Utah American Atheists

THE PUBLIC FUNDING OF RELIGION -- A THREAT TO STATE-CHURCH SEPARATION IN THE 21st CENTURY

by Conrad F. Goeringer
At The Rocky Mountain RAM Jan 30, 2000

What I'd like to talk about today is the problem we face as both atheists and state-church separationists with the public funding of religion. I don't mean to suggest that the issues other speakers have touched on day are not important. They are. I think it's pretty obvious that in the foreseeable future, we are going to have to continue in our role of trying to prevent or dismantle religious monuments in public, and stop attempts to introduce prayer, creationism and other religious ritual into the public school classrooms. I think that we are essentially dealing with the same types of issues that were addressed in supreme court cases from the early 1960's, ENGEL v. VITALE, MURRAY v. CURLETT, SCHEMPP v. ABINGTON TOWNSHIP. The same is true of creationism... the debate in the year 2000 is essentially the same one that the Scopes trial was about in 1925.

There is one issue that is emerging, though, that was almost dead and buried, and that is the public funding of religious groups. Let me give you a brief overview of this.

Beginning with the American Revolution, the respective states began in 1776 a process known as "disestablishment of religion," which meant that one did not need to be a member of a so-called "established" church in order to own property, or hold an office of public trust of exercise other rights. In addition, in some of the states the official church no longer received the largesse of public funding. Lands having been granted to the church were taken back in Virginia. A fight also erupted when some churches tried to incorporate and establish themselves as quasi-official agencies.

Now, in 1835, beginning with Pennsylvania, states began granting churches a tax exemption on their property , and from 1859 to 1911, religious groups won this special status in thirty-eight states. And it's interesting to note that all during this time, while religious groups were seeking special tax privileges, there was also a flurry of legislation -- nearly 70 bills at the federal level up to 1910-- which would have declared the United States a nation officially founded on Christianity and the Saviorship of Jesus Christ. Within this same time frame you had other proposals too, like the one in 1861 by Rev. M. R. Watkinson who proposed that "In God We Trust" become the motto on coinage.

So, there's a lot of good historical data to suggest this correlation between the churches seeking a special privilege of tax exemption, and efforts to move the United States further away from political separation, and establish Christianity as official ideology of the land.

Beginning in the early 20th century, religious groups -- and specifically the Roman Catholic Church -- began attempting to find ways to obtain public money for sectarian education and other activities. Actually, the first case of this type that I found was from 1899, BRADFIELD v. ROBERTS, and this involved whether or not government appropriations for a hospital chartered by Congress and run by the Sisters of Charity violated the separation of church and state. The court voted unanimously that it did not, and in a very brief decision, they said that essentially that while the incorporators happened to be religious, the charter of the hospital rendered it a secular corporation.

In 1908 there was another ruling, this was in the case QUICK BEAR v. LEUPP. This involved money flowing from the federal government through a trust fund set up for the Sioux Indian Tribe in South Dakota; some of this money was used for a contract with the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions to operate a boarding school. And in this decision, once again the Supreme Court was unanimous, it held that the funds technically belonged to the Indian tribe who were free to dispose of the money as they saw fit. So, what you have here is the genesis of a "pass through" principal where the government basically says that they are doling out money to another entity or agency. And here, was of the facts admitted to in the case was that the Catholic group operating the school was sectarian, the school itself was sectarian. And it even came out in one of the footnotes in the case that:

The Catholic missions schools were erected many years ago at the cost of charitable Catholics, and with the approval of the authorities of the government of the United States, whose policy it was then to encourage the education and civilization of the Indians through the work of religious organizations..."

There was an act passed in 1819 that provided $10,000 of tax money in direct aid the associations or individuals engaged in this effort. In 1820, twenty one religious schools received $11,838 in aid.

