The New York Times / By Samuel Freedman
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Six months after starting a humanist charity in 2010, Dale McGowan unveiled a philanthropist’s version of a beta test. He already offered donors to his organization, the Foundation Beyond Belief, the opportunity to designate their gifts for groups that worked in fields like refugee aid and environmentalism. Then, in an contrarian brainstorm, he decided to try adding a category for progressive religious bodies.
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Challenge the Gap puts money behind that analysis. Since 2011, the initiative has given several thousand dollars each fiscal quarter to a different religious group. The recipients have been Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and interfaith, and their primary issues have included hunger, reproductive rights and medical aid in Afghanistan. The only requirement, Mr. McGowan said, is that the organizations not proselytize.
Appropriately enough, the Foundation Beyond Belief will be releasing its next donation in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 5-to-4 decision this month in a case from Greece, N.Y., allowing official prayer before a public meeting of the municipal government. And the foundation’s gift of about $10,000 will be going to the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, one of a number of religious groups that filed amicus briefs opposing the concept of formal public prayer.
To the Rev. J. Brent Walker, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee, the separation of church and state offers a necessary protection for religious liberty rather than an obstacle to it. He describes the First Amendment as a product of both the Enlightenment and the Great Awakening, a safeguard of personal conscience for the secularist and the religious minority alike.
“In the views of these Christians,” stated the joint committee’s amicus brief in Town of Greece v. Galloway, the recent case, “decisions regarding whether to pray — and, if so, when and how — must be made voluntarily by each person based on his or her own conscience, and not by the government. It is because of — not in spite of — the importance of prayer and religion that amici object” to prayer at a governmental meeting.
