Thank God for Tipped Passes!
Vine Deloria, Jr., is a historian at the University of Colorado at Boulder, an Indian activist, and the author of many books, including Custer Died For Your Sins, and God is Red.

It is indeed ironic that Bush wants to include religious organizations in the annual distribution of taxpayers' money. If we look back at the origin of Western institutions closely, we can see that churches were the original providers of schools, welfare, health care, and even penitentiaries. Over the last few centuries these institutions have all become secular because the churches abandoned their responsibilities and were able to transfer the responsibility to the state.

Today even the former church-related-colleges scramble for federal funds. So we have come full circle now, and the church, instead of leading the state in matters of human concern, or being separate but equal partners in social issues, will become the handmaiden of the secular state in a formal relationship.

Considering the track record of religious institutions in the past, choosing them to participate in what have become secular social programs is absurd. Christianity has always been the subject of wide pendulum swings between two biblical verses:

"Go forth and preach to all nations!!!"
and,
"Let your light so shine before men that they can see your good works and glorify your Father which is in heaven."

Unfortunately, it is a lot easier to preach at people than to do good works. Modern Christianity, with some rare exceptions, has embraced the god of the Old Testament rather than the god of the New Testament, so the present posture is one of blaming the victim rather than helping the victim. Good Samaritans are a rare commodity today. Since the only timewe actually hear about god in secular life is interviews with winning professional athletes, thanking god for tipped passes, funding religious groups to do anything is simply hastening the complete collapse of whatever is left of American culture-and perhaps even American history.

With John Ashcroft as attorney general, writing the opinions on which religious groups are eligible for federal funding, is there any doubt that this plan represents the complete takeover of the national government by the religious right? Whatever they do thereafter can be explained by Jimmy Swaggart -- "I sinned and I'm sorry" -- so let me go and sin again. We face a disaster of unimagined proportions and intensity if Bush's plan comes into operation.

Let the Poor Choose Their Own Religion
Polly Trout is a religious historian and author of Eastern Seeds, Western Soil: Three Gurus in America.

Let's not get in such a self-righteous liberal huff about the church-state thing that we sit around dissing people who are actually out helping the desperately poor while we talk about how to help them. Instead, let's examine more closely the possible reasons why faith-based social services work, since they seem to.

One possibility is that when a person in trouble goes to a small, community-based operation run by individuals who are willing and able to share their own strategies for coping with tragedy, then the needy person is more likely to experience real human contact than if they apply to a large bureaucratic agency staffed by people who are not allowed to have actual conversations with their supplicants about anything that matters. What matters to a lot of people is religion. Or, to put it another way, "religion" is what we call our attempts, as human beings, tofigure out what matters and how to live a meaningful, dignified life. For many people in traumatic circumstances, these are issues that must be addressed before healing can be accomplished, and talking to others about these issues is an invaluable aid-especially if the helpers are highly motivated to treat the wounded person as a human being worthy of love and respect. Whether or not a needy person can get this sort of help at an average church is unclear to me, but they sure as hell aren't going to find it at DSS.

Also implicit in the debate is the assumption that the clients of social programs-the homeless, the addicted, the poor -- are passive rubes who need to be protected from the brainwashing attacks of evangelicals. An effective intervention program must start with the assumption that every individual is the competent, rational navigator of his or her own life. If the faith-based program is a voluntary option among an array of other choices, both secular and from other faith perspectives, its presencewould help affirm the personhood of the client, who could then choose the program he or she wanted rather than having the state decide by offering a smaller number of choices.

Give Bush the Creepy Crawlies
Starhawk is a Witch, an activist, and author of The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of The Ancient Religion Of The Great Goddess, recently republished in a 20th anniversary edition by HarperSanFrancisco.

Bush's plan dovetails with a larger right wing agenda: essentially, to remove government from any social responsibility. I'm writing from Brazil, where I'm attending the World Social Forum, a counterforum to the World Economic Forum being held in Davos, Switzerland. A lot of the discussion revolved around the upcoming attempt to extend NAFTA through the wholehemisphere via a trade agreement known as the Free Trade Area of the Americas. Among other things, the FTAA would open the door to the privatization of services, such as health care, education, prisons, etc. It would allow your friendly local corporationto sue your government, say, for lost potential profits if a pesky government insisted on subsidizing its own schools, or running its own utilities.

So I see Bush's proposal in this context-a step in the attempt to shift all responsibility for compassion in the system to private religious groups. Then we'll eventually be left in a world where government simply administers for corporate interests, and the church is left to staunch the worst of the wounds. The wounded will have no real say in any of the decisions that affect them.

I happen to believe that those canny framers of our Constitution separated church and state for good reasons -- not least because they had direct experience of living under a system much like I've described. So as far as Bush's proposal goes, I'm agin' it. I think it's extremely dangerous.

As for strategy, the quickest way to defeat it is for the most respectable organs of the most respectable religions to just say no. Ditto to the World Council of Churches and the larger ecumenical and interfaith groups. "We'll stick with the Constitution, thank you."

And then we Pagans, Witches, and all the other groups that probably give Bush the creepy crawlies could step forward and say, "Well, if you're going to do this, we want a seat at the table. We want our share of funding. We want to be part of the process. After all, whether you think we're a religion or not, we're acknowledged as such by a Higher Authority -- the IRS, actually -- and we want to play, too."

Could get interesting!