Funding Faith-Based Charities with Taxpayer's Money
Funding Faith-Based Charities with Taxpayer's Money
There is much controversy over the recent initiative to have the government fund faith-based charities. The proposal is to allocate about $10 billion of taxpayers’ money to religious charities in the hope that they will efficiently distribute aid to the needy .(Miga). The people who want to pass this bill claim that the aid will reach more people with more efficiency than through federal charities. However, most experts, both religious and secular, disagree. Federal funding of faith-based charities will deprive people of rightful government aid. If this initiative is passed, then the federal money may not all go to its intended use –– aiding the poor and needy –– but may sponsor religious discrimination by both the church and the federal government.
Religious charities could discriminate against some of those in need; they might give aid mostly to people of the same faith. On a general basis, people who agree with each other have more in common. With this bond come more trust and sympathy between the people who agree than an outsider with a different ideology. This also applies to religion. Nothing is stopping the government funded charity workers from taking more of a liking to people of the same faith than to an atheist or a person of another religion. With trust comes friendship. With friendship comes favoritism. When favoritism enters the process, aid gets distributed unfairly, with people of the same faith as the charity getting more help than people of a different faith. The non-believers may either be converted or ignored if the charity workers have strong beliefs in their own religion. “Teen Challenge achieves a remarkable eighty-percent (80%) cure rate for teenage drug addicts because they lead the young people to faith in Jesus Christ and then painstakingly instruct them in biblical principals of Christian living,” said Pat Robertson, a popular Christian televangelist (Robertson). This approach to charity could also force change in people’s lifestyles. In Iowa, a program exists called the InnerChange Freedom Initiative for prison inmates. Every inmate is allowed in as long as they are approved by the prison, but once in the course, they are required to continue to change their lifestyle into one that is more Christian, and their rights to all television and sexually explicit materials are waived (Goodstein). This proves that if this program were funded by the government, at least some religious...