Now in 1930, another case comes along that is particularly relevant to us today, and this is sure to influence many judicial outcomes regarding further attempts to meld government money and religion-operated social aid, and ironically it has to do with aid to religious schools. This is the high court's 8-0 ruling in COCHRAN v. LOUISIANA STATE BOARD OF EDUCATION, which examined a Louisiana act permitting public money to buy textbooks for school children.

This is one of the briefest Supreme Court decision I have read. It prints out to two pages, but I think it has some profound ramifications. In the COCHRAN case, the justices articulated what has been dubbed the "child benefit theory" of government aid. The justices said that the money was for textbooks, that it was available to both public and religious school children, and -- to quote the decision:

"The schools, however are not the beneficiaries of these appropriations. They obtain nothing from them, nor are they relieved of a single obligation, because of them."

Now, the justice claimed that these funds did not purchase anything that helped the school in indoctrinating the youngsters in religion. And they also noted that the books were given to the children, not the school. And not one justice questioned this reasoning, or the implications it might have.

Another pertinent case was 1947, EVERSON v. BOARD OF EDUCATION which examined a New Jersey practice of reimbursing parents of youngsters attending religious schools for transportation. In a 5-4 ruling, the justices acknowledged that despite the wall of separation, the plan was constitutional because of the "child benefit" theory. What is often ignored, though, when that case is cited, is what Justice Black wrote in the majority decision, he suggested that the ruling carried "to the verge" of territory forbidden under the Religion clause, and those words were later used in another case that we will come to, LEMON v. KURTZMAN.

The point I want to make here, though, is that in 1947 and again 24 years later, the court is warning that something as seemingly innocent as the state covering bus transportation was really about the limit that you could go in trying to justify public aid, in this case to a religious school.

We can expect a decision in just a couple of months in a similar case involving how far the government can go in spending public money to assist sectarian schools, and this is MITCHELL v. HELMS, and this involves a provision in the 1981 "Elementary, Secondary and Education Act" (ESEA). That Act made government money available for public and non-public schools, specifically in the form of technical equipment like computers and audio-visual aids. These resources are supposedly in the form of a "loan" to the school. This lawsuit dates back to 1985, which will give you some idea of how long it takes for these legal challenges to wind their way through the courts.

Now, after COCHRAN the floodgates opened further. The 1947 case of EVERSON v. BOARD OF EDUCATION simply extended the "child benefit" theory. Again, advocates of this sort of aid would say that the practice benefited the students, it was comparable to what the government did really for public school youngsters, and you couldn't really show supposedly this linkage between paying for transportation to and from school, and religious instruction.

The effect of all of this, then, is to start chipping away at a literal or strong interpretation of the Establishment Clause. You start drawing the line at specific practices within religious schools, or whether the aid directly funds a religious practice or activity, and you never really look at the broader picture of whether or not such aid has the overall effect of assisting the survival or "mission" of religious institutions.

We are far from a resolution on all of this, especially one that is consistent. As you know the latest scheme is vouchers, so that rather than having the government give the check directly to the sectarian school, the money is funneled to a third party -- the parents -- and they supposedly "choose" on whether or not the reimbursement or "scholarship" or "grant" or whatever else you want to call it is ultimately used. But the effect and intent is really the same -- you have this transfer of government money from the public treasury to religious schools.

I want to move on to something, though, that is broader than just public aid to sectarian schools, and that is the question of social programs operated by faith-based organizations.

In a sense, this is already a "done deal." Religious groups benefit from billions of dollars of government programs, grants and other tax disbursements every year to operate hospitals, nursing homes and retirement communities. Religious denominations establish non-profit corporate subsidiaries to administer social outreach programs -- everything from soup kitchens to emergency services, hospices, literacy programs and much more. We have no idea whatsoever of how much this comes to annually; in fact, I'd suggest that in every state and municipality, we don't have a breakdown, and for a couple of reasons.

-- One is that we haven't taken the time to look. There isn't much interest in this, we aren't aware of it.

