Charity for the Autonomous Self

Abstract

Australia adopted the Charities Act of 2013, consolidating and restating the country's governing statutes on the registration and qualification of charities, but leaving to the future any reconciliation between faith-related charities claiming religious liberty and others demanding marriage equality and no discrimination based on sexuality. Concurrent to this development, but with an eye to the direction of charity law in common law systems throughout the world, major works have come to us from two Australian scholars. In this review I offer much about these two monographs, but the discussion that immediately follows concerns the law of charitable nonprofits in the United States, the basic structure of that law, and current issues implicating religious freedom.

Law, Christianity, and Good Samaritanism

“…The U.S. Supreme Court has largely taken a permissive perspective on charitable choice despite these complaints from various sides, and the permissive view seems likely to continue, and perhaps to expand, in the near future, given the primacy of the Free Exercise Clause over the Establishment Clause and affirmative, nondiscriminatory aid to religious individuals and groups in the Court's recent jurisprudence. 42 "Compassionate conservatism" became the term for the continuation of this charitable-choice impulse under the administration of President George W. Bush.43 But circumstances changed, in many respects, with the Great Recession of 2008. This was a global economic recession that touched lives the world over, but in the United States, it gave rise to the Tea Party movement, which began as a fiscally conservative movement concerned to lower taxes and reduce the federal debt, but which became a volatile movement of libertarian, conservative, and populist forces, all of which ultimately wanted much less government in people's lives.…”