Gaining faith in federal money?

Operation Blessing, which has a paid staff of 40 at its Virginia Beach headquarters, says its mission is to "demonstrate God’s love by alleviating human need and suffering in the United States and around the world." That means the group does not hire non-Christians. (File Photo/ The Virginian-Pilot )

By BILL SIZEMORE
The Virginian-Pilot

When President Bush launched his “faith-based initiative” in 2001 to funnel federal money to religious groups, Pat Robertson was skeptical, calling the idea a “Pandora’s box” and a “narcotic” that would ensnare religious organizations in government red tape.

Those misgivings notwithstanding, the federal government has become a major source of money for Operation Blessing, Robertson’s international charity, under the Bush initiative. In two years, the group’s annual revenue from government grants has ballooned from $108,000 to $14.4 million.

Critics worry that the president’s program, which directed more than $2 billion to religious groups nationwide in 2004, is subsidizing evangelistic activity and religious discrimination in hiring.

Operation Blessing says it adheres carefully to federal guidelines designed to safeguard church-state separation and uses the grants for humanitarian relief, not evangelism.

Regardless, the charity’s booming federal aid offers a case study in how Washington is channeling money to religious groups at an unprecedented pace and loosening some long-standing restrictions on how they spend it.

Robertson, the Virginia Beach-based religious broadcaster who has been one of the Bush administration’s most reliable supporters, raised eyebrows in 2001 when he expressed public misgivings about one of the president’s signature programs.

The faith-based initiative “could be a real Pandora’s box,” he said on “The 700 Club,” his nationally televised daily talk show.

“Federal rules will envelop these organizations,” Robertson said. “They’ll begin to be nurtured, if I can use that term, on federal money, and then they can’t get off of it. It’ll be like a narcotic. They can’t then free themselves later on.”

Less than two years later, Robertson’s doubts seemed to have evaporated.

In October 2002, Operation Blessing was one of 21 recipients in the first round of grants from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Compassion Capital Fund, an early manifestation of the Bush initiative.

The organization has received $1.5 million over three years from the program. About 75 percent of the money was passed through to scores of small hunger-relief agencies – food banks, church food pantries and the like – around the country. The money was used to buy materials such as refrigeration units, hydraulic jacks, computers and product-tracking software.

Most of the recipient groups are part of a network of local organizations that serve as distribution points for surplus food donated by manufacturers and delivered by Operation Blessing’s fleet of 18 trucks and 58 trailers. The organization says it has delivered nearly 500 million pounds of food since 1992.

Donated goods accounted for 90 percent of Operation Blessing’s $243 million in revenue last year.

By far the biggest chunk of federal aid received by Operation Blessing under the president’s initiative has been surplus nonfat dry milk from the Department of Agriculture.

Nonfat dry milk is what’s left over when manufacturers remove the fat from milk to make butter, ice cream and other products. The government buys the powder to prop up milk prices under a Depression-era price support system and stores it in warehouses and man-made caves around the country.

When the government’s stockpile of dry milk hit a record 1.3 billion pounds in 2003, it began giving millions of pounds to religious groups. Operation Blessing has received $22.7 million worth in two years. The powder can be used for baking, but much of it is traded to manufacturers for ready-to-eat puddings, soups and other products that are then distributed by Operation Blessing trucks.

The organization has received smaller grants from the U.S. Agency for International Development to cover freight costs for humanitarian relief shipments to Guatemala and Romania. It is also part of a consortium of eight organizations that recently received a USAID grant for HIV/AIDS treatment, care and prevention in 14 countries, mostly in Africa.

The faith-based initiative has come under fire from a variety of critics, including some religious groups. One of them is the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, a Washington-based lobbying group for 14 Baptist organizations.

Hollyn Hollman, the committee’s general counsel, said the president’s initiative threatens religious liberty by entangling government and religion in new ways.

Church-based groups – such as Lutheran Family Services and the Jewish Federation – have received government money for many decades, Hollman said, but they have done so under safeguards designed to make sure the money is used only for secular purposes.

For example, she said, those groups typically set up separately incorporated entities to deliver the government-funded services.

“Now, they say you don’t have to have a separate organization,” she said. “In fact, money could go directly to a house of worship. That is a drastic change. …

“Whenever the government funds a religious entity like a house of worship, it’s going to end up controlling it. With government funding comes government strings.”

Many of the ultimate recipients of Operation Blessing’s government grants are churches. An example is Lighthouse Mission, a street ministry on Long Island in New York, which received a refrigerated trailer and a computer system.

The mission is unabashedly evangelical. Lighthouse Mission “not only feeds the hungry, but spiritually feeds the soul,” it proclaims on its Web site. “Through the love of God, the volunteers at the Mission help people in need on a daily basis through prayer and God’s Word.”

Deborah Bensen, Operation Blessing’s director of media and government relations, said all grantees are required to read and sign off on a 15-page set of guidelines published by the government.

Among other things, those guidelines say federal money must not be used for “inherently religious activities.” Any such activities must be separated, in time or location, from government-funded activities, and recipients of services must not be required to participate in them.

“The goal is to relieve suffering, not to proselytize,” said Louis A. Isakoff, an attorney for Robertson.

Some say that’s a difficult line to draw.

“We’re concerned that people might just put up with proselytizing because they need the help,” said Joe Conn, a spokesman for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, another Washington-based lobby group. “Often, these folks are not in a position to complain. They don’t want to rock the boat.”

Another issue for many critics of the initiative is that it allows discriminatory hiring practices.

The government guidelines say grant recipients “may consider their religious beliefs in hiring and firing employees.”

Operation Blessing, which has a paid staff of 40 at its Virginia Beach headquarters, says its mission is to “demonstrate God’s love by alleviating human need and suffering in the United States and around the world.”

That means the group does not hire non-Christians, Bensen said.

“We’re a Christian faith-based organization,” she said. “We hire people that are able to help support our mission.”

U.S. Rep. Bobby Scott, a Democrat whose district includes parts of Norfolk and Portsmouth, has been one of the initiative’s most persistent critics in Congress. He says it flies in the face of federal anti-discrimination protections that date back to the civil rights laws of the 1960s.

Once when testifying on the issue, Scott recalled recently, he was asked by a congressional colleague, “What’s wrong with Catholics hiring Catholics?”

“My response was that we had had that debate 40 years ago, and my side won,” he said. “We convinced enough people that telling somebody they can’t get a job solely because of their race, color, creed, national origin or sex was so inherently offensive that we made it illegal. …

“If a policy that 'we don’t hire Catholics, Jews or Muslims’ offends you, I don’t have to explain to you what’s wrong with the faith-based initiative.”

Finally there is the issue of effectiveness.

When President Bush launched his initiative, he said he wanted to rally “America’s armies of compassion” to fight poverty and despair: “We must be outcome-based, insisting on success and steering resources to the effective.”

His critics counter that while steering money to religious groups, Bush has tried to starve programs with a proven record of helping low-income families. Last month, the president supported a House-passed

$700 million cut in the food stamp program; the money was later restored at the Senate’s insistence.

“There are no data we know of to indicate that faith-based organizations do a better job than others,” said Conn, the spokesman for Americans United.

Meanwhile, hunger in America continues to rise. The Department of Agriculture reported in October that

38 million people lived in “food-insecure households” in 2004 – 7 million more than five years before.

Reach Bill Sizemore at (757) 446-2276 or bill.sizemore@pilotonline.com.