A couple of weeks ago in this space, the Reverend Brian
Jordan suggested that religious organizations pause for a moment’s reflection
before signing on to President Bush’s faith-based initiative. Father Jordan,
who works with poor immigrants at the Church of St. Francis of Assisi on West
32nd Street, wondered if taking government money for the provision of social
services will taint the mission of religious organizations. “Faith-based groups
are called to be prophetic by the memory of their founders,” he said. “Are
these groups compromising any of their prophetic quality by abiding by
government guidelines? The government can’t treat these institutions like
government employees.”
Father Jordan’s own
prophetic qualities are formidable. Two months after he spoke with The Observer , the issue he raised back
when everybody was talking about Bill Clinton and Marc Rich is now under
vigorous discussion. From his electronic pulpit in Virginia, Pat Robertson is
sending messages similar to those Father Jordan expressed in this space. Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne
noted recently that the Bush initiative has “unleashed intense argument and
soul-searching among those who were presumed to be its prime supporters and
beneficiaries.” Critics, from conservative Christian clergymen to African-American
ministers, “say much the same thing,” Mr. Dionne noted. “With Caesar’s coin
comes the obligation to submit to Caesar’s rules.”
The New York Times Magazine on April 1
presented a version of this discussion, focusing on a woman named Alicia
Pedeira, who was fired from her job with the Kentucky Baptist Homes for
Children because of her “homosexual lifestyle.” If organizations like the
Kentucky Baptist Homes for Children are going to receive federal funds, The Times asked, should they be able to
fire employees like Ms. Pedeira because of their “lifestyle”? Because religion
can, according to The Times , “bleed”
into such categories as race, gender and sexual orientation, is it not time to
reconsider the exemption religious organizations receive from laws prohibiting
religious discrimination? Those wishing instruction in correct thinking did not
have to read too closely in order to grasp the piece’s message.
Ms. Pedeira has filed a
lawsuit, so the issue is headed for the federal courts.
The most fascinating aspect of this conversation is that it
is taking place at all. Most people would have expected the nation’s churches,
synagogues and mosques to leap at the opportunity to receive federal money to
fund their social-service programs. Instead, they are wondering aloud about the
price of their souls.
This is not the kind of introspection one associates with
some other beneficiaries of federal largesse, i.e., the artists, museums and
other cultural organizations whose consciences are untroubled by the flow of
money from the National Endowment for the Arts and from the budgets of local
governments. Rather than wring their hands about the possible corrupting
influence of government money, a generation of artists has come to believe that
publicly funded grants are an entitlement, and those who either oppose them
outright or seek some kind of review process are nothing more than neo-Fascist
shredders of the right to free expression. Faith-based organizations may
torture themselves about the rules that accompany federal money; artists
believe that rules simply don’t apply to them. Free expression, don’t you know?
It’s in the Constitution! Indeed it is-contained in the same amendment that
guarantees religious freedom.
One needn’t be a fan of Rudy Giuliani’s decency commission
to notice the double standard at work. Stout-hearted defenders of the First
Amendment deplore Mr. Giuliani’s notion that publicly funded art ought to
receive a public vetting before being deemed worthy of taxpayer support. The
streets of Soho and the dining rooms of many a patron of the arts are filled
with cries of censorship. Governments that provide funds for artists have no
right, it is said, to withhold those funds if a sector of the taxpaying public
finds the resulting art offensive. First Amendment and all that.
That’s a valid and indeed honorable argument, so one might
expect right-thinking artists to stand alongside their brothers and sisters in
the First Amendment as the nation’s religious organizations attempt to balance
their right to religious belief with the acceptance of government money. One
suspects, however, that the denizens of Dante’s Inferno will be turning triple axles before the nation’s artists
will person the barricades on behalf of Pat Robertson’s right to worship as he
sees fit while taking federal money to minister to the poor.
So some of the very same people who believe cultural
organizations owe no obligation to public sensibilities when they take taxpayer
funds are prepared to argue that religious organizations must abide by the
government’s political dictates if they take the government’s money. If that
infringes on religious belief-well, nobody is forcing these organizations to
take tax dollars. Those who use a similar argument on matters artistic, of
course, will find themselves condemned as censors.