US judge rules public funds can be used for church renovations

"We have well over half a million visitors each year, including some 70,000 school kids," says Ed Pignone, director of Old North Foundation. The 1723 church is "Boston's most visited historic site," he says.

Other instances of direct government aid are being challenged, however. When Congress passed a bill specifically to fund the restoration of California missions, 19 of which are active Catholic churches, Americans United for Separation of Church and State said it would sue. The missions have yet to raise the matching money that would trigger the grant.

And last week, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a suit in Louisiana to halt the payment of $120,000 in state money to two churches. The funds were earmarked in an appropriations bill, without any purpose or justification given.

AAI is considering whether to appeal the Michigan ruling. Although they had a partial victory (some church expenses were not reimbursed), they say they can't let the bricks-and-mortar argument stand.

"You could easily build a megachurch and avoid the religion iconography," Ms. Johnson says. "Then the church could later say, 'Now we'll put in the religious symbols ourselves.' " There's nothing secular about a church, she adds.

Others argue that religious groups frequently provide a secular service that makes them worthy of public support, even without setting up a separate 501(c)3 nonprofit to ensure no funds go to religious activities. This is the thinking behind Mr. Bush's faith-based initiative.

Partners for Sacred Places (PSP), a nonprofit, nonsectarian organization founded in 1989 to help preserve older and historic houses of worship, seeks contributions from private and public sources to help congregations repair their buildings.

Partners conducted a study of 100 congregations in six cities. It found that, on average, each maintained four community service programs. And 80 percent of the people who entered the buildings in a given week were nonmembers – people receiving those community services.

To donors, "we say it isn't supporting a religion, but supporting everybody – they don't make distinctions between kids or seniors of one faith or another," says Bob Jaeger, PSP executive director. "The other argument is that these are historic buildings ... that are an important part of a community's heritage."

PSP set up a fund in Pennsylvania and raised $2 million in donations from the William Penn Foundation, the state government (three different sources), and individuals to restore buildings in southeastern counties. The goal is to help congregations across the state.

One beneficiary is St. Francis de Sales Catholic Church in west Philadelphia. "It's an enormous building ... and they've been struggling for 20 years with how to fix the [three] domes which have water leaks," says Mr. Jaeger. "The church has an amazing physical presence and a cluster of programs for the community – we gave them $100,000."

For strict separationists like Johnson, no tax money should help a church – "religion should be doing that themselves."

For Tuttle, the Michigan decision seriously tackles the changes that have gone on in the law: the shift from barring any funding to religious institutions to barring funding for any religious activities. It comes down neither on the strict separationists side nor on the blanket neutrality approach of the Bush administration.

Instead, it says that "when a government makes a grant for secular purposes to a broad set of grantees, it can include churches," Tuttle adds. "But it has to be careful it is not directly supporting the religious mission or ministry."

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