RALEIGH – I’ve long been skeptical of some conservative proposals to involve “faith-based institutions” in the provision of social programs.
For one thing, routing tax dollars to church-run charities rather than public agencies may seem like the best of poor choices, but there are plenty of areas where government shouldn’t be in the coercive-funding business in the first place. Examples would include subsidies for housing developments and ongoing relief for able-bodied adults. To advocate that churches do these things, with tax dollars, rather than government agencies is seemingly to grant their continued presence in the budget.
Secondly, what makes faith-based care more effective and likely to encourage dependency is likely the very factor that government dollars could endanger: expressions of faith. If churches, synagogues, mosques, or other religious institutions can’t talk about the divine, how are they supposed to minister to the needy? It goes hand in hand. The superiority of faith-based institutions doesn’t lie in their exemption from paperwork requirements or government personnel systems (though such exemptions are also worth protecting).
Third, once churches start getting government grants, they will become another lobby for the maintenance and expansion of welfare spending. We just don’t need any more of those.
All of this having been said, I’m not against all faith-based initiatives. Federal, state, and local government can take steps to expand the role that religious communities play in the social sector. For example, I have long favored a Charitable Choice Tax Credit capped at (let’s say) $500 per household, for gifts to private or religious charities serving the poor. Each dollars of credit should be subtracted from the state or federal government’s total budget for public assistance. In effect, citizens would be allowed to route some of the dollars they are forced to spend to institutions most likely to use them effectively and with which citizens may have a personal familiarity or affinity. This would reduce significantly the risk of dangerous entanglement between the state and the church (though it would not be eliminated entirely due to the need to exclude some kinds of charities, such as art museums or regular religious services, from eligibility).
Similarly, North Carolina should offer a tax credit for personal or corporate contributions to scholarship funds serving low-income K-12 students. Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Florida already have versions of this idea in operation. Many schools receiving such aid are religious, but again the risk of government strings attached is significantly reduced because the money goes directly to private scholarship funds, and then to schools.
Yet another good idea for faith-based initiatives can be found in a recent presentation at the Heritage Foundation. Panelists were discussing the idea of churches and other congregations becoming an alternative site for health-insurance purchases. Rather than workers buying health plans through their employer – and make no mistake, employers sell insurance to workers in exchange for labor, there’s no gift involved – individuals could realize the bulk-buying advantages of large groups through their religious institutions and thus reduce problems such as “job lock” and having premium dollars go to fund services they find abhorrent, such as abortions.
This is a good idea, but it’s not a new idea. Fraternal orders, religious aid associations, and other denominational groups were important in the development of health benefits in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In the 1930s, lobbyists for hospitals and doctors eventually got state legislation enacted to create preferential treatment for their own payment systems (the Blue Cross and Blue Shield associations), thus muscling out the religious plans and the for-profit insurers, both of which tended to pay claims directly to patients rather than to providers. Couldn’t have the patients see the bills, you understand. In the early 1940s, expansion of the federal income tax, federal wage and price controls, and related regulatory rulings brought on the employer-based system of third-party payment of health bills that continues to hamper the efficiency of our delivery system today.
Time to put our faith in another approach.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.