Last week John J. DiIulio, Jr., who momentarily was director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, issued an angry manifesto. He foresees a "New Civil Rights Struggle." Read him on the editorial page of the The Wall Street Journal, (June 20), a site that will tilt some toward acceptance of his case and lead others to keep their guard up. 

DiIulio's charge: opponents of the Initiative rush in to claim that providing tax funds to religious organizations that offer welfare services violates the establishment clause of the First Amendment. He wants us to look also at the Fourteenth Amendment, since, he says, refusing to include inner-city faith-based charities is discriminatory, and violates the Equal Protection Clause in that amendment. How so? Because biggies like Catholic Charities, Jewish Federations, Lutheran Social Services and the Salvation Army have long received and disbursed mega-funds. He likes that. But why, he asks, do "godly inner-city people who administer aid to low-income minorities receive either no government money" or a few crumbs? The question is worth asking. 

He claims that neglect of the latter is an explosive, ready-to-explode civil rights issue. "The discrimination is real, racial, illegal, unconstitutional, immoral, no longer to be tolerated." He hears eight assertions used to duck his indictment. He knows more about this than I, but having sat in on many discussions of the subject, including with Jews, African-Americans, Catholics, Baptists, Evangelicals, and mainline Protestants on both, or all, sides of the issue, I find some of them rarely voiced. "They don't want to apply." "They'll be unaccountable." "They'll get poor results." "They are uneducated and not professionals." "Things are improving anyway." Those five concerns, if they really are raised, are shaky. They would probably meet DiIulio's terms as "discriminative." 

The other three should receive focus. "The First Amendment forbids it." He's right: if it does, then the big faith-based organizations had better watch out, and had better make a better case. "They'll lose the faith and turn on each other." This often comes from fellow-believers. I hear: "Whoever takes the kings shekels gets the king's shackles." That leaves one more: "They proselytize." That's the substantial one that has to be reckoned with, perhaps case by case. That religious symbols inevitably get carried along with faith-based social work is not so much the problem as when religious motivations and justifications are key to the efforts, which means "I" am directly paying to propagate someone else's faith. Forget most of the more rarely-heard objections. This one merits most attention in the season ahead.