Category: What’s Wrong with Faith-Based Funding?

The following article was developed as a position paper by the Center for Inquiry’s Office of Public Policy in Washington, D.C., and released on February 6, 2009. The reviewers were Paul Kurtz, Derek Araujo, Ronald A. Lindsay, and Toni Van Pelt.—Eds. Government-funded social-service programs conducted by religious organizations are becoming increasingly sectarian. The Center for …

In an ideal world, there would be no such thing as a government-run “faith-based” initiative. A federal office that does nothing but look for ways to funnel mo ney to religious organizations is hard to square with the separation of church and state. But the reality is that we are way beyond that discussion. The …

Nearly everyone now takes for granted the wisdom, constitutionality, and inevitability of some form of federal financing for community social services run by religious groups. Who anymore can imagine that the United States managed to exist for over two hundred years without the government providing any direct aid to faith and its works? It is …

President Barack Obama has gratified the “reality-based community” by reversing some of his predecessor’s policies on everything from the detention and torture of terror suspects to government funding of abortion and family planning counseling, fuel-efficiency standards, and stem-cell research. But one part of Obama’s program represents change I can’t believe in. The change Obama brought …

The Supreme Court has decided to hear the case of Salazar v. Buono, an interesting church-state dispute—interesting in no small part because it may tell us much about the Obama administration’s approach to establishment-clause issues. For most of the past seventy years, there has been an eight-foot cross set atop Sunrise Rock in the Mojave …