A blog here prompted a comment that triggered this post around Church/State issues looming on the horizon.  It also recalls countless hours of debate on conservative forums around school vouchers as a concept, among other things, as well as some interest in Bush’s failed Faith Based Initiative.  (In that forum I was painted as a wishy washy moderate, or worse, a liberal.)

The referenced blog sites some pretty clear cut examples.  You cannot establish a religion.  No government sanctioned religion.  No “Church of England” that was the Episcopal Church at the time of the founding.  No forcing of the individual to pay fealty to a specific religion.

Got it.  No dispute.  Pretty clear cut with case precedent.  God removed from the Pledge of Allegiance.  No more Crèche scenes on public commons, etc, etc. ad nauseum.  No forced prayer in school, but if you want to pray on your own, then Mazel Tov!

Founders intent and past patterns are clear here.  Many fled other countries, and England in specific to avoid religious persecution.  Some settlers had to bolt from one colony to another, such as fleeing the Massachusetts Bay Colony for Rhode Island by Roger Williams, and William Penn separating from Delaware to form Pennsylvania, for example.  These were clear antecedent actions the founders were considering when establishing this.

Back then government taxed far less and spent far less.  To shorten that I will use the term redistribution, which has ugly connotations I do not want thrown at me in the comments section.  You want to type that from your itchy, partisan hands, come back here and read this, goddamnit.  I am using it as shorthand to discuss rather complex things with greater simplicity and economy of words which, as regular blog readers understand, is not a strong suit.

So centralized government did not redistribute wealth.  Local communities did that.  They did that, oftentimes, through church infrastructures as well as local orphanages and poor houses.  Good or bad, that was how it worked.

Today we have a very sophisticated system for wealth redistribution that has centralized that aspect at both the state and federal levels while also allowing for tax credits for sanctioned charities.  One such charity happens to be the church of your choice.

Now throw the notion of education vouchers and delivery of welfare services into the mix.

School Vouchers

This issue likely is not going to abate as we wrestle with how to retool the education of the citizenry as we continue toward the inevitable transition into a knowledge work economy.  The internet alters education delivery in ways hard to comprehend.  The traditional delivery of lecturer at a blackboard with students writing it down has roots in the Middle Ages.  At the end of the day you had your book.  You had your knowledge transfer at a time predating printing presses.

Not relevant in the electronic age.  MIT offers its course curriculum and lecture notes on line, for example.  Reportedly the largest downloader of this free content happens to be China.  Students and teachers collaborate over the networks to wrestle with homework.  Many class rooms have no text books now, using online content projected onto a screen for class lectures.

And the notion of school choice with some kind of government credit for those expenditures remains an issue.

And what does it mean about vouchers or credits for schools tied to a religious organization?   Government redistributes funds tied to church backed organizations without discrimination.  You choose without bias.

Allowing that does not establish a religion nor does it impede your right to exercise your right to choose the religion of your choice.  

Or would it?

A Jew in some Christian-centric red state might not be able to find a Jewish School to which to send their child.  But they would have no problem in New York City doing that, while a Mormon might.  Is critical mass of the citizenry by religion by geography really a fault or responsibility of government?

Is that unfair government influence in religion while still seeking to redistribute money for the collective good in a centralized fashioned unfathomable to founders when writing up the Establishment Clause?  The right to assemble is not impeded by the government offering funding equally to all established religions in the far larger role government has in wealth redistribution than envisioned at the time of the Founding.

Then becomes what the government defines as a recognized religion.  With any government transfer program will come those seeking to abuse the program to grab the money.  Scientology likely passes the smell test, though would be controversial.  But what becomes, then, of applications for recognition as a religion to qualify?  What if it is just some weird education approach the Department of Education rejects on those grounds, so the educators seek to use the religion loophole and point to establishment as the basis?  

You know, Ebonics as a recognized language to get ESL funds?  That kind of thing.

Faith Based Initiative

This took a lot of heat and never really got tested fairly.  Look at this from economic grounds seeking to improve efficiency of services delivery.

Churches have an existing infrastructure to deliver welfare services.  They have soup kitchens and sleeping services for the homeless.  They house many support functions such as AA within their halls with no religious litmus test for participation.

If we recognize we need to tighten our national belt, then seeking to leverage existing infrastructures delivering the intended services makes a ton of sense to INVESTIGATE.  Overlapping infrastructure means less net benefit to the recipient if tied up in redundant overhead structure.  A business operations/efficiency view, rather than a religious view.  And government, if nothing else, is in the business of delivering services to the citizenry.  And it needs to rethink business practices given economic reality.

No establishment of a religion.  No coercion of who gets to attend or receive the services.

And likely most readers here will be scanning this and rejecting it.

But that issue Bush sought to explore is going to be pressed hard whenever we get through the late stages of the healthcare bill.  Many hospitals have religious affiliation.  What will the impact of the Establishment clause be on government mandates around healthcare services?

Will a Catholic hospital be forced to perform abortions?  Dispense birth control?  This would seem to be a violation of the Establishment clause if forced to do so.  If the only hospital in town, then citizens ARE impacted, but if there are competing places for services, then it would seem the religious-affiliated healthcare providers should have the right to refuse to perform services the government wants to make sure get performed under these grounds.  For some abortion is a violation of their religious beliefs whether others of us want to accept it or not. 

Catholic Charities made noise around this very issue during the healthcare debate.  It is exactly the same kind of scenario as would have been useful to explore in a localized area under the Faith Based initiative.

Again, the issue here is religious affiliated infrastructure in the delivery of services into which government involvement has creeped since the Founding as we have increased central government’s role in welfare redistribution to care and tend to the citizenry.  The more we turn to government for these solutions, as we have done since the Founding, the more we bump up into the individual rights and liberties sought to be preserved in the 1780s by some pretty bright minds.  They were not, however, time travelers who could see the future two centuries out.

So it is all well and good to mock the cartoon character that is the Republican Senatorial candidate in Delaware, but there are some emerging issues that will but up against the First Amendment as it relates to religious organizations that were not at all anticipated by the founders. 

It is analogous to the difficulty around the 2^nd amendment on guns and what was meant by “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State.”  Here again, government did less back then.  It relied on citizen infrastructure.  In this case gun owners.  In the topic at hand, religious charity. 

The more we turn to government, the more we but up against this conflict.

No strong position being offered one way or the other.  Just a cautionary tale of the realities of what we are facing working from a document that could not envision life in America in the 21^st Century.

It is not as clear cut as folks would like to suggest to abe able to mock a weak candidate and an easy target.