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Faith-based donations confuse US aid policy

Barack Obama. Wikipedia
US President-elect Barack Obama
From the first day of his presidency, George W. Bush made it a priority to provide faith-based organizations, including those abroad, with greater opportunities to receive government money. In 2006, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) awarded US$552 million to such groups, rising to $586 million in 2007.

But the initiative did not come without its share of controversy. Civil libertarians worried about violations to the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the US Constitution, which says that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion…” According to federal regulations, USAID is required to refrain from providing financial assistance to organizations that engage in “inherently religious activities, such as worship, religious instruction, or proselytization”.

On 17 July 2009 – seven months after Bush left office – USAID’s Office of Inspector General, which monitors the internal workings of the agency, issued an audit that found “some USAID-awarded funds were used for religious activities”, without determining whether the Establishment Clause had been violated. The IG audit cited the rehabilitation of mosques and mosque-affiliated facilities in Fallujah, Iraq, and the distribution of HIV/AIDS prevention-through-abstinence programmes that cited the Bible. Yet the audit also noted that USAID “generally” acted in accordance with federal and agency regulations in awarding the contracts.

Upon the release of the IG audit, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed Freedom of Information Act requests for agency records pertaining to the funding of the HIV/AIDS prevention-through-abstinence programmes, which it believes violate the Establishment Clause. (The IG audit described the HIV/AIDS programmes as contradicting “the Government’s putative neutrality toward religious activities”.)

But USAID did not release any of the requested material until the ACLU filed a lawsuit in February in New York, according to Brigitte Amiri, an attorney with the ACLU. She told IRIN that 1,058 documents were released by USAID on 5 March, with the promise that more would be forthcoming.

Asked if the ACLU was preparing a legal challenge to the constitutionality of the funding, Amiri said, “I think we are a long way from that. But we will consider all of our options.”

A spokeswoman for USAID directed questions about the lawsuit to the US Attorney’s office in New York, which declined comment.

Clarification

The IG audit recommended that USAID seek legal clarification from President Barack Obama’s White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, which he established last year to replace President Bush’s version of the same office. On 9 March, the office’s 25-member advisory council issued an extensive report that, among other things, asked President Obama to tweak the language of the federal guidelines pertaining to the funding of faith-based institutions.

“The Council recommends that the administration replace the words ‘inherently religious activities’ with ‘explicitly religious activities’ in these regulations,” the report read.

It described the phrase “inherently religious” as confusing. “For example, some might consider the provision of a hot meal to a needy person an ‘inherently religious’ act when it is undertaken from a sense of religious motivation or obligation, even though it has no overt religious content.”

In its response to the IG audit, USAID noted that its funding of the improvements to four mosques and associated buildings in Fallujah – which had been damaged or destroyed by insurgents – had a clear secular intent. “The purpose was to support the rehabilitation of portions of buildings belonging to mosques that were utilized as community centres for youth activities and adult education and that provided social services to the community, including food and non-food assistance to the needy.”

Of the HIV/AIDS abstinence programmes, USAID agreed that some of “the curricula reflect a religious perspective and include religiously infused materials and religious references as a way of conveying HIV/AIDS prevention messages”. But the agency argued that US courts had acknowledged “circumstances which could warrant overriding the usual Establishment Clause presumption”. It could be supposed, in this interpretation, that funding such programmes would serve “compelling foreign policy interests” that permit its continuance, USAID said.

In a taskforce report issued on 23 February, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs - an independent think-tank - urged the US government to act promptly to clear up “uncertainty surrounding the limits of the Establishment Clause”.

The report, Engaging Religious Communities Abroad: A New Imperative for US Foreign Policy, pointed to the positive results of USAID’s work with the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and the Council of Imams to distribute HIV/AIDS literature in Ethiopia and the agency’s efforts to combat polio in India with the help of the Islamic Council of Doctors. In an interview with IRIN, Thomas Wright, who served as the taskforce’s project director, stressed that bringing clarity to the issue would help in Obama’s goal, as stated in his Cairo speech, for greater engagement with Muslim communities throughout the world.

Confusion over the application of the Establishment Clause, the Chicago Council said in the report, “appears to be impeding foreign policy in some significant ways”.

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This article was produced by IRIN News while it was part of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Please send queries on copyright or liability to the UN. For more information: https://shop.un.org/rights-permissions

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