What is unclear, because so many groups are involved and AIDS appropriations are sometimes linked with broader health grants, is how much of the remaining AIDS budget is also being spent for abstinence-only programs. Funding for long-established secular charitable groups like CARE dropped steadily after Bush took office–from $138 million in fiscal year 2001 to $96 million in 2005. In 2006, a CARE contract to fight AIDS in Africa and Asia was canceled and replaced by a program of grants for faith-based organizations. Focus on the Family, the ultra-right group headed by James Dobson, called USAID a "liberal cancer" for having ever allocated grants to secular organizations committed to distributing condoms and working with prostitutes–major vectors of AIDS in the third world.

But the push for faith-based money from religious organizations on the far right (as distinct from mainstream institutions, like the Roman Catholic church, that maintained large-scale charitable endeavors before there was any government money up for grabs) is not the only issue. There is no social science research indicating that religious organizations do a better job of delivering social services than secular organizations, although that unsupported assumption is taken by many faith-based funding advocates as gospel, so to speak (though not DiIulio, who concentrates much more on the sincerity and dedication of religiously motivated volunteers). Furthermore, according to polls by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, a majority of Americans believe that either secular organizations or the government can do a better job of providing social services ranging from combating teen pregnancy to feeding the homeless–even though the public supports the general concept of faith-based funding.

Many enthusiasts for faith-based funding try to enlist the founders on behalf of a closer relationship between religion and government (although the faith brigade conveniently ignores the fact that the framers deliberately wrote a constitution that does not mention God). But however one interprets the founders’ religious beliefs, it is useless to look to their "original intent" for guidance on such matters, because the iconic eighteenth-century politicians never envisioned a society in which the federal government would spend billions of dollars on any social programs. In 1786, the Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom–the first state law separating church and state–turned on the issue of tax support for the teaching of religion in schools. The law prohibiting tax expenditures for that purpose, strongly supported by James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, was passed overwhelmingly–and the Virginia religious freedom act became the template for the secular provisions of the federal constitution, including Article 6, which prohibited all religious tests for public office, and the subsequent First Amendment to the Bill of Rights. Whatever the founders would have thought, there can be no doubt that much of the push for faith-based funding today comes from churches themselves–though not from mainline Protestants and most Jews, who tend to see taxpayer funding as a threat to religion as well as government.

African-American churches, it should be noted, have been among the strongest supporters of faith-based funding. I spoke about this subject some years ago with the Reverend Carlton Veazey, an African-American Baptist pastor in Washington for many years and now president of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice. Veazey points out that it would have been tough for southern black churches to take a leading role in the civil rights movement had they been dependent on a government faith-based dole in the 1950s and 60s. Indeed, fear that government would corrupt religion was the reason why nineteenth-century Virginia Baptists joined with freethinkers like Jefferson and Madison to prohibit the use of tax funds for the teaching of religion in the state’s public schools. Whatever the century, it seems obvious that any organization–religious or secular–may be subject to pressure when it takes money from other sources.

It is naïve to suggest, as DiIulio and Bane do, that government funding can be strictly monitored so that it will be used only for social services and not for proselytizing. One of the reasons why religious institutions engage in charitable endeavors is that charity helps spread their faith. That is not a criticism but a historical reality. In spite of their good intentions, faith-based funding supporters like DiIulio and Bane ignore a larger reality: that such funding is just one weapon in the larger effort to promote greater overall entanglement between government and religion. The push for state support for charter schools and federal tax vouchers for private schools–which, in most instances, means religious schools–is another example of the same phenomenon. The effect on public schools, if vouchers were to be legalized throughout the country, would be devastating.

Voices like those of Bane, DiIulio, and Jim Wallis, the author of God’s Politics, have become increasingly influential within the Democratic Party, whose candidates have been urged to take back religious issues from the Republicans by emphasizing socially progressive values rooted in religious faith. That is the reason we have heard a great deal of talk about personal faith from Democratic candidates so far, and nothing at all about the separation of church and state. I doubt that any serious Democratic candidate today would be willing to raise any questions about the constitutionality or practical utility of faith-based programs. That is a mistake, because faith-based funding under a Democratic administration will surely fall into some of the same traps that it has under Bush.

It would be wrong, and contrary to America’s historical traditions, to suggest that religion should be excluded from public life. But there are many ways to define "public" that do not involve feeding at the government trough. Moral leadership is most effective, as it was during the civil rights movement, when it speaks truth to power from outside the government power structure. Both church and state are degraded when tax dollars are spent–as they have been and inevitably will be–to promote a specific religious agenda in the guise of promoting the general welfare.