“The history of Western civilization shows us that most social
and moral progress has been brought about by persons free from
religion.”
This statement, earth-shatteringly ignorant and historically
inaccurate as it is, tops the “purposes” page at the Freedom From
Religion Foundation website. The work of mostly feminists, atheists and
leftists, the FFRF is one of many groups that not only seek to
banish all vestiges of (mainly Christian) religion from American
public life, but to soil the debate with absurd notions as above.
While it is true that no religion has been free from the human
weaknesses of its purveyors, organized religion has accounted for
much more good than evil in the West.
Most of us would argue that great institutions like
universities, libraries and hospitals were the result of religious
entities themselves, while the great pillar of justice, natural
law, springs from belief in God. Conversely, modern history would
show that people who were “free from religion” have brought us
mostly Nazism, Communism and the granddaddy of them all, the reign
of terror that was the French Revolution.
At issue is Dennis Grace v. Freedom From Religion
Foundation, a case that the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to
hear this term. Ostensibly at issue is whether taxpayers have a
right to sue over a program funded by Congress, even one created by
an Executive Order. The program which is at the heart of the
lawsuit is President Bush’s signature one, the White House Office
of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, which seeks to return to
those faith-based organizations (FBOs) the business of charitable
work.
How did the government get in the business of charity to begin
with? Well, some would not call it charity, but justice, confusing
the government’s promise to guarantee the “pursuit of happiness”
with that of happiness itself. Most trace the beginning to FDR’s
New Deal policies of the 1930s which in turn led to LBJ’s Great
Society, both leading to the Welfare State and the insertion of
Nanny-Statism into everyday American life.
Federal entities sprang up and were funded to address problems
that were usually left to local humanitarian and religious groups,
or to individuals themselves — poverty, addiction, child care,
marital counseling, family planning, illness and the care of our
elderly — and even added its own missionary wing, the Peace Corps.
So what we have is actually the usurpation of religion’s role by
government; an ironic reversal of the separation of Church and
State argument.
But now the whole argument boils down to who is most qualified
to handle what was formerly known as charitable work in our
country: religious organizations or the State? President Bush has
uttered the answer that sends fear down the spines of
secularists everywhere: “Rather than fear faith programs, welcome
them. They’re changing America. They do a better job than
government can do.”
Ouch! The notion that anyone or anything can out-perform a
government bureaucracy has to hurt leftists, but religious groups
no less? Of course faith-based initiatives are the bane of those
who think that federal dollars that go to them are the devil’s
work.
But should FBOs be prevented from proselytizing or even
displaying religious symbols on their premises as is often required
to qualify for federal funding? If they entirely distanced
themselves from their religion, they would not meet their moral
call to real charity, which is to the soul as well as the body.
Most religious entities minister to much more than material
hardships; guilt, loneliness, abandonment, depression and despair
require more than bureaucrats and wads of money.
Perhaps no one sums this up better than Pope Benedict XVI, who
explains in this beautiful and rational way in his first
encyclical, Deus Caritas Est:
Since the nineteenth century, an objection has been
raised to the Church’s charitable activity, subsequently developed
with particular insistence by Marxism: the poor, it is claimed, do
not need charity but justice….The Church can never be exempted
from practising charity as an organized activity of believers, and
on the other hand, there will never be a situation where the
charity of each individual Christian is unnecessary, because in
addition to justice, man needs and will always need,
love.
Lisa Fabrizio is a columnist who hails from
Connecticut. You may write her at mailbox@lisafab.com.
