Walking into the lobby of HOPE Initiatives’ Anson Street
offices, there’s little to identify the place as home to a religious group.
Faux-marble paneling frames a receptionist’s window, and off
to the side sit a few chairs for visitors. The room’s walls are devoid of the
symbols that often distinguish religious groups from their secular
counterparts. Posted on the reverse side of one of a pair of glass doors is a
single clue: A plastic placard reads “God Bless,” then, just below it, “Please
do not exit this door.”
HOPE Initiatives is an offshoot of Bethel Christian Fellowship.
The large East Avenue church rolled all of its outreach programs into a single
community development corporation with separate books and a separate staff a
few years ago.
The organization is one of a handful of religious
non-profits that stand to benefit from the recent creation of an Office of
Faith-based and Community Initiatives for Monroe County by County Executive
Maggie Brooks.
Even before the county created the office, HOPE Initiatives
had successfully obtained federal funds from the federal government through
President Bush’s faith-based initiative for two of its programs: $970,000 over
a three-year period to promote sexual abstinence in schools, and $480,000 (also
over three years) for a program that pairs volunteer mentors/counselors with
the children of prisoners in Monroe County jail.
“We have a heart for kids in this city,” says Luis Perez,
HOPE Initiatives’ executive director (and a district pastor at Bethel). “One of
the primary callings of the church is to look out for the poor and the needy
and those in distress. That’s our responsibility. That’s our charge.”
Perez echoes language purveyed by the Bush administration,
saying that the changes to federal funding laws merely “level the playing
field.”
A program like child mentoring, for example, ought to be
judged on an equal footing with its secular counterparts, he says.
“Everybody’s doing that,” says Perez. “We just happen to
have skills, experience, people with passion for that, so why not do it? No one
could say that could be inherently religious. But if we have the capacity and
professionalism to do that why shouldn’t we? Because we’re a church?”
But more than simply seeking to join the traditional mix of
social programs the federal government funds, some religious groups want to
reshape the face of human services. Perez, who holds a Master’s degree in
social work, articulates a vision of human services — shared by many
evangelicals — that dovetails perfectly with the Reagan-era Republican
principle of small government. Namely, that social welfare is the
responsibility of the church, not the government. According to this narrative,
government welfare programs owe their existence to the church’s past failures
to live up to its mission of clothing the naked, feeding the hungry, and caring
for the fatherless and the widow.
That’s why Perez isn’t worried that funneling public dollars
to religious groups might weaken similar government programs.
“The government shouldn’t be doing it anyway,” he says.
A few minutes later Perez softens his language to reflect a
more nuanced perspective: “I think there are certain roles the government
plays, but the pendulum has swung such that everybody is looking for the
government to do what we should be doing as believers.”
That strong sense of the historic role played by the church in social services is something the
Reverend Scott Tayler, co-minister of Unitarian Church of Rochester, shares
with Perez. It’s a history in which groups like the Salvation Army and Catholic
Charities formed the backbone of the human services support network available
to the poor.
Paradoxically, that’s led Tayler to take the opposite
position on accepting government funds for his church’s outreach efforts.
“We would not do it on principle because of our concern that
this approach leads to a blurring of church and state boundaries,” he says.
“We’d rather spend our own money on our own programs.”
Which is what the Unitarian Church has done. Using money
from its own budget, the church operates programs that provide food and shelter
to the homeless, and also donates to other groups doing similar work.
“I totally agree with the current administration that
faith-based organizations are effective,” Tayler says. But that doesn’t mean he
thinks tax dollars should go to support such programs. Instead, Tayler says, he
believes the church’s stance vis-ร -vis the government ought to be encouraging
it to spend public money more wisely, not vying for a portion of it.
When it comes to his concern about blurring the lines
between church and state, Tayler is clear in his objections. Directly or
indirectly, he says, taxpayer money is subsidizing religious activity.
“There’s no way to deny that in one way or another the money
that goes to faith-based programs ends up supporting the evangelism part of the
program,” he says.
Even if the funds are kept strictly separate, Tayler argues,
that still means “more money is available for evangelism.”
And when extra dollars are freed up for evangelism, you’ve
crossed into a First Amendment gray area where government is involved in
promoting a specific religion, he says.
It’s into this ideologically
charged debate that the county’s first-ever faith czar steps.
The office Mel Walczak heads is brand new — he was
appointed to the position of manager January 7 — and tiny: “Initially, I am
the office,” he says.
The soft-spoken priest (no longer in active ministry) most
recently worked for the county’s Department of Human and Health Services. “I’ve
had my feet in both worlds,” he says.
That experience will need to serve him well, since he’s
stepping into largely uncharted terrain.
“To my knowledge, Monroe County is the first county in New
York State to establish its own office of faith-based and community
initiatives,” he says.
