Public Policy: Faith and Freedom.(Brief Article)

The dispute over the president's plan to help religious charities is being portrayed, in the press, as a racial one, with white evangelicals suspicious of the government and black churches more favorably disposed. John DiIulio, director of the White House initiative, made a few ill-considered remarks in a lengthy speech that lent credence to this analysis. But the racial story line is too simple. There are plenty of white religious leaders who support the president's initiative, including Jerry Falwell, who has been mistakenly depicted as an opponent because he brought up some reservations about it. Prominent black clerics such as the Rev. Jesse Jackson and the Rev. Calvin Butts, meanwhile, have expressed the same concerns about the initiative that white critics have. Racial politics is, here as so often elsewhere, a distraction from the merits of a policy.

The administration's initiative has three components: the lifting of regulatory obstacles to the work of religious charities; the use of the tax code to encourage donations to them; and the opening of federal programs to their participation. Hard-core secularists object to all of these steps, but the initiative's mainstream critics worry only about the last one. They fear that discretionary federal grants to churches- as opposed to tax credits or vouchers-will tend to reduce the churches' effectiveness and, even more ...