Washington, USA - Indiana has ended a program that put a chaplain position on the payroll of the state’s Family and Social Services Administration.
In May, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, an advocacy group based in Madison, Wis., filed a lawsuit on behalf of several Indiana taxpayers challenging the program.
The foundation argued that the office was unconstitutional because it involved purely religious activities. This week, the state confirmed that it had disbanded the office and dismissed the minister, the Rev. Michael L. Latham.
“Indiana was establishing religion by, in the words of Latham’s job description, ‘encouraging a faithful environment in the workplace,’” said the foundation’s co-president, Annie Laurie Gaylor.
The Family and Social Services Administration disburses public assistance and other aid to the poor. It hired Mr. Latham, a Baptist minister, in 2006 to serve as its chaplain.
While chaplains paid with public money work with the military, fire departments and the police, the Indiana chaplaincy program was considered unprecedented by both sides of the dispute because it involved a large state bureaucracy.
Marcus Barlow, a spokesman for E. Mitchell Roob Jr., secretary of the Family and Social Services Administration, said that the chaplaincy had been a pilot program and that it had been disbanded because it did not meet its goals. The chaplain was supposed to function like those in hospitals, prisons and police departments. He was also asked to pull together a cadre of volunteer chaplains for the agency.
In August, the state ended the program but placed Mr. Latham on disability pay. The foundation said it would continue the lawsuit until Mr. Latham’s benefits ended, which occurred Sept. 23. The state and the foundation filed a joint stipulation for dismissal of the lawsuit on Tuesday.
Taypayer-paid chaplaincies “rest on a narrow constitutional footing,” wrote Ira C. Lupu and Robert W. Tuttle, co-directors of legal research for the Roundtable on Religion and Social Welfare Policy, and professors of law at George Washington University, in an analysis of the case last May.
Chaplaincies in the military exist because military service can isolate people from religious communities. Fire and police departments have them because their employees might require access to clergy members with an understanding of the risks and stresses in those jobs.
The workers at the Indiana agency “do not appear to have religious needs that have been materially burdened by any acts of the government,” Mr. Lupu and Mr. Tuttle wrote.
David W. Miller, executive director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture and an expert on workplace chaplaincies, said part of the problem lay with how the Indiana office was run. “It’s not prima facie that such a program is unconstitutional,” Mr. Miller said. “This one was just poorly thought-out, structured and executed.”
In fact, the program may have buckled for reasons apart from the lawsuit. Mr. Latham lacked the academic credentials that other state chaplains have, yet he was the state’s highest paid chaplain, according to a June article in The Indianapolis Star. And he failed to pull together the team of volunteer chaplains asked of him, the paper reported.
The article also pointed out Mr. Latham’s political ties: he was president of a local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and had campaigned in 2004 for Mitch Daniels, a Republican, in his successful bid for governor.
Mr. Latham told the newspaper he had been working in ministry for 20 years and “in the people business since the age of 17.” To those critical of his political ties, he said African-Americans needed to be involved in both parties.