Glenn's new book looks at public funding for nonsecular social services

By Eric McHenry

The Salvation Army is not a thrift store.

Nor is it a rehabilitation center, a day care center, a group home, or a brigade of bell-ringers in Santa hats -- although its program of social services makes use of all of these things.

The Salvation Army is a practicing Christian church. What's more, it's a church that has been partially funded by the government for decades. And this arrangement, despite the U.S. Constitution's frequently cited separation of church and state, has never faced a serious First Amendment challenge -- for representing "the establishment of religion" or for threatening "the free exercise thereof."

"Why is it a violation of the First Amendment to fund a school," asks Charles Glenn, SED professor and chairman of the department of administration, training, and policy studies, "but not to fund an adolescent counseling program or a day care program that's religious? Nobody, really, opposes the latter."

As the 2000 presidential campaign gathers momentum, media attention will likely turn to the subject of government funding for faith-based social services, including the contentious vouchers that would allow students to attend parochial schools regardless of their families' ability to pay tuition. Glenn believes that Americans, when assessing the legitimacy of such public/private interplay, should first look to places where it already exists. In his new book The Ambiguous Embrace: Government and Faith-Based Schools and Social Agencies (Princeton University Press, 2000), he gives them ample opportunity to do so.

Reasoning from such examples as the Salvation Army, which has both thrived and changed as a result of government funding, Glenn weighs the potential benefits and drawbacks of similar support in other areas.

"Comparing the Salvation Army with organizations like the YMCA and the American Red Cross," Glenn writes, in a chapter he co-authored with Emily Nielsen Jones, "which have over time shed their religious commitments, the former stands out as an example of how to accept government support without abandoning religious character."

Yet the state's purse strings can double as puppet strings, Glenn and Jones note, and even the Salvation Army must constantly grapple "with how to maintain its distinctive character and mission in the 'ambiguous embrace' of government . . ."

The greatest threat to successful cooperation, Glenn concludes, lies not in overbroad interpretations of the First Amendment -- nor even in the risk of government coercion -- but in faith-based social service providers soft-pedaling their missions.

"I expected to find that government strings might lead to religious groups abandoning what had made them distinctive and effective," says Glenn. "What I found was that while that was a potential problem, there was an even greater risk of what I call loss of nerve on the part of religious organizations.

"Religious groups that don't keep constantly reflecting upon what it is that makes them distinctive are likely to lose their distinctiveness," he says, "and once it's lost you can't regain it."

Government-funded faith-based organizations, for example, can legally base hiring decisions on religious criteria. But when they begin to lose their religious character, Glenn explains, they likewise lose that prerogative.

Charles Glenn Photo by Kalman Zabarsky

"If you get wishy-washy about your religious identity," he says, "a court's not going to allow you to use religious criteria in hiring staff. And if you don't use religious criteria in hiring staff, you're going to get more and more wishy-washy.

"It's in your hands, whether you're going to lose your character or not."

Glenn's book arrives at a time when these issues are increasingly prominent on the political table. Al Gore opposes vouchers, but both he and George W. Bush have spoken in favor of enhanced public funding for some faith-based organizations. The Charitable Choice provision of the 1996 federal welfare reform act, which stipulates that state and local governments must allow religious social service organizations to compete for contracts, cleared the way for increased cooperation at that level. And vouchers, Glenn says, are winning support from diverse constituencies. Contrary to the widespread perception that vouchers are solely a pet issue of white conservatives, "the black rank-and-file are the strongest group in support of vouchers in the country," he says. "More than 70 percent now support them.

"We are moving in the direction of recognizing that government can not do everything that for a time it tried to do," says Glenn, "and therefore we're going to have a much richer mix of institutions and organizations to meet a whole range of needs.

"As government increasingly looks for partners in the civil society," he says, "a high proportion of those are likely to be religious. And we're going to be serving new players -- there will be Hindu and Muslim organizations much more visible than they are now as those populations grow."

BU, Glenn points out, has become a center for expertise on strengthening the institutions of civil society, with scholars such as Glenn Loury, Krzysztof Michalski, and those at the Institute for the Study of Economic Culture [ISEC], which provided support for the research that led to The Ambiguous Embrace. Glenn undertook the project at the suggestion of ISEC's director, Peter Berger, who wrote the book's foreword.

In early April, Glenn received the fourth annual leadership award from the Center for Public Justice, a nonpartisan Christian-based civic education and policy research organization. The award recognized both recent scholarly output such as The Ambiguous Embrace and Glenn's career-long commitment to education reform. Glenn served for 21 years as director of urban education and equity efforts for the Massachusetts Department of Education. His other books include The Myth of the Common School, Choice of School in Six Nations, Educational Freedom in Eastern Europe, and Educating Immigrant Children: Schools and Language Minorities in Twelve Nations.