WHAT MR. JEFFERSON WOULD THINK OF MS. MYLES'S ADDICTION PROGRAM

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. Ms. 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 Ms.
Myles's 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 Ms. 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."

Ms. Myles's 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, Ms. 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 Ms. 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.

Ms. 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."

Ms. 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, Ms. 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 Ms.
Myles's 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.