Bill de Blasio under fire for omitting Catholic clergy from 60-member transition team

[eomer]

77. You're right, I was too broad-brushed about motivations behind charity of religious groups.

I am sure there are religious groups that do charity for the right reasons. I am also certain there are religious groups that do charity for the chance to proselytize. What the percentage is of each I don't know.

Unfortunately the groups that I've encountered personally were of the type that do it to proselytize. I recently attended training for a prison visitation program of the Catholic Archdiocese in my area. It was quite surprising that the one and only thing being taught in a training class that lasted a full day was that the volunteers were to minister to the prisoners only on matters of religion. They were taught not to engage in discussion of the prisoner's personal life and the difficulties such as family relations due to being incarcerated. They were not to engage in discussion about conditions, including abusive conditions, at the facility. They were not allowed to minister to the person's human needs; they were allowed to do no other thing than proselytize!

(I say "they" in the above because the deacon doing the training and eventually everyone in the class knew I was a UU and an atheist. I was there because I thought I would learn something useful about prison visitation but did not because the approach we take in our new visitation program is the exact opposite - we ask volunteers not to engage on religion unless the prisoner specifically wants to and instead we engage on the human aspects of their incarceration. We're recruiting volunteers mostly from the community and not with any attempt to find people who are religious - in other words it is really a secular program.)

In another example, a family member wanted to volunteer for a program helping kids run by a local Baptist church. But even though she is Christian she did not meet their religious litmus tests and was not allowed to volunteer. Clearly the reason that her religious beliefs mattered to them was that they see religion as a central part of their ministering to these people in need of help.

All the instances in my personal experience are similar where clearly the program had proselytizing as a central component and motivation. As I said, I don't know what the percentage is in real life as obviously my personal experience could be a statistical outliier. So please allow me to modify my statement, with apologies, to say that I don't want religious leaders involved in government because I don't trust them to have the right motivations. Some of them do, some of them don't, and I don't see a particular need to have them involved anyway so my solution would be separation of church and state, vigorously applied.