Seamus Hasson, the founder of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, warned faith-based organizations in an August 28, 2014, Wall Street Journal op-ed of the "Pharaoh Effect": the religious organizations enter into a partnership with a friendly government-and then a later administration adopts an anti-religious policy, forcing the organizations either to accept secularizing restrictions on their operations or to give up the government funds they've come to depend on.
His current example of this dangerous dynamic? New York City's rules on permissible and impermissible religious symbols, stories, and practices as Mayor Bill de Blasio's administration recruits faith-based schools into the city's expanding government-funded preK school program.
As a New York Times story on the expansion, and its dilemmas, said:
"The biblical story of Noah's Ark will be taught, without mention of who told Noah to build it. Challah, the Jewish bread eaten on the Sabbath, will be baked, but no blessings said over it. Some crucifixes will be removed but others left hanging."
Reflecting on rules like these that have been generated in other attempts over the past decades to put together religious schools and government programs that insist on secularism, Hasson says,
"A rabbi friend once said to me, with a twinkle in his eye, that it had all become very 'Jesuitical,' hadn't it? I responded in kind that it seemed more Talmudic to me. Whereupon we both agreed it was Byzantine."
But of course, as Hasson stresses, a partnership between government and faith-based organizations that is structured like this is no laughing matter. It is no surprise that both the New York Civil Liberties Union and religious leaders and organizations concerned about faithfulness are watchful and worried.
The problem isn't partnership. The problem is the terms of the partnership. The mayor is intent not simply on expanding government-funded preK-but, according to his deputy major, intent "to create a single, unified, high-quality system."
But city government is not permitted to pay for religion. It is forbidden to budget government funds to buy story books telling how God spoke to Noah. A "single, unified" system has to follow the secular rules that apply to government funds.
That forces religious schools that accept the money into contortions, trying to
extract the "religion" from stories and practices that may become confused or meaningless once deconstructed.
There is a solution, endorsed by the U.S. Supreme Court and long practiced in the federal program that funds child care for low-income families: use vouchers rather than government contracts to providing funding for the preK schooling. With vouchers, it is the family that decides which preK school to choose, and it is the family's right to choose a fully religious school.
When the city pays the school after it turns in the voucher that shows the family's choice, the city is only supporting the family's decision, not violating the constitution by setting out to pay for religion. With vouchers, the city can freely partner with religious as well as secular schools, the religious schools can take part without having to suppress their religious character, and parental wishes about the character of their children's school are respected.
A voucher-based system will be less "unified" but it will be "high[er]-quality." Religious leaders and faith-based schools in New York City should insist on vouchers. And city and state elected leaders ought to modify the laws if they are concerned that the state's church-state rules are not hospitable to voucher funding of faith-based organizations.
