A Skewed Value System

Prison Fellowship is an organization that has ministered to the needs of prisoners throughout the United States. Although it champions Christian values, non-Christian inmates are beneficiaries of its services. InnerChange Freedom Initiative was a highly successful program affiliated with Prison Fellowship until its operations were the target of a court order occasioned by a lawsuit filed by Barry Lynn and Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Reduced recitivism was a by-product of this well administered program. That brings me to the point of this post. While organizations like Americans United for Separation of Church and State strive to rid our prison systems of any connection to Christian organizations, even when benefits derived from the services provided by them are well documented, literature supplied by extreme Muslim organizations, openly sympathetic to al-Qaeda, proliferate and recruitment follows suit. Prisons have become breeding grounds for home grown terrorists. So is this being challenged? That's the other shocking aspect of this. While Christian organizations with good track records are legally handcuffed, Muslim extremism not only thrives; it goes unchallenged.

What's wrong with this picture? Plenty, but at the heart of it lies a religious conflict. In this case it is not so much Christianity at odds with Islam as it is Christianity at odds with secularism. At its core religion is about values. True values are believed to be divinely ordained by both Christianity and Islam. Secularists depart from this view but their preoccupation with the deity is no less obvious.

The interesting part of this involves analyzing why Americn leftists and leftist organizations have a double standard toward religion depending on whether it is embodied by Christianity or Islam. As Mark Early has observed: "Shouldn't we be more concerned with removing radical Islamic literature from our prisons than removing the Bible?"

One would think so but the left views conservative Christians as their primary enemy and Muslims as a group to include in "diversity" programs. The innane policies spawned by this attitude have awakened the interest of normally left leaning academia. A study involving both the University of Virginia and George Washington University resulted in a recommendation that a federal commission be created to investigate the problem.

The InnerChange Freedom Initiative was a voluntary program that was working for inmates of diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds. It was part of the solution; not the problem. Wresting control of our prisons from extremists and hypocritical boosters of church and state separation may be an uphill battle but it is one that is necessary.