The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA or “stimulus plan”) allocates nearly 800 billion federal dollars for federal, state, and local government expenditures. As usual in the American “third-party government” system, much of the money for products and services will not be spent directly by government agencies but instead will be awarded to private organizations. It will be these entities that expend the federal funds for many of the purposes specified in the law: construction companies that contract to complete some “shovel-ready” project, private businesses that receive federal dollars to fund a “green” product, and nonprofit organizations that win grants to carry