(RNS) — In a meeting at the White House on Wednesday (March 5), white evangelical Christians, who have for decades enjoyed billions in funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development for their overseas missions, were told by Trump administration officials not to expect a reopening of the flow of funds, The Washington Post reported the following day.
The Post said the administration officials passed the turn of events off as a positive for their faith. “’Do you want the country to get credit for foreign aid, or do you want the Creator to get the credit?’ asked Albert Gombis, a State Department political appointee,” according to the story.
The leaders in the room were flabbergasted. “‘Some of us looked at each other in disbelief,’” the paper quoted one attendee saying.
The fact that these groups got an audience to explain the cuts is testimony to their unflagging support for Trump in both his campaigns for the nation’s highest office. They have no one but themselves to blame for the political path they have chosen. They are merely reaping what they have sown for more than four decades.
It was in the 1970s that white evangelical Christians began to drift from their belief that interacting with the government and taking government funds would corrupt the faith. In 1979, Virginia televangelist the Rev. Jerry Falwell formed the Moral Majority to politically mobilize conservative Christians in partnership with the Republican Party. Falwell’s “traditional family values” coalition opposed the Civil Rights Movement, feminism and the Equal Rights Amendment, divorce, LGBTQ+, the teaching of evolution and abortion.
Abortion had been added to that list by Catholic political activist and Heritage Foundation founder Paul Weyrich, who brokered their union with small government conservatives in the GOP. It had not been their issue before, but Weyrich convinced them it was the price of becoming more politically active and powerful. They were also persuaded to abandon their longtime distrust of government, and its funding.
Sinking ever deeper into politics, white evangelicals and their conservative Catholic partners have fought after every election to install their people in government, to bend the law to their worldview and to access as much government funding as they can. To fulfill this aspiration, the religious right had to dismantle the separation of church and state, which would open a sluiceway of government money.
The alliance with the GOP was not just about money. Yes, they wanted to allow taxpayer funds to pay for their Christian schools, but they also wanted to control the government’s treatment of LGBTQ+ people, women, and children. Unable to win the culture war by example or argument, they sought to do it by co-opting the government. And so instead of becoming a religious adjunct to the Republican Party, they transformed the party from a small-government, deficit-minded party to one controlled by far-right religious interests.
Central to this campaign was destroying the U.S. Supreme Court’s establishment clause doctrine, which holds that taxpayer funds can’t be paid directly to religious institutions. This is nearly accomplished: This term, the court is set to decide whether a public charter school can be Catholic, a case that would have been unimaginable even 10 years ago.
The white evangelicals dismantled this rule by claiming it was “unfair” and “discriminatory” to give tax dollars to secular organizations delivering government functions, but not religious organizations. This is a categorical mistake that treats religion as though it is like any other group.
To clear the way for government’s direct support of religious mission, law professor Michael McConnell argued before the Supreme Court in 1995, in Rosenberger v. Rectors of the University of Virginia, that the public university could not deny student activity funds to a proselytizing group as along as groups like the chess club received funds. At the time, McConnell liked to shame anyone who used the (purely descriptive) phrase “proselytizer” as anti-religious — his way of trying to soften the brazenly religious use of publicly collected tax dollars.
New York Times columnist David French, writing recently about the evangelical discord over the USAID shutdown, made clear he was proud of his own role in opening the floodgates of government funds, saying that he had worked hard to ensure that religious entities get government funds. His argument? “Treat religious groups exactly the same as any other group. Don’t favor them, but don’t discriminate against them, either.”
But French misses the forest for the trees. In a country of religious liberty and diversity, redirecting funds from the government directly to religious mission means that taxpayers are being co-opted into supporting religious ideals they wouldn’t otherwise support.
In order to get their hands on government funding, the religious right also had to alter their own constitutions to permit the church to take government funds. “The church should not resort to the civil power to carry on its work,” the Baptist Faith & Message states. “The gospel of Christ contemplates spiritual means alone for the pursuit of its ends.”
Framer James Madison similarly warned, when Virginia considered tax support for Christian education, that it would corrupt religion as well as the state. He also predicted that government-subsidized religion would be drawn to tyrannical establishments.
But when President George W. Bush formed the Office of Faith-based and Community Initiatives in the White House through executive order in 2001, Falwell was at the front of the line, arguing, “it is high time that faith-based institutions in our nation to be given a chance to reenter the public square through the cooperation of our government,” and boosting support among his fellow evangelicals by pointing out that “the usual suspects on the left” opposed it. Those “suspects” were standing up for the separation of church and state.
The white evangelicals are learning to be careful what you wish for. When religious groups obtain the right to receive taxpayer dollars for their missions, they also insert themselves into a pipeline that can be turned on and off at will. Having loyally argued for low taxes and small government for more than a generation, having deconstructed the separation of church and state laid out in the First Amendment, they now find themselves on the short end of their bargain with the GOP.
More embarrassing, perhaps, having supported Trump despite evidence of his philandering and his civil sexual assault conviction, his mocking of the disabled and ill treatment of immigrants, they find themselves vainly trying to draw the line when he cuts off their funding.
Showing their fiscal appetite is unabated, despite their political scars, two days after the White House meeting about aid, congressional Republicans introduced a bill supported by the White House that would deliver a 100% tax credit for private schools and home-schooling at a cost to federal taxpayers of $5 to $10 billion per year. As the federal Education Department, which serves the 90% of American students in public schools, is dismantled, this new funding for their schools would fulfill a long-held political dream, or nightmare.
(Marci A. Hamilton is a constitutional law professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of “God vs. the Gavel: The Perils of Extreme Religious Liberty.” The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)