Should Christian Ministries Take Government Funds?
(ANALYSIS) The Office of Management and Budget recently issued a memo directing federal agencies to stop all grants and loans. The OMB wanted to review them and ensure they were in compliance with new executive orders issued by President Donald Trump.
The backlash against the memo was swift and strong. Of course, liberal groups objected, in part because the memo would have frozen funding to some of their pet projects, including the funding of abortion and LGBTQ+ advocacy.
But the outcry was not just from progressives. A number of Christian groups, some of them relatively conservative, also objected. World Relief, the benevolence arm of the National Association of Evangelicals, said the freeze would hamper their refugee resettlement efforts.
PEPFAR, an AIDS prevention effort in Africa and elsewhere that costs $5 billion a year, has been a favorite of evangelicals. It too faced a funding freeze. Sanitation and clean water efforts, many of them led by Christian groups in Africa, India and elsewhere, faced immediate shutdown.
In fact, a spreadsheet sent to federal agencies naming the programs under review ran to more than 50 pages.
As a result of the outcry coming from all quarters, the OMB rescinded its directive in a matter of days. Money from the government trough will continue to overflow into these programs — including many run by Christian groups — for the foreseeable future. (Though the foreign aid freeze was not rescinded.)
But should it?
A lot of smart people — including many who have made a career helping the “least and the lost” in our broken world — say the answer to that question is “no.”
One of the smartest, and most compassionate, is James Whitford. Whitford earned his doctorate from the University of Kansas Medical Center before he and his wife, Marsha, founded Watered Gardens Ministries in 2000.
Watered Gardens has been on the forefront of the “effective compassion” movement for more than a decade. In 2019 it won WORLD Magazine’s “Hope Award for Effective Compassion.”
Whitford and Watered Gardens take no government funds, and they put Scripture front-and-center in their work. Whitford says that true freedom and dignity cannot flourish if people are trapped in dependence — whether than dependence is on alcohol, drugs — or the government.
Whitford has taken the lessons he learned at Watered Gardens and created True Charity, a network of like-minded organizations (now numbering more than 200) that champions the “resurgence of civil society in the fight against poverty.”
The reasons for not taking government funds are many, Whitford says. Chief among them is the fact that organizations that take government funds, even if they are Christian groups, are not able to bring the transformative power of the gospel to their work.
These Christian groups are reduced to dealing with symptoms and not causes. That means the problems that they hope to eliminate are never truly solved.
Another important reason for questioning government’s role is the fact that government intervention tends to “crowd out” the private sector and institutions of civil society. In Whitford’s new book “The Crisis of Dependency,” he writes, “It’s not rocket science. You only give to a need that’s not been met. If the government steps in to meet basic needs in our own communities, charity naturally declines. Government sponsored poverty programs and personal charity don’t mix well.”
American Founding Father James Madison understood this. During Haiti’s revolution (1791-1804), refugees from that country saw the United States as a refuge. Congress debated whether to spend $15,000 to aid the refugees. Madison argued against the appropriation:
“Charity is no part of the legislative duty of government. It would puzzle any gentleman to lay his finger on any part of the Constitution which would authorize the government to interpose in the relief of … sufferers.”
Whitford asks, “What Madison heartless? Did his … stance … reflect indifference to the suffering of others? Not at all. In fact, he pressed on to consider other ways to care for those refugees without compromising his principled constitutional position.”
Whitford — with Madison — said the role of the state should be to provide “a simple framework of law and order upon which a free and flourishing society could be built — a society in which each person was unrestricted to speak his mind, build his dream, defend his family, and to be charitable toward his neighbor in need.”
One wonders if Haiti would not be the failed state it is today if it had not become so dependent on American “largesse.” (I’ve written more about Haiti and its dependency on the U.S., including U.S. evangelicals. You can read that article here).
Some argue that many problems we face today are too big for the private sector or charity. But is that true? Free enterprise feeds, clothes and shelters more people than all the governments of the world combined. Even in times of widespread natural disaster, when government can and should play a role, private charity and business are often far more effective than the federal government in standing communities back on their feet.
Now, all of this is no endorsement of the OMB memo. The fact that the memo was so quickly rescinded is proof enough that the whole affair was handled poorly, and the net effect has — so far — been business as usual.
But it is my hope that the events of the past week might cause Christians to consider whether the most effective forms of compassion might be found outside of Washington, D.C.
This article was originally published at MinistryWatch.
Warren Cole Smith is the editor in chief of Ministry Watch and previously served as Vice President of WORLD News Group, publisher of WORLD Magazine and has more than 30 years of experience as a writer, editor, marketing professional, and entrepreneur. Before launching a career in Christian journalism 20 years ago, Smith spent more than seven years as the Marketing Director at PricewaterhouseCoopers.