The Power Worshippers

by Katherine Stewart

  The legal powerhouses of the Christian right soon realized that their triumph in after-school programming had opened the door on yet other opportunities in church-state fusion. The same strategy for turning religious liberty into claims on public resources could be generalized to cover a variety of activities.

  For example, around the time that Hurricane Sandy hit the eastern seaboard, it occurred to leaders of the legal movement that the new idea of religious liberty might unlock federal money for disaster relief. FEMA, after all, grants assistance to not-for-profit entities, such as shelters, disability and social service providers, child care centers, and others whose work is thought to be essential in the aftermath of disasters. So why shouldn’t churches get in on the action?

  Religious organizations have a tax exemption not because they provide essential services (some do and others don’t), but because it has generally been felt that taxation would limit the freedom of exercise of religion that is guaranteed in the First Amendment. Precisely for that reason, religious organizations are exempt from reporting requirements imposed on those nonprofits that perform these essential services. They are also exempt from the nondiscrimination laws to which other nonprofit groups are compelled to comply.

  But the more the legal powerhouses of the movement thought about it, the more denial of FEMA funds seemed like another case of religious discrimination. Keeping religious hands out of the public till was a violation of their religious freedom. By the time Hurricane Harvey hit Houston in late August 2017, the legal guns were armed and ready.

  On September 4, 2017, even as the floodwaters from Harvey still swirled in the streets of Houston, three Texas churches filed suit alleging that FEMA’s policy of excluding houses of worship from disaster relief funds was unconstitutional. The cause was taken up in a bill cosponsored by a number of right-wing politicians. The churches demanding federal money were free to buy insurance, just as businesses are. But they had not bothered to do so—it was too expensive, as one church representative claimed—so they were counting on the federal government to resolve their problems.

  The demand for FEMA relief sounded innocuous at first. Who could object to helping out churches, especially those that offered aid to hurricane and flood victims in their hour of need? Some churches do provide essential services some of the time. And to the extent that they do, and if they should organize those activities with the kind of transparency, fairness, and accountability required of other nonprofits, few would argue with their claim to public money.

  But two of the three churches in question did not lay claim to be providing essential services. And if they did, one wonders whether they would have provided those services with dignity to all members of the community, regardless of sexual orientation, ethnic background, or religious belief. Churches that filed the lawsuit belong to the Assemblies of God Pentecostal denomination, which issued in a statement of doctrine “that the growing cultural acceptance of homosexual identity and behavior (male and female), same-sex marriage, and efforts to change one’s biological sexual identity are all symptomatic of a broader spiritual disorder that threatens the family, the government, and the church.”31 The Assemblies of God has also subscribed to the belief that “the spread of oriental [sic] religions and the occult in America has brought with it an increase in demon possession similar to that reported formerly by missionaries on foreign fields.”32

  Some churches in the area did, of course, open their doors to flood victims in order to provide shelter and other essential services. But many others did not, or at least not immediately—including the megachurch of “prosperity gospel” preacher Joel Osteen, who opened the doors to his 16,000-seat suburban facility only after he received a public drubbing.33 Some private corporations, such as the Houston furniture showroom owned by Jim McIngvale, or “Mattress Mack,” aided victims, too, offering food, shelter, and supplies in the immediate aftermath of the disaster—and yet none of those businesses laid claim to free insurance from the government. The argument for the FEMA money for church repair simply boils down to the complaint that the churches do not wish to purchase their own disaster insurance. “Wind storm insurance,” explained a representative of one of the churches leading the lawsuit on a GoFundMe site, would cost “over $15,000 a year … that’s simple [sic] not affordable.” But why should taxpayers be on the hook for church facility insurance? Shouldn’t “oriental” and “homosexual” taxpayers have a say?

  As far as the Christian right was concerned, the answer was simple: religious liberty. “FEMA policy is patently unfair, unjustified and discriminatory,” said New Jersey Republican Chris Smith in 2013 after he first introduced a bill in the House that would have compelled FEMA to underwrite church repairs.34 At that time the Republican-controlled Senate balked, largely out of concern that such aid raised fiscal and constitutional issues. Just five years later, with Trump in office and the Republican Party controlled by the far right, the announcement by FEMA that houses of worship could now claim this special government benefit, too, was met with a collective shrug. The lines of separation between church and state were by now so blurred, the Establishment Clause so degraded, and the list of outrages over Trump-and-allies–related instances of graft and corruption so long and overwhelming that few people could muster the ability to notice or care.