-- The second reason is that the funding is so spread across the accounting ledger, there are federal programs, some of the money trickles down to the states and municipalities, there are different names for programs, so you get into the whole Byzantine world of public finance.

One reason for the lack of interest may be that a lot of these programs have seemingly worthy goals. Or, maybe people (and I think that this includes a lot of atheists and separationists) are simply unaware of their extent. For instance, I know that in the Northeast U.S., every time there is a blizzard urban areas put into effect special snow warnings, for instance, where the homeless are rounded up and transported to public shelters, and some of these are operated by religious groups. What a lot of people don't realize is that increasingly, these programs depend on public funds for the bulk of their financing. Last year, for instance, National Catholic Charities received 60% of its total operating budget from public disbursements, and on top of that may have been as much as a 10% - 12% administrative fee.

Beginning the late 1960s and 70s, social service programs expanded considerably and two trends quickly emerged:

* The first was a process whereby social programs were increasingly funded but not administered by governmental agencies. This meant that non-profits became major players in delivering goods and services, whether it was literacy programs or community food banks. One impetus for much of this was the booming "market" in drug and alcohol abuse rehabilitation programs, and the fact that the higher education system was grinding out a surplus of people with degrees in fields like "counseling" so social services became a growth industry.

* Religious groups stepped into this market for a variety of reasons. For Protestant mainstream groups, this was simply an extension of the "social gospel" movement from the early part of the century that called upon churches to reach out and involve themselves in addressing social problems like poverty. But I think there was more of an incentive here, because public money -- even under conservative political regimes -- was loosening up. Religious groups directly, or through affiliated non-profits stepped up the plate for their share of the action.

Now, this raised some interesting constitutional problems. To the best of my knowledge, it never reached the Supreme Court level, but here's what happened... because religious groups were either directly or peripherally involved in the operation of many new social programs, some very loose guidelines were established to deal with this question of faith-based organizations handling public money. The program had to be non-discriminatory, that is it had to be open to all without regard to race, gender or religious belief. So, in other words, if the Salvation Army was operating a soup kitchen or overnight rescue mission, in theory they could not use religious belief or affiliation as a litmus test. Everyone had to be eligible.

The program could not be proselytizing in nature. I suspect that the deeper we might dig into this, the more evidence of abuse we will find... There were some cases where a gospel rescue mission might require a "client" to first listen to a religious service or rant, but as far as I know where those practices were challenged (and that's an important condition here), they ended up being changed at least for the time being.

So, you had an expanded version of the old "child benefit" theory at work, because people could argue that it was the poor and the hungry and the needy that were benefiting, not the religious organization. Government was simply a "pass through" mechanism. And there was another legal loophole, and ironically this was one that was supposed to end up protecting the separation of church and state, and this was the "LEMON TEST."

This was based on a 1971 U.S. Supreme Court case known as LEMON v. KURTZMAN. Now, this was a combined case that examined state programs in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island where money was given directly to parochial schools with the proviso that it was to spent only for secular instruction -- so it has some loose parallels with this practice of government giving money to sectarian non-profits with the understanding that it be used only in a constitutionally appropriate way.

In LEMON, the court laid down the so-called "three-prong" or "Lemon Test" as a standard to presumably help courts evaluate when public policy violates the establishment clause. And here is what the justice wrote in LEMON.

"Every analysis in this area must begin with consideration of the cumulative criteria developed by the Court over many years. Three such tests may be gleaned from our cases. First, the statute must have a secular legislative purpose; second, its principal or primary effect must be one that neither advances nor inhibits religion; finally, the statute must not foster 'an excessive government entanglement with religion.'"

Now, there are some problems here. Even though LEMON is frequently attacked by religious right groups in particular as an oppressive instrument, and has indeed been crucial in overturning a number of violate practices, I would argue that increasingly, it is either ignored outright or actually used to permit, rationalize and facilitate other practices which we would certainly argue violate the separation of church and state. A court merely has to connect a religious activity with some kind of "secular goal," and then opine simply through what is best termed as "dicta" that the said practice passes the other two prongs. For instance, courts have talked about public programs having the "incidental" effect of assisting religion, but still ruled them constitutional.