Jeremy White, at the outreach arm of the White House’s
faith-based office, couldn’t think of any other county-level offices, either in
New York or elsewhere in the nation, but added that his office doesn’t track
such developments. (Several states have established statewide offices, but New York is not among them.)
Though in theory the county’s office is supposed to be
modeled after the White House version, there is at least one very important
difference: Unlike the federal government, the county does not have its own
so-called “compassionate care” fund to dole out — at least, not yet. (That
may change in the future, says Walczak.) Instead, the county’s top faith
administrator functions primarily as a liaison, connecting groups like HOPE
Initiatives to federal dollars, taking the mystique out of jargony application
forms, and brokering access to services like county grantwriters.
“It’s that, plus a little bit more,” Walczak says. “It’s
really trying to connect all the dots that exist already in the community so
that it puts together a seamless effort to solving some of the problems.”
Walczak says he accepted the new position at Brooks’ urging
after the two had a series of conversations about what the county could do to
coordinate disparate local efforts. Like the Bush administration, they
concluded that a well-placed grant to an existing religious organization was an
effective tool.
“And I’m hoping through this office — and that’s certainly
the hope of the county executive — that we will be able to provide that extra
little push or that extra connection that they might need to be able to do more
of the good things that they’re doing,” Walczak says.
The trend that Perez is pushing for and Walczak embodies — one of devolving social services
responsibility from the federal level to state, local governments, or even out
of government altogether — is one that’s been going on since the 1970s, says
Len Erb. Erb is the director of the Center for Christian Social Ministries at
Roberts Wesleyan College. The Chili college is one of only a handful of
evangelical colleges nationwide to offer a Master’s of Social Work. The Center
for Christian Social Ministries is the program’s hands-on arm.
To Erb, the trend toward allowing religious groups more
access to federal money is mostly a good one; it reverses previous
discrimination against such groups solely on the basis of religion, he says.
But he also is attuned to the complexity of the church-and-state relationship.
“We certainly need to be concerned, but concerned on both
sides of the First Amendment,” he says. “That there not be a deliberate
proselytizing under government funding — I think that’s clearly prohibited
— but by the same token neither should there be a discouragement of
faith-based initiatives. The First Amendment has two phrases, and we have to
make sure that both of those are held in balance.”
Whether that balance will continue to hold up if the federal
government keeps handing more responsibility over to non-governmental groups
remains to be seen, says Erb.
“That trend will probably continue,” he says. “Is there a
point at which the federal government just completely bails out? I don’t think
that will happen; I think government always has a role to play. I’d like to see
that role be more an oversight role to make sure equity continues for all
people, so faith-based organizations, if they did more, would not be doing it
in a discriminatory sense. I think that’s a very important role for the
government.”
For now that
oversight role is also largely the territory of non-profit, non-government
organizations.
But among groups that typically play watchdog on
church-state issues, the county’s new office has generated surprisingly little
response.
“We’re in a wait-and-see mode,” says Barbara de Leeuw,
executive director of the local ACLU. Until they’ve done more research, she
says, her group won’t take a stand on the county office.
“It’s not our idea to shut this thing down,” says de Leeuw.
“As long as people aren’t proselytizing, as long there’s not subtle pressure,
it may be a fine thing.”
The local chapter of Americans United for Separation of
Church and State wasn’t even aware of the office’s creation.
The only strong stand taken by a local group comes from
Metro Justice, whose organizer, Jon Greenbaum, serves a biting critique.
Characterizing the office as a step toward the privatization of basic services,
he says “It’s just part of a move toward a theocracy.”
To lay such charges to rest, Walczak and those like Perez whom he’ll serve will need to convince
the public that the church-state wall will remain intact.
“I think that the effort from the George Bush administration
still recognizes the strength of the first amendment to keep the two entities
separate to a certain degree,” Walczak says. “None of those dollars are to be
used for any inherently religious practice. You can’t take dollars that are
designed to deal with social problems and use them as a vehicle for
proselytizing one faith against the other or for enhancing your own religious
experience, whatever that happens to be.”
But it remains largely up to each group to police itself.
What if a volunteer felt God calling them to share their
faith, despite the strictures that accompany federal dollars?
“I would tell you that if you’re with that child through the
mentoring relationship we set up, you probably don’t want to do that,” Perez
says. “You want to be a friend, you want to be an encourager, but you don’t
want to impose your values on them during the time that you’re working or
serving under the auspices of what we’re doing here.”
But then he adds: “We all know how that works. Once a
relationship is established and people spend more time than the hour that’s
allotted, it could be different. But in this case we want them just to mentor
the child. So in training we talk about that.”
HOPE Initiatives relies on that training to prevent
volunteer counselors from overstepping boundaries, says Perez.
How much training do they receive?
“The initial training is six hours,” he says, and after that
there are monthly gatherings to address topical issues.
This article appears in Feb 2-8, 2005.