  The ultimate destination of the religious liberty gravy train is the school system. One way of securing government resources, Christian nationalists have realized, is to take a cheap ride on public school facilities. Today, thanks to national policy effectively legislated from the bench of the Supreme Court, churches can claim access to public facilities for their services, typically with below-market-rate facility use fees, on the grounds of “religious liberty.” (Partisan political groups, on the other hand, have no such right.) A variety of religions and denominations have taken advantage of the opportunity, but the most aggressive by an overwhelming margin have been conservative evangelical churches that belong to national or international parachurch networks. For these groups, establishing churches in public schools has the added advantage of investing their activity with a high degree of public trust, especially among children and school families. Over the past two decades, vast networks of “church-planting” organizations have sprung up and rolled across the nation, effectively using taxpayer largesse to establish religion in the name of “religious liberty.”

  Church planting is now happening on an industrial scale, and it often takes place in neighborhoods that least expect it, with little or no input from the residents who are, in the end, subsidizing the process. Consider the town of Brookline, Massachusetts, which recently invested $120 million to make one of its elementary schools, known as the Coolidge Corner School, a top-drawer public school facility. Five days per week, the Coolidge Corner School’s gleaming new complex houses a K–8 school for about eight hundred of the town’s children. On the seventh day it turns into the City on a Hill Church, where hundreds of congregants fill the halls and multiple classrooms, gather for Bible study in the airy cafeteria, worship in the capacious auditorium, and make use of the school’s sixty-three free underground parking spaces.

  The town is presently poised to rename the Coolidge Corner School in honor of Florida Ruffin Ridley, a civil rights activist, educator, and suffragist who edited the country’s first newspaper published for and by Black women. So it is perhaps interesting to note that the school that will likely soon bear Ruffin Ridley’s name houses a church fighting the culture wars that drive support for a political party that has made voter suppression one of its principal and strategic imperatives.

  The City on a Hill Church moved to the Coolidge Corner School after vacating another Brookline elementary school, the Driscoll School, which it had occupied for nearly eight years. In addition to weekly Sunday services, City on a Hill holds luncheons in the cafeteria on topics such as religiously righteous parenting and “exploring faith.” The church even makes use of the expensive new school building on some wee
knights. In this way City on a Hill is like other churches, except that many of its costs are borne by local taxpayers.

  In lieu of rent, the church pays the town a “facility use fee,” which is set at $100 per hour for a gym or auditorium and approximately $12.50 per classroom, according to the town’s facility use forms—well below market rate for similarly sized facilities in the area. In many towns and cities, such fees are lower still, and sometimes the use of the facility is free. Naturally the town also charges for janitorial staff to clean the facility after it has been used. But paying people to clean up after you isn’t “rent,” as some public school church planters have characterized it. The real cost of occupying the space may be counted as a gift from the taxpayers.

  The City on a Hill Church is a member of Acts 29, a parachurch network of approximately seven hundred churches worldwide. Each member church may have a distinct name, but all are united under the Acts 29 network umbrella, which has a codified structure of development and support for member pastors that ensures the doctrinal purity of every participating church.

  The network was cofounded by Mark Driscoll, the controversial preacher who disparaged “sensitive emasculated men” and asserted, “We live in a pussified nation.” He attracted further controversy after he blamed a celebrated pastor’s affair with a male prostitute on the pastor’s wife for “letting herself go.” The late Christian author and columnist Rachel Held Evans castigated Driscoll for “degrading women, bullying men, and using hateful slurs to talk about LGBT people.” In a widely circulated blog post she added, “Listen up, Church: Misogyny is real. Homophobia is real. And a man this notorious for both, a man this severely disturbed, should not be in a position of leadership in a church. He needs counseling, not a pulpit.”35

  Driscoll was eventually removed from his position following accusations of plagiarism, misuse of church funds, and abusive behavior—but not, apparently, for his views on gender order and contempt for gay people. On this count Acts 29 does not appear to deviate too far from its roots.

  Women, according to an article in the Acts 29 online publication, are directed to “submit” to their husbands at home. According to an article on the Acts 29 website, “male headship and wifely submission” is something “God designed,” and “we have no right to tamper with God’s design.”36 It should come as no surprise, of course, that an Acts 29 doctrinal statement groups “homosexual behavior,” together with “bestiality” and “incest” as worthy of condemnation.

  Brookline’s City on a Hill Church appears to be no less preoccupied with policing the line between pure and impure. In their written materials, which they hand out during their Membership Matters Course, a requirement for all new members, the church singles out other faith traditions to disparage, including Jehovah’s Witnesses, Unitarians, “evangelical pragmatists,” and “theological liberals who reject any notion of divine standards and judgment.”37 Like its parent network, Acts 29, the City on a Hill Church groups “homosexual behavior” together with “bestiality” and “incest” as worthy of condemnation.

