And where do we draw the line? If you donate money to your church to provide people food, all well and good. If they include gospel readings with their orange juice, that’s you’re problem (if you even have a problem with it). But if it’s the goverment’s dime, can they preach the word of God while doing God’s work? That’s why they’re there, after all- to do God’s work. So now we have the goverment paying people to promote their religion- not all religions, just some acceptable religions- oh, and to hand out orange juice. And what happens when they’re out of orange juice- but just happen to have more than enough Jesus on hand?

It’s called conflict of interest. When your paycheck is being signed by Uncle Sam, you’re not doing God’s work- you’re doing the People’s work. We the people, who, in order to form a more perfect union, did ordain and establish this goverment. When you pick up the gavel and put on a robe, when you take an elected seat, you serve the people. Not some of the people. Not just the beleivers and the righteous. All of the people.

You can’t be for faith based initiaves and be against judges ruling based on the ten commandments and not the law. You can’t be for faith based initiatives and be against calling this a Christian country. You can’t be for faith based initiatives and not be for theocracy. Because faith based initiatives are funding churches. That’s the point. And our democracy, our freedom of religion, is the externalized cost.

Given “if this…” or “if that…”, the whole problem of welfare would be trivial because there would be no poor.

Here in reality, faith-based organizations are better at doing charitable work than secular ones. So why have we been traditionally penalizing them? Is it truly a seperation of church and state — a non-judgemental stance — to penalize an organization (particularly an effective and valuable organization) simply because it is open about its faith-based status? It’s certainly just as discriminatory as preventing gay or minority advancement organizations from existing.

Besides: would it be better to force faith-based organizations and people to go into hiding, or to try to pretend that they’re something different (like “Second Harvest” does)? The enshrinement of secularism is as damaging to this country as Americanity, and it is just as bigotted and biased while cunningly and ironically labelling itself “open” and “accepting”.

As a bit of an aside, I tend to attribute the success of faith-based organizations to the following: 1) they are better at gathering and retaining volunteers than secular orgs; 2) they are less corrupt due to externalized policing; 3) they tend to be people-focused instead of system-focused (your point, analog).

This weekend, I’m going to go buy groceries for some very poor friends. Why? They lost their food stamps due to a red tape issue. And it’s not that the state employees don’t WANT to help, but rather that they CAN’T help. They can’t make exceptions even when it means children go hungry.

The church-based organizations you tout are efficient because they’re GENEROUS. They aren’t running extensive background checks or tightly monitoring just how bad that poor family needs to eat this week. Someone asks for help, they give help. And this is where the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the “compassionate conservative” approach to helping the poor comes out. For all the talk of “empowerment”, the conservative approach refuses to acknowledge the SHAME people feel in asking for help. Welfare is humiliating, and nobody wants to be on it. The only people taking aid without shame are the ones whose spirits have been totally broken by poverty and humiliation (the product of years of being called lazy and selfish for merely wanting to eat and sleep somewhere other than under a bridge).

An economic model that elevates the idea that people are selfish greedy bastards to the point of theology leads to a belief that people will simply steal resources from the public without shame or remorse. For all the moralizing on the right, they sure think people are amoral! This leads to a system that, in practice if not in theory, We The People would rather spend a dollar to make sure those who aren’t destitute get any resources intended for the destitute than give that extra dollar to the destitute.

Churches, with their passing understanding of the teachings of Jesus outweighing the politican’s tough-talk evocation of Reagan’s false “welfare queen” symbolism, simply give to those in need, and understand that those who don’t need generally don’t ask. That’s the “efficiency”. Government could be so efficient as well, if it weren’t for the selfish, greedy obsession with the selfishness and greed of others.

And I’m not saying we should eliminate all government charitable programs. Just that we should seriously challenge the assumption that its the governments responsibility to take care of everything.