Funding the Culture Wars: Philanthropy, Church and State

[PDF] Hidden amid the conservative foundation grants to well-known right-wing think tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation and American Enterprise Institute, were donations to overtly religious organizations with political aspirations. Organizations like Toward Tradition, the Family Research Council and James Dobson’s Focus on the Family received approximately 10 percent of the grant monies studied in Axis to promote what has come to be popularly known as “traditional family values.” This “Culture War” and its issue battlefields of abortion, school prayer, public displays of the Ten Commandments, stem-cell research and most recently same-sex marriage are all issues with which conservative foundations engage.
This relatively large level of foundation support for religious conservatism raises substantial questions about philanthropy, politics and religion. To further explore these connections and issues, NCRP decided to expand its research on conservative philanthropy to the more specialized area of foundations that support Christian evangelism—with an emphasis on grantees that either directly or indirectly attempt to impact public policy. In looking at the magnitude and variety of grantmaking within this subsector of philanthropy, knowledge of the successful strategies applied by conservative grantmakers can be expanded. But equally important is the desire to examine the larger issues related to church and state, and how philanthropy factors into the equation.