to the present, the magisterium of the church has insisted that those in power are morally obliged to preference the needs of the poor” (a principle Ryan claims his budget upholds). Boehner’s record on addressing “the desperate needs of the poor,” the academics charged, “is among the worst in Congress.”

Ryan and Boehner dashed off a letter of their own, to then-Archbishop (now Cardinal) Timothy Dolan, the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Dolan, of course, does not mince words when reacting to perceived transgressions by elected officials. In January, he pronounced the Department of Health and Human Services requirement for insurance coverage for contraception “literally unconscionable” and on Easter Sunday described it as a “dramatic, radical intrusion of a government bureaucracy into the internal life of the Church.”

Such bombast was notably missing from his letter responding to Ryan and Boehner. It’s true that Dolan’s letter didn’t directly say Ryan’s budget was in line with Catholic teaching, only that Dolan appreciated Ryan’s effort to claim (however disingenuously) that it was. But given that Obama made significant efforts to yield to religious objections to the contraception rule and has been treated only to vitriol from the bishops and their Republican allies, it was significant that Dolan was far more gentle with Ryan: “Care must be taken that those currently in need not be left to suffer. I appreciate your assurance that your budget would be attentive to such considerations and would protect those at risk in the processes and programs of such a transition.” Not, take note, “literally unconscionable.” Even though it is.

Liberals, for their part, have sought to counter Ryan with more religion. Last year, in a stunt staged at Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition conference, fellow Catholics confronted Ryan and tried to give him a Bible with passages on the poor highlighted. An anti-Ryan advertisement was critical of his admiration for Tea Party heroine Ayn Rand — not because of her cruelly libertarian views on economics, but because she was an atheist.

More recently, a coalition of Christian, Jewish and Muslim leaders known as the Faithful Budget Campaign have pushed back against Ryan with their own Faithful Budget. The coalition says its “faithful” budget “protects the common good, values every individual and lifts the burden on the poor.” These are worthy goals, but shouldn’t be elevated merely because they have a religious imprimatur.

Surely it’s understandable that liberal Catholics are angry that Ryan is misrepresenting their faith to justify his punishing and heartless assault on his fellow Americans. They should — and they will — persist in protest, in discussion and in argument. But just as Ryan shouldn’t run to Cardinal Dolan for approval, or at least acquiescence, nor should liberals seek religious cover for their counter-proposals. Religious leaders and voters are free to have their say, but when it comes down to the rationale for defeating Ryan’s budget, it should be based on the economic realities of the people whose lives would be destroyed by it, coupled with a cogent case for the role of government, and not on theology.

Rose’s invocation of Roe as a parable for Obamacare is emblematic of conservative confusion and hypocrisy when it comes to the law. Roe enshrined a woman’s right to be free from interference from the government in choosing an abortion — a medical procedure. Yet the right to be free from government “tyranny,” as Tea Party activists call it, is the same principle that animates conservative opposition to imagined “government bureaucrats” writing the rules on access to care. You wouldn’t want the government telling you what to do with your body, would you?

The one exception, of course, is the space between a woman’s vagina and her ovaries.  Anti-choice activists, like conservatives broadly, argue the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate is unconstitutional because it infringes on individual freedom to choose one’s own healthcare, but women’s reproductive care is another matter. It’s not a coincidence that renewed conservative hostility to women’s health has coincided with the movement’s mobilization against Obama’s healthcare reform. In the three years conservatives have been fighting against Obamacare, first in Congress and now in the courts, anti-choice activists also have been using the power of state legislatures to make it more arduous, more invasive and more humiliating to seek an abortion. Then there are the so-called Personhood laws, as well as a proposed federal law, heralded by conservatives as freedom-loving, that would grant equal protection rights under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution to fertilized eggs, thus elevating the freedom of a zygote above that of a woman.

Much of this energy has come as a result of opposition to Obamacare, which, the anti-choice movement claims, contrary to reality, is a huge expansion of abortion rights. Ellen Staniszewski, a demonstrator outside the Supreme Court on Tuesday, believed “because I’ve read the whole law” that “death panels” will result in more abortions. That’s because — being death panels, after all — she believed imaginary grim reapers masquerading as bureaucrats would order women to have abortions rather than carry a pregnancy to term.

Obamacare, claims Americans United for Life president Charmaine Yoest, is “the largest expansion of abortion since Roe v. Wade.” Why? Because, Yoest argues, insurance plans that cover abortion will be permitted to participate in the federally subsidized insurance exchanges, assuming it’s permitted under state law. Never mind that women receiving subsidies would have to pay a separate premium for abortion coverage out of their own pockets. Because such insurers must, under the law, assess a $1 per month surcharge on all enrollees in the plan, Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., and anti-choice activists complain that this constitutes taxpayer funding for abortion.

In fact, this dual-payment system was designed to ensure that no taxpayer funds were used to cover abortion. “To really ensure private funds are dedicated to abortion coverage, the insurers are not allowed to take into account the cost savings of abortion and must assess a minimum of $1 for the abortion premium,” says Jessica Arons, director of Women’s Health and Rights Program at the Center for American Progress. “So it’s actually a ‘protection’ against taxpayer funding of abortion. It just shows once again that you can never satisfy the anti-choice movement.”

Rather than forcing an expansion of abortion, Arons adds, the law may actually lead to a decline in private insurers covering abortion, because it “adds new administrative hurdles to obtaining abortion coverage and invites states to ban abortion coverage.” What’s more, she says, because more women will be eligible for Medicaid under the law, “a whole new class of women will now be subject to the Hyde Amendment’s ban on abortion coverage for women enrolled in Medicaid.”

Yet for Staniszewski, who regularly demonstrates outside of a suburban Washington abortion clinic as part of the 40 Days for Life movement, Obamacare may be more important than Roe, because it “not only funds abortion but pushes abortion.”

The contraception coverage requirement, Staniszewski told me, turning the language the pro-choice movement has used on its head, is a “war against women.” The coverage of contraception, she said, detailing yet another bizarre, conspiratorial scenario, “will make our young ladies and young boys — it will turn them into animal sex objects if you tell them if they can have free contraception in the first, second and third grade, they’re going to be having sex early on, ‘til they’re going to be covered in sexually transmitted diseases, until they have abortion after abortion, until they no longer have any respect for their own body and life.”

“This is a revolution,” Rose told an interviewer at the “Stand Up for Religious Freedom” rally outside the Department of Health and Human Services headquarters last week, one of 140 simultaneous demonstrations nationwide. “This is an act of tyranny by our government,” Rose insisted, vowing, “This is just the beginning. We will not comply.”

This revolution, if it is indeed one, is about a reactionary notion of freedom — one that elevates certain religious views above others, and demands that the government impose, or least acquiesce in imposing, certain religious views on citizens.

Even if the Court strikes down the individual mandate, activists won’t let up on this culture war for “freedom” from the government. In fact, they may be emboldened.

Staniszewski was straightforward about why. The government, she maintained, shouldn’t get to make decisions that “should only belong to God.”