My big fat GOP wedding: Bush administration marriage grants seek to wed church and state in unholy matrimony

Church & State, Feb 2003 by Boston, Rob

Like so many others in the Bush administration, Horn stands solidly behind a faith-based approach to social problems and sees no problem with taxpayer funding of religious groups. Last year Horn told Focus on the Family's Citizen magazine that he advocates states offering a type of voucher so couples could choose religious counseling. Horn believes this approach circumvents any church-state problems.

"It allows the provider not to have to take the faith out of his services," Horn told Citizen.

Horn was quick to praise former Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating, who in 2000 set aside $10 million of the state's welfare budget for a marriage initiative heavily anchored in the religious community. Horn called the project "quite exciting" and said he was looking forward to seeing the results.

Clergy in the state were asked to sign the "Oklahoma Marriage Covenant," a pledge to require couples to undergo a four-to-six month period of preparation before a wedding. Counselors were also trained in a Prevention and Relationship Enhancement Program, which purports to help couples communicate better. According to Citizen, participants could choose a secular or Christian version of the program. Despite the religious content of the latter, the state still paid for the training.

Dr. Bruce Prescott, director of Mainstream Baptists in Oklahoma, has tried to track faith-based money being used to prop up the marriage initiative in his state but has found the going difficult.

"In Oklahoma, the money gets distributed and no one knows," Prescott said. "The people in the legislature just close their eyes. They sure don't want to be on the wrong side of something that has to do with faith.... Churches have easy money and loose accountability. It's going to be a disaster when it's said and done. In Oklahoma, the government is telling pastors, `You don't have to compromise your Christian witness and faith.' It's a way of putting any government social service provider out of business."

Prescott, a Baptist minister himself, suspects that most of the money is going to Religious Right-oriented churches. He is also skeptical that marriage-promotion programs can avoid advancing religion.

"Why are you going to a Christian minister for a marriage if you're not trying to deal with that in a religious context?" he asks. "You could go to the justice of the peace. If you need counseling, you could see a psychologist. I honestly think this is about funneling tax funds to ministers one way or another."

While the Oklahoma project still has seven years to run, early results are not encouraging. Oklahoma is known as a conservative and religious state, but it also has the second-highest divorce rate in the nation. (Thirty-one percent of Oklahomans are Southern Baptists, making it the state with the third highest percentage of Southern Baptists in the country.) So far, the divorce rate has not changed.

Some observers say the marriage-improvement movement's emphasis on conservative religious groups and "faith-based" organizations is ironic. Statistical data shows that historically, members of conservative religious denominations have a higher divorce rate than the rest of the population.