Back in the late 18th Century at the onset of the United States, the founding fathers – despite their faults – recognized the dangers of entangling government and religion. So much, in fact, the First Amendment to the new Constitution created a legal barrier dividing the two, what Thomas Jefferson famously called a “separation between church and state.”
In 2025, that separation, due to an increasingly right-wing U.S. Supreme Court in recent decades, is rapidly eroding. In Tennessee, this marriage between religion and government is being officiated by GOP Gov. Bill Lee.
At the behest of Lee, the Tennessee state legislature in 2023 created the Governor’s Faith-Based and Community Initiative. At first only funded via private donations, the largest monetary gift it received by far at $100,000, as reported by the Chattanooga Times Free Press recently, was made by Lee himself.
By the next fiscal year, the initiative began receiving public funding. The governor’s effort to mingle religion and government receives from the state a recurring annual fund of nearly $1.5 million.
With the aim of using government “to leverage the power and possibilities of Tennessee’s faith communities,” the governor’s vision for the initiative is “to solve the state’s most challenging issues.”