Don't Toss Out the Faith-Based Options

When I was in high school, we studied the “Book of Job” in a literature class. Some of the parents were upset. How could a public high school justify teaching The Bible? My teacher’s answer – a reasonable one, I thought – was that the story of Job had a literary structure and history of literary influence that could and should be studied beyond any particular faith message it contains.

A story by Matt Sepic on NPR last week brought that piece of my educational past to mind. Sepic reported on a case before the Missouri Supreme Court in which Saint Louis University, a Jesuit University, is seeking “$8 million in public money in the form of tax-increment financing for its new planned basketball arena.” The controversy, of course, is about separation of church and state. Should a Jesuit institution receive support via tax dollars?

I am not a lawyer, and won’t play one on this blog. The intricacies of whether St. Louis University’s request violates either the U.S. or the Missouri constitutions are best considered by the dozens of lawyers and legal academics already involved in the case. I would like to pose a slightly different question, however. Can and should we value what a faith-based institution has to offer the general community outside the context of its faith orientation?

President Bush’s faith-based initiative jump-started a discussion on this subject, but it also focused on the question of tax dollars. Individual donors, however, do not have the same restrictions. In a world in which service provision increasingly devolves from the government to the private and nonprofit sectors, and in which faith-based organizations a) have a tremendous amount of capacity; b) often have unparalleled on-the-ground presence (e.g, see Aspen Insitute’s Weathering the Storm about the Gulf after the hurricanes); and c) often do not couple evangelization with their operations (see a Catholic Relief Services or World Vision), those donors interested in social impact should not give themselves the luxury of an over-simplified look at faith-based groups. Job is useful as a literary protagonist, and SLU basketball probably does bring something to the community, regardless of whether the players take any of their classes from Jesuits.

Tiziana Dearing