Should Religious Institutions Receive Funding from the Government?

In recent years, state and federal courts have repeatedly been faced with the questions of whether governmental grants and programs can provide money to churches, seminaries, and other religious institutions without running afoul of the First Amendment or state constitutions, and, conversely, whether withholding such funds constitutes prohibited religious discrimination. Michael Helfand, examining the sometimes-contradictory rulings on the matter, sees—and applauds—an emerging tendency for the Supreme Court to allow, or even require, religious institutions to be eligible for government largess:

[J]ust this past Thursday, the New Jersey supreme court punted on a . . . case addressing New Jersey’s “Building Our Future Bond Act,” which provided funds for capital-improvement projects for institutions of higher education. Among other institutions, both Beth Medrash Govoha (BMG) in Lakewood and Princeton Theological Seminary received funds under this program—approximately $10.6 million and $650,000 respectively. . . . At issue for the court was whether the funds would ultimately be used for conduct and purposes that it could describe as wholly religious. . . . Thus, while BMG clearly expressed that its programs included significant amounts of religious study, it also highlighted that less than 5 percent of its students pursue [rabbinic] ordination. . . .

Ultimately, the [U.S.] Supreme Court has allowed for the exclusion of religious institutions from government funding in the narrow set of cases where [providing such funding] would put the state in the position of using tax dollars to support the ministry. But veering away from those narrow historical confines, the Supreme Court has emphasized that excluding a religious institution from “benefits for which it is otherwise qualified” is “odious to our Constitution.”

And maybe, notwithstanding all this constitutional messiness, that approach—prohibiting religious discrimination in government funding except in the narrowest of circumstances—provides the best option for courts going forward. Accordingly, . . . maybe once the state is granting funding for higher education, then it should not be able to exclude a subset of institutions of higher education simply because they primarily pursue the rigorous study of religion.

At bottom, when adjudicating claims of religious discrimination in government funding, courts are thrust into a clash of values between [the] non-establishment [clause] and neutrality. But in parsing cases that fall uncomfortably between the two, courts might be wise to embrace an approach that defaults to putting religious and secular institutions on equal footing. No doubt, there may be hazards in adopting such an approach. But the hazards of tolerating the singling out of religious individuals and institutions for unequal treatment seem far greater.

Read more at Forward

More about: Freedom of Religion, Politics & Current Affairs, Religion & Holidays, Supreme Court

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society