WHAT JEFFERSON WOULD THINK OF ADDICTION PROGRAM

Guest editorial:

BATON ROUGE, La. -- "Holy, Holy/Are You Lord God Almighty," a Christian
rock band sings, as the crowd sways, palms in the air. The music
stops, and a preacher with a microphone speaks. "God, you are bigger
than any addiction!

You are bigger than any crack cocaine, you are bigger than any beer,
than any pornography!"

It is Friday night at Healing Place Church, and Tonja Myles is
presiding over one of the most controversial church services in
America. It is a meeting of a "Christ-centered" addiction-treatment
program, led by the woman who has become the face of the Bush
administration's campaign to send tax dollars to faith-based social
service providers.

Myles was President Bush's special guest at the State of the Union
address in January, when he asked Congress for $600 million over three
years to finance vouchers for addiction programs, including religious
ones.

Faith-based social services are the latest missile the Bush
administration has fired at the wall between church and state.

Earlier this year, the Department of Housing and Urban Development
announced plans to allow tax dollars to be used to build churches, as
long as part of the building is used for social services.

I decided to head to Baton Rouge to see Myles' program firsthand. For
airplane reading, I brought Thomas Jefferson's writings on religion,
including his famous reply to the Danbury Baptist Association, which
introduced the now-classic formulation of a "wall of separation"
between church and state.

Meeting the ebullient Myles, it is instantly clear why the Bush
administration likes her. She is a natural communicator. Her arms
waving, and her voice soaring, she compares her audience's bitterness
and covetousness to cracks in her home, which recently allowed a mouse
to get in. "You left a little bitty crack for the Devil to get in and
destroy your life!" she cries out. "It's time that we seal up the cracks."

Myles' turbulent personal history is well known -- sexual abuse, drug
use and dealing, institutionalization and suicide attempts -- and she
draws on it freely: "I went from the crack house to the White House!"

When the time comes for audience participation, Myles grabs her
microphone and dives in, exclaiming, "I'm fixin' to play Oprah!" The
congregation's affection is evident, a striking thing given that Myles
is a black woman preaching to a virtually all-white crowd.

When the service ends, the congregation breaks into small groups to
talk about their addictions.

Myles has heard the talk of church and state, and is unconvinced. She
echoes the Bush line: a Christ-centered approach is one option, and
people should be allowed to choose. "It's like going into a steak
restaurant," she says. "You know you're going to get steak."

Backers of faith-based initiatives say that rules against state
support for religion are a recent invention of activist judges.

But when the Supreme Court handed down a landmark church-state case in
1947, it was careful to ground its decision in the words of our third
president.

Jefferson was hardly hostile to religion.

In his first Inaugural Address, he called God "an overruling
Providence, which by all its dispensations proves that it delights in
the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter." But
when the Danbury Baptist Association, a Connecticut religious group,
asked him to declare a national fast day, he refused, citing his
conviction that "religion is a matter which lies solely between man
and his God," and his view of the First Amendment as "building a wall
of separation between church and state."

Jefferson saw freedom of conscience as paramount. "To compel a man to
furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which
he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful," he wrote in "A Bill for
Establishing Religious Freedom." He also feared that if the churches
were united with government, the result would be tyranny.

The power of organized religion, Jefferson once wrote, "has been
severely felt by mankind, and has filled the history of ten or twelve
centuries with too many atrocities not to merit a proscription from
meddling with government."

Myles clearly cares about her flock.

Her ministry could be effective -- even secular 12-step programs rely
on submission to a higher power.

And it certainly fills a need. There is a severe shortage of
affordable addiction treatment nationwide.

Still, Myles should not get government funds for the reasons Jefferson
set forth.

Using tax money to spread her religious views would violate the
freedom of conscience of every taxpayer who does not share them. And
if Myles' small program gets government funds, larger and more
powerful religious groups will receive far more. As Jefferson
observed, the combination of large-scale organized religion and the
state would simply be too potent a force.

Supporters of faith-based initiatives accuse opponents of being
anti-religion. But it is the Bush administration that denigrates
religion by presenting it as simply another "option," no different
from secular choices like Alcoholics Anonymous or Weight Watchers.
Jefferson insisted on the need for a wall between church and state not
because he failed to appreciate religion, but because he understood
its power all too well.