Without getting bogged down in a legal debate, it is worth noting that courts have also distinguished between, say, whether a subsidy is paid directly to a religious institution or an individual; they have gone to excruciating lengths to try and separate the idea of a tax exemption for religious groups from, say, direct support. I would argue that the cumulative effect of all of this is to leave the door open -- wider and wider as time passes -- for a considerable amount of transfer of funds from the public treasury to sectarian groups.

In LEMON the court noted that one of the problems with religious aid to sectarian schools was the state would become seriously entangled with religion if it had to monitor how all of this money was spent. For instance, in discussing one Rhode Island case, the decision talks about impressionable children, the dangers of a teacher under religious control and discipline. It adds:

'These factors require continuing state surveillance to ensure that the statutory restrictions are obeyed and the First Amendment otherwise respected. Furthermore, under the Act, the government must inspect school records to determine what part of the expenditures is attributable to secular education as opposed to religious activity..."

Similar terms are used in looking at a Pennsylvania program, the justice noted that entanglement between church and state arises:

"...from the restrictions and surveillance necessary to ensure that teachers play a strictly nonideological role and the state supervision of nonpublic school accounting procedures required to establish the cost of secular as distinguished from religious education... Historically, government control and surveillance measures tend to follow cash grant programs, and here the government's post-audit power to inspect the financial records of church-related schools creates an intimate and continuing relationship between church and state..."

What I would like to do is think about all of this not just in the case of government aid to religious schools (where, you could argue, impressionable children are involved) but the wider issue of government-funded social outreaches which are administered and operated by religious institutions. A lot of questions come up here:

* What is the scale of this transfer between governments (at all levels) and religious non-profit organizations? We simply don't know. Right now there are so many conduits the money could flow through. You'd have to start at the local level, for instance, by going down to city hall, trying to get a list of all of the groups which are granted public monies -- usually that trickles down to city hall through government and state programs like Community Development Block Grants-- and then see how that money, in turn, in disbursed. Even when you had the list, it would not always be clear whether a particular program was being operated by a religious group. For instance, if you find that something called (and this is just picking out a name...) "Wingspan" or "Harvest House" is getting government money, you'd have to dig deeper and try to identify who or what group is behind that.

* Even if the claimed goals of a program are said to be secular, is this really the case? I think we need to have a public discussion as to whether or not giving public money to National Catholic Charities or some other sectarian group for programs is not in itself compelling nonbelievers to support religion in a significant way. We could argue the legal nuances of this, we could argue whether this does indeed aid religion, but I think that we need to have that brought up in the public forum.

* Are these programs serving religion indirectly? This relates to the point I just raised. We need some research in this area...let me just ask: why do you think that religious groups get involved in CLEAN UP A HIGHWAY programs? It's not just to clean up the road, it's to gain visibility for their religious group or church. There may be a parallel here...

* Do such programs amount to a "job corps" (at public expense) for those who directly affiliated with religious groups? Are nuns, or priests or ministers or their relatives drawing salaries? Again, I think this is a different situation from a case where a nun or priest or minister would take off his or her uniform and go to work driving a cab or working in Sears.

I want to briefly turn now to the issue of public funding of faith-based groups and the current political climate, specifically the year 2000 elections.

The leading contenders for both the Republican and Democratic presidential nominations have proposed so-called "faith-based partnerships" between the church and the state as a mechanism for dealing with social ills, and administering a variety of social service programs.

Vice President Gore proposed a "New Partnership" with religious groups last May during a speech in Atlanta at a Salvation Army drug rehabilitation center. He told the media that if elected president, "the voices of faith-based organizations will be integral to the policies set forth in my administration." Gore paid lip service to the separation of church and state -- and that is something we notice more and more on the campaign trail, where the establishment clause is either recast as a one-directional membrane designed to protect the church from interference by the state rather than guard society and civil liberties from the predatory dogmas of religion, or it is reduced to an encumbrance, a sort of embarrassment.

