When legislators set up the Governor’s Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in 2019, among the selling points was its below-bargain-basement price tag.
“I’m pleased to say that this bill does not require an additional cent of taxpayers’ money,” Sen. Ken Yager of Kingston said when presenting the bill to the Senate. “We will depend on the donations and the grants that nonprofit organizations will receive.”
Gov. Bill Lee had made the office, intended as a public-private partnership to address issues like foster care and drug addiction, a central element of his God-centric first campaign for the job. “Government can never solve the challenges that we face in our community,” he said.
I’d argue churches and faith-based organizations can never solve those challenges, either, or else they would have by now. But Lee’s pitch was an appealing message for voters who believe the private sector pretty much always does a better job than the government.
Inspired perhaps by the opportunity to align themselves with a project that included “faith” in its name and also was free, not a single senator voted against it. Nor, a week earlier, had a single House member.
Things have changed since then. The notion of a self-sufficient office hasn’t exactly panned out, with fundraising proving to be a problem. So supporters of the faith-based office are again before the legislature, this time with their hands out: They’d like some of that taxpayers’ money now, if you don’t mind, to the tune of $1.2 million.
To put that in Yager’s terms from 2019, that would be 120 million cents of taxpayers’ money. Rep. Darren Jernigan of Old Hickory summed up the request this way during a committee meeting on the bill:
“We pretty much passed the plate and we didn’t raise the funds. The fundraising goal was not met, so now we’re turning to taxpayers to subsidize it.”
Jernigan – a Democrat, I should mention – thinks such a public subsidy would be an unconstitutional violation of the separation of church and state. Rep. Jason Zachary – a Republican of Knoxville who presented the bill – believes otherwise. All other states’ faith-based programs get taxpayer money, Zachary said. What’s more, he added, a similar White House program functions with federal money.
That White House program began with President George W. “Compassionate Conservative” Bush and has been continued in one form or another under his three successors.
Having done a fair amount of research, I can tell you faith-based organizations do indeed benefit from taxpayer money, within limits. The Department of Health and Human Services states those groups:
“[M]ay not use direct government support to support ‘inherently religious’ activities. Basically, it means you cannot use any part of a direct Federal grant to fund religious worship, instruction or proselytization. Instead, organizations may use government money only to support the nonreligious social services that they provide.”
It’s that church/state separation that Jernigan was suggesting a subsidy would violate.
Zachary told committee members the founders never intended to suggest a church/state separation. The phrase itself arose first in a letter from Thomas Jefferson to a Baptist group in 1802, he said, not in the Constitution. Zachary went on to read various quotes suggesting how God-centric the founders were and how connected they saw church and state.
“There seems to be this notion that the two have to be separate when our founders made clear that the two are completely intertwined,” Zachary said.
It’s an old and familiar argument, long made by those who would have you believe that the United States was founded as a Christian nation.
At its extreme, it’s a concept central to today’s Christian nationalism, a movement that can intersect “with white identity, anti-Black sentiment, patriarchy, antisemitism, anti-Muslim sentiments, anti-immigrant attitudes, authoritarianism, and support for violence,” the nonpartisan Brookings Institution states.
I’m not attributing any of that kind of extremist thinking to Zachary. I don’t even know that I’m opposed to his bill funding the faith-based office. But I am suggesting we need to be careful when heading down that road.
And I can’t help wondering how often these public-private initiatives partner with faiths that don’t feature Jesus at the helm.
Joe Rogers is a former writer for The Tennessean and editor for The New York Times. He is retired and living in Nashville.