The Trouble With Faith-based Initiatives

Back when President Bush was pushing his idea for faith-based organizations to have access to government monies it seemed like a good idea. But many conservatives warned against it, because whatever the government touches the government controls.

Think the Catholic adoption agency in Massachusetts that decided to get out of the adoption business rather than be forced to accept gays as adoptive parents.

A number of conservatives have had their doubts in the years since. Now Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) has come out in favor of faith-based initiatives. Writes Rev. Robert Sirica,

Barack Obama has announced that he likes President Bush’s program of public funding for religious charities. In fact, he wants to expand the program.

Yes. Think about it. Think what the liberal government managers will do, and think what the liberal activist groups will do with faith-based initiatives.

The point is, of course, that government is the last place in the world that you would look for giving people a hand up. Government is about power and patronage. It is not about faith, love, and charity. When government helps people it thinks immediately about binding those people into supporting it at the next election.

But votes are all that the liberal politicians care about. Fraser Nelson wrote recently about the people in the welfare ghetto of east Glasgow, Scotland, where 50 percent of the adult population is on “incapacity” benefits and male life expectancy at birth is 54 years:

I once had the job of signing up the good people of Glasgow East to the electoral register — at the time, regarded as an invitation to pay poll tax. Gang graffiti scars the walls, police are virtually unseen. This no-go-zone status is new, and cost billions to achieve. Houses there are in good condition, money is being spent. But it has funded a hideous social experiment, showing what happens when the horizontal ties which bind those within communities to one another are replaced with vertical ties, binding individuals to the welfare state.

Liberals like to talk about the “safety net” afforded by government programs, but the metaphor is misleading. In a safety net, the people are the knots, supported by horizontal ties to work, family, church, and neigborhood. In a welfare state, the only tie is the umbilical cord to the welfare state placenta. Cut that one cord, and you are dead.

Maybe umbilical cord is the wrong metaphor. Maybe the reality is that the vertical tie by which dependents are bound to the welfare state is a rope.