Incidentally, Gore went on to denounce what he called the "allergy to faith," he said: "I believe that faith in itself is sometimes essential to spark a personal transformation," so none of you in this audience will ever be able to "transform." He also praised the fact that "belief in god" was essential to the Salvation Army's rehabilitation scheme -- so much the for the idea that programs paid for with public funds must be primarily secular.

Two months later, George W. Bush was on the bandwagon. In July he told a crowd of parishioners at an Indianapolis church that he wanted to establish a federal "Office of Faith-Based Action" which he described as the "next bold step in welfare reform." The purpose was to encourage Americans to give to religious groups, and increase the role of government in making money available for faith-based outreaches. Bush said that in his first year, if elected, he would dedicated $8 billion to these programs.

Now, the proposals being put forth by Bush and the GOP are more blatant when it comes to the restrictions which currently exist on paper for religious groups to follow when they accept public money. Generally speaking, the Democrats give at least a token nod, an ascent to the notion that there have to be some restrictions on permitting religious groups to incorporate religion blatantly into any programs that they administer. Bush and a lot of proposals from the GOP on capitol hill make no such pretensions.

Just a couple of examples...

* The American Community Renewal Act sponsored by Rep. J.C.Watt would lift any restrictions on funding of groups that incorporate a sectarian message into their programs.

* The Religious Freedom Amendment, which everyone thinks is just limited to school prayer -- it isn't -- has been re-introduced in the House by Rep. Ernest Istook. The most dangerous part of this legislation is that is says that government could not deny a "benefit" on account of religion, and many of us see that as an open invitation to the public funding of faith-based outreaches.

Faith-based outreach schemes have also begun popping up in state capitals and city halls. In Indianapolis, the Mayor there has something called "Front Porch America," which tries to involve churches. In Michigan, last year Henry Morgan our State Director found out about a seminar that the Department of Housing and Urban Development was having, that was exclusively for religious groups, and was designed to "assist" them in getting low-interest loans and other money to buy or construct low-cost housing complexes.

In Philadelphia, the newly elected Mayor, John Street, has announced that he is opening up a faith-based partnership. In New Jersey, Gov. Christine Whitman has established a state office of Faith-based partnership, and in Newark, for instance, government money was used to rehabilitate a run-down movie theater and turn it into a church and so-called "community meeting center."

Closing Remarks

I'd like to close (and I'm sure that you would like me to close!) with some thoughts on how this issue of public funding of religion-based social outreaches and groups is going to affect us as both Atheists and First Amendment state-church separationists; and briefly add to that some recommendations.

The first thing that became apparent to me is how little we actually know.

There are a few books -- and I think that Madalyn O'Hairs FREEDOM UNDER SIEGE is a classic, as brief as it is -- and every so often there is an article or news story that gives us some insight into the extent of church wealth in American, and sometimes discusses a connection with government. There are those paragraphs, for instance on pg. 181 where O'Hair discussed the extent of religious holdings in the United States... She said, for instance: "Mormons control the greatest aggregation of capital to be found in the states of the Rocky Mountain region."

I think it would useful for us to start updating this information-- that book was published in 1974. The issue of church wealth is inextricably linked to that of public funding of religion because some of this wealth was directly transferred from or facilitated by the state. When you talk about a hospital, or retirement home or some other enterprise, we need to know who owns it, how it makes money, how it is funded.

Second, I think that with all of these proposals from political and religious groups right and left, from both parties, we need to start developing strong and innovative legal and rhetorical strategies to stop this trend. I'm operating here from the premise that the "child benefit theory" or arguments that suggest that religion-based social outreaches do not violate the First Amendment are spurious. I'm also operating from the position that it is difficult if not impossible to give money to religious groups in any form, and expect them to operate or administer a "secular" social outreach, and not derive some benefit from it.