  City on a Hill insists on a “complementarian,” “different-but-equal” theology that mandates the “Biblical role of pastor-teacher limited to males.” The church’s elders and deacons are uniformly male. Written materials for the church soften the imposition of gender hierarchies with some nice doublespeak about men’s and women’s “biblical equality.” It’s a way of assigning women and men distinctly unequal roles while assuring women they need not fret about their subordination because they are equal in the eyes of God. It sounds convoluted, but Robert Lewis Dabney would have gotten the point. “Higher and lower hold alike the same relation to the supreme ruler and ordainer of the commonwealth, God,” he wrote, “yet they hold different relations to each other in society, corresponding to their differing capacities and fitnesses, which equity itself demands.”38 City on a Hill asserts that that “submission in roles is a reflection of the Trinity.”39 The organization regularly funnels a portion of the money it collects to a local antiabortion “crisis pregnancy center.”

  City on a Hill is able to thrive and grow precisely because so many of its essential expenses are covered by the taxpayer. After all, it did not pay to construct the Coolidge Corner School, nor did it cover any portion of the $120 million renovation. It does not have to purchase furniture, pay the heating bill, or contribute in any meaningful way to the building’s ongoing operations and upkeep. It is perhaps for this reason that City on a Hill has become a “church-planting church,” spawning new congregations in public schools in other parts of the city. It has also been able to acquire for its own use a three-story brownstone building with nine bedrooms and four bathrooms (according to the website RealtyTrac) in an area of Brookline where buildings of a similar size and location sell for over $1.5 million; City on a Hill appears to use the brownstone for housing, administration, and some smaller gatherings.40

  The mingling of church and school comes at a time when many public school districts are under severe financial pressure. According to the Economic Policy Institute, underresourced schools have led to such dramatic declines in teacher pay that 59 percent of American public school teachers are supplementing their paychecks with additional paid work.

  The state of Florida offers a clear example of the consequences of right-wing, “small government” policies. Between 2007 and 2015, public schools in Orange County, which includes the city of Orlando, suffered over $105 million in budget cuts—devastating losses that curtailed school administrators’ ability to hire staff, maintain their facilities, and fund extracurricular activities.

  In 2012, grappling with dwindling resources, overcrowded classrooms, and insufficient textbooks and supplies, Orange County Public Schools superintendent Barbara Jenkins announced an expanded outreach to faith organizations. “Our missions to better our community dovetail when churches, synagogues, and mosques and all faith-based organizations harness the power of volunteerism and servant leadership to benefit the region’s youth,” she said. Jenkins’s plea was purposefully nonsectarian—and yet the “faith partners” for Orange County’s schools were nearly all evangelical Christian.

  Paradoxically, some of those groups did not appear to have faith in public education. The Venue Church in Apopka, Florida, which was planted inside a public school, used its website to “bemoan” the fact that “the school house has replaced the church house as the community building.” Public schools, it added, are places where “morality is challenged and set.” The church’s purpose in becoming a “faith partner” with the school appeared to have little to do with education and everything to do with its own sectarian goals. “If you are looking to maximize missional money,” the website continued, “the school campus is where you will yield the highest return on your investment.” Indeed, as Georgia activist Terri Hoye, who champions church volunteers mentoring in public schools, said at a 2014 evangelical conference, “Once [the door to the public schools] is open, it is wide open.”41

  America’s expanding network of quasi-state-funded churches have their eye on more than cheap or free facilities. Accessing taxpayer-funded school buildings to subsidize religion is a pauper’s game compared to getting one’s hands on the money that governments spend on the education that is supposed to go on inside those buildings. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the United States spent $668 billion on public primary and secondary education for the 2014–15 fiscal school year. Christian nationalists understand that if they can capture a portion of that figure in the name of religious liberty, the money will flow without end.

  It was on this account that Christian nationalists reacted ecstatically to the Supreme Court’s June 2017 decision involving a church playground in Missouri. Hitherto, the state had declined to repair aging or lackluster church facilities, including playgrounds, out of Establishment Clause concerns. Now the Supreme Court ruled that churches may seek state money for new playground surfaces and other, ostensibly “nonrelig
ious” needs. Of course, taking a few pennies from public money to pay for the resurfacing of a church playground is the kind of small potato that even the most resolute advocate of constitutional propriety might be willing to overlook. But the Christian nationalists behind the case understood very well what was at stake: where the case spoke of playgrounds and repair funds, the Alliance Defending Freedom and its allies saw the potential for schools and vouchers.

  In Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer, the Supreme Court majority, following the tortured legal theory enshrined in the Good News Club decision, agreed with plaintiffs that in excluding the church from public funding for its repairs, the state discriminated against its religious character. Under such a logic, of course, the Establishment Clause itself ceases to exist—or, rather, the government is effectively mandated to provide religious groups with public money, since failing to do so would amount to discrimination against their “religious viewpoint.” In this case, the justices stopped short of saying whether the ruling applies to school voucher programs that might be used, in effect, to funnel money from the federal and state governments to churches. But the ADF and its allies are nothing if not patient.