By ‘Executive Order’ Bush Defies Congress,
Begins Undoing Separation of Church & State

By William Finucane

What in the name of God is George W. Bush doing now?

For centuries, America has built rules aimed specifically at keeping any church out of government affairs and any government out of church work. Yet over the past couple of years the Bush Administration has been flailing away at all of the rules. And succeeding.

Sure, as Americans we all thought the fight over keeping church and state separate was a done deal. As recently as 2002, the United States Senate squashed a faith-based initiative.

That initiative, made by the White House, was designed to give wide power to religious groups to access federal grants and to claim an exemption from civil rights laws that bar discrimination in hiring.

But it died in the Senate.

Done, finished, killed.

However, knowing there is more than one way to win a war, despite losing a battle, Bush then employed that great and questionable political equalizer: the executive order.

Marvelous things, these executive orders; the president can issue them and they take effect quickly, quietly and without a breath of debate. All the arguments that blew through the heated Senate on the question of faith-based initiatives simply stopped being of any account. George Bush’s arguments took over by executive fiat and he closed off all talk with his own silencer.

Executive order: end of discussion.

So now Bush has freed up about $100 million in taxpayer money for which faith-based groups can vie with each other.

Vie they will.

This is huge money.

Such funding can be terribly important to the religious people who are honestly struggling every day just to keep their programs and sometimes their churches alive. Why, such funding is so important that it might even sway the way a given church membership feels on all sorts of things: abortion, wars, and of course the federal budget – of which they are now becoming a part.

Would that constitute government busying itself with church activities?

Yes.

All these churches are clients now.

Like any other clients, they need to be stroked and encouraged and taught the niceties of the government minuet – step this way and you’ll get more money next year; step the other way; poof, money’s gone.

But church leaders would never lower themselves, you may think, to the pedestrian search for government dollars. You could be right. For a while, you probably would be right.

Yet the pressure from a government that offers money for small changes in the way a church does business can be very persuasive. Bush and company will be drawing votes from congregations in the inner cities over the upcoming election year. So it seems obvious they will want to find and give money to as many churches as they can.

These faith-based initiatives, in other words, have a political foundation in which funds may realistically be expected to help Bush harvest votes from former Democratic strongholds.

Wait, though, that is way too cynical.

Bush is a faithful Protestant. He is a religious man who prays; he declares he was ‘born again.’ Could this not all be just his deep faith that drives all of his administration’s faith-based activity?

Of course it could.

But that doesn’t really matter.

His intent may be most laudable; his actual results will be utterly different.

Say, for example, a couple of really well done pieces of human services work are accomplished in a local church. Immediately, the victims – the homeless, those with AIDS, unwed mothers and a thousand others – would show progress. Naturally, the United States government would like to see all its hard earned taxpayer money spent with such effectiveness and efficiency. So would that church now become a model from which funding standards are derived? Very possibly.

Would the government – eventually – tell all the churches how to operate? And how about the church employees; in such a case would they have to know anything about medicine or the caring for people who are ill or disadvantaged? Would they have to meet federal standards?

And do the employees and various caregivers have to be of the right religion? Sometimes, in this context, they do. The Bush doctrine allows the officials of the given church to decide who fits their profile and who doesn’t, based on the individual’s religious preferences and affiliations. Conformity may become an absolute.

Also changed by the Bush Executive Order was a Franklin Delano Roosevelt order, first issued during World War II, that contradicted that sort of evaluation.

Bush’s version says that, unless there is a statutory prohibition involved, religious groups can take the employee’s faith into question when entering into government contracts. Maybe not today, probably not in the next few months, but at some not-too-far-off time this provision will wreak havoc among religions. Exclusion and absolutism are in fact being encouraged.

Surely, one would imagine, the church based initiatives must also include temples, mosques and other non-traditional churches. For all religions are in fact present everywhere; they know no boundaries.

Governments are, by definition, of just one place.

What will happen when a faith-based group wants to use money in a way the government dislikes? This is no hypothetical question.

Churches are themselves often involved in controversies, sometimes involving gay church leaders, other times involving clerical pedophiles and wide-ranging child-molestation allegations, plus there are certain church policies in opposition to condoms, and others that proclaim absolute prohibitions against abortion, and more, etc., etc.

The chances of government and pulpit disagreement are not probable, they are inevitable.

Nonetheless, the money is waiting.

Whether taxpayers like it or not, funding various faiths with their government dollars is now a reality; there are bids being made right now.

The "charitable choice" wording in the 1996 law is being liberally interpreted to apply to religious groups. They now are eligible for funding from the Education Department, Labor Department, Housing and Urban Development, Justice Department, Health and Human Services and the Veterans Affairs Department.

These government agencies have $8 million up for grabs today, $65 million this year, $100 million next year.

House and Senate majorities seem to both be on Bush’s side here, especially with elections coming up and some of the GOP dominated Congress needing strong issues on which to run. Some politicians think faith-based activity is such an issue, and others think it is too hot to speak against so they are content to be silent.

But the Bush initiative is not just a political entity.

If the Republican majority is successful in capturing religion as its own, and then if it tries to inform it as a political entity, the country will suffer dearly. The Billy Grahams and other preachers who tend to slip into the realm of public policy rather than religious speech will become preacher/political teachers.

Federal officials will become quasi-church officials, at least where money is concerned.

America will eventually have its top religions or religion as an accepted norm, it’s state accepted and sponsored faith, and its secondary churches, temples, mosques, will be visible in that they are tolerated, at least at the outset. This is how it may begin, with a sense of increasing hierarchy diffused by tolerance for other points of view. But isn’t it realistic to assume that this will ultimately change? Doesn’t history show that once a state becomes involved in a given religion, ultimately all others become anathema?

George W. Bush stood before a congregation celebrating the dedication of the Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship in Dallas, his home area, and confidently announced that, "Slowly but surely, we are changing the culture."

With a few executive orders, he is dismantling all the separations of church and state that the Constitutional Founders established, and he’s grinning happily as though he just won an award for the deed – perhaps he has, from himself and his backers. Maybe we should call it the Culture Coup Award.

Chilling, absolutely chilling, there is no other way to describe it! George Bush doesn’t seem to have a clue as to what he’s doing to our country and our churches, but perhaps that is being too generous. Perhaps his ‘Aw shucks’ approach is intended to be disarming, and he knows precisely what type of revolution he is trying to initiate.

The latter possibility is all the more chilling!

In the end, of course, if this mixing of church and state continues and becomes entrenched, we will have diminished our democratic government and weakened our independent churches.

12/2003