I think that we need to start a discussion about this, and I think that one objective should be to challenge more of these programs in court.

We have several hurdles to clear here. In the March, 1991 issue of American Atheist Magazine, Jon Murray pointed out how many Atheist and first amendment cases have been dismissed as "frivolous;" another strategy has been to declare that the plaintiff challenging a particular practice "lacks standing," and this is what initially happened to Richard Suhre, an American Atheist member who died last summer, and who had challenged a display of the Ten Commandments in his local courthouse.

Another strategy that we see increasingly is to use cases and standards that are meant to protect separation as two-edged swords, whereby practices are upheld and actually strengthened. This happens more in more in the use of the "Lemon Test."

The problem here is that not only is LEMON under attack directly -- you mention LEMON at Pat Robertson's American Center for Law and Justice and they grimace... -- it is also being watered down. One way is to maintain that any religious elements in a case are "benign," and see this claim all the time especially in briefs filed by the government. They might argue, for instance, that a display of the Ten Commandments is "not religious" or is "benign" because you don't have to go over and read it, even if it is displayed at the front of a courthouse. Another strategy is to take a portion of LEMON and simply claim that the purpose of some practice is primarily secular, it's NOT primarily religious, that there is some secular purpose involved. The key here is to argue (as the Supreme Court has done in cases like LYNCH v. DONNELLY, that a statute does not automatically violate the Establishment Clause simply because it confers an incidental benefit on religion.

So, it's going to be very difficult to challenge a lot of practices which involve religious groups getting public money to run social programs even if they are faith-based to some degree. There's the rub. WE know that religious groups are profiting from this.

Third, this is going to require a change in how we approach issues. We get in an enormous amount of information about what Atheist and forethought groups are doing, and I think that in certain ways, we're still whistling in the wind. We are where the religious right was thirty years ago, and I think that we have to borrow some pages from their strategy books.

So we're talking here about trying to educate atheists, to try to make them more savvy in navigating and negotiating the political system. We're talking about trying to develop a sense of priorities, that means that you have to realize that not every idea or suggestion that someone brings up is good one, and even if it is good, it doesn't automatically mean that we should do it.

I think that this issue of the public funding of religion means that we have to morph more in the direction of positioning ourselves as a watchdog group. It also means that we have invest some time and effort in long term researching and fact finding. Again, it's relatively easy to sit down and argue with the local preacher about things like evolution or the existence of god (and I'm not saying that we should avoid that sort of thing all together), but that is a flash-in-the-pan issue. If you want to find out what the local preacher owns, or better yet what his or her denomination owns, and where their money is coming from, you have to do so some digging. That means that we need people who are willing to put in the time and effort digging through public records, developing some investigative skills, asking questions -- this sort of thing -- and assembling a picture on the local, state and federal level.

Just look at what the religious right has done over the issue of schools. In every community and state where they raise a flap about the school curriculum, some group like the Eagle Forum or the Christian Coalition does its homework, they research the schools, they find out about textbooks and courses. They investigate, they dig, they research. We have to do the same thing. If you want to stop the public funding of religion, you have find out how it is taking place, where the money is coming from, how it's being spent. That means that you have start getting the basic skills of digging through the public record. You have to know, for instance, what's in your state corporation commission office. You have to know what's in the city and county budget. If a city gets a grant, you have to start finding out about who is getting the grant money, and where it's going. And the information is there, you have to start developing the skills to ferret it out.

In the 1960s, Allen Dulles who was then the head of the CIA wrote a little book titled "The Craft of Intelligence," and he said something very revealing. Ninety-nine percent of all intelligence comes from public record sources. 99%. Only 1% is the James Bond stuff. There is so much public record, and in our case I think that we CAN start to track this, but we have to develop the commitment and expertise to dig.

As a watchdog group or groups, we have to take this information and do what so many other advocacy groups are doing, and this go public with it! Build public awareness. Talk about in the media, hold a press conference, complain to local officials.

Fourth, there is the question of after finding out this sort of information, after the press conferences, what else do we do? We have to get creative here, too, and one proposal I have is that if we can't stop public funding of religious programs, we can hobble them, restrict them and slow them down. Here's what I mean... and you should take a page from the environmentalists books on this. No nuclear power plants are being build in this country. Not a one that I'm aware of. And it's not because we don't know how to build them, and maybe it's not just because some people don't want them built (because a lot probably do...), it's because it is now way too expensive to do so. It would take at least a decade just to get through the permitting process, the environmental impact studies, the paperwork, the oversight.

I suggest that frankly, we try to do the same with religious outreaches that depend on public largesse, and if any media are here, I don't mind saying this in front of them. I think that we need to make the public funding of faith-based social outreaches, or programs that are even loosely associated with religious groups (because we re aware of what this is really all about...) so expensive, or so burdened with regulations and paperwork, or so controversial, that religious groups are going to think twice before heading to city hall or the state capitol to apply for a grant. I think that it is thoroughly reasonable and fair, and a positive affirmation of the public fiduciary responsibility, that faith-based agencies receiving any public money be monitored strictly.

So, we should demand that any funding to a religious group come with more than just a token sign-off by a city attorney who perfunctorily states that the program passes constitutional muster.

We should demand an active oversight plan; one possibility for instance is random checks of a facility to make sure that religious symbols and literature is not being displayed. We should also require the religious/social group in question to come up with a training program for all personnel delineating what precisely they may or may not do. (Judge Ira DeMent has mandated this for public schools in DeKalb County, Alabama). Rules should be in place, the same rules that are used, say, with religious volunteers who might come into a public school. In other words, I don't see any reason why a program that is taking public money should have any less oversight than a private business, whether it's the local gas station or the nuclear power plant.

Under this same category, I propose that we also try to ensure that local and state governments -- if they disburse money to religious groups for any kind of social outreach -- do not exempt these same groups from the sorts of generally applicable rules that apply to other organizations and businesses. Let me give you a quick example... We ran a story in AANEWS in November, 1998 about a California hospital owned by the Seventh-day Adventist church. Now, three-quarters of the nurses there signed a petition calling for a union election, and this is something guaranteed under the National Labor Relations Act. And the hospital chain, Adventist Health, said that because their religion teaches that labor unions are counter to the teachings of Jesus Christ, they wanted an exemption. I suspect that this has just as much to do with money as it does religious belief... The San Francisco Chronicle reported that hospital made over $3 million in profit in 1997.

Incidentally, this practice of union busting isn't just limited to the Seventh Day Adventists. In March of 1998, two third of the nurses at a Roman Catholic hospital in Fresno, California signed a union petition, and this is one of the facilities owned by something called Holy Cross Health Systems Corporation, which is based in South Bend, Indiana.

Again, under this same heading, I think that a good place to start in getting a handle on the extent of church wealth would be in studying hospital systems owned by religious groups. A Planned Parenthood affiliate in New York has done some excellent research on the impact these hospitals are having in terms of women's' access to abortion and contraception services. Just recently in New Jersey, the ACLU had to make the best of a bad situation when it reached a compromise agreement with a hospital that was taken over by a Catholic health care chain, because these Roman Catholic hospitals take over, they continue to receive all sorts of public funding in one way or another, they compete with private hospitals and secular non-profit hospitals, and to varying degrees they bring their religious message into the hospital. The abortion issue is a case in point.

The issue of public funding of religion is already part of the year 2000 Campaign, it is going to grow as an issue, we're going to see more "faith-based" partnerships being formed across the country between government and religious organizations. If we want the separation of church and state to mean anything, if we want to stop the policy of having atheists subsidize religion by various social mechanisms, then we have work hard to position ourselves as a credible voice in the debate over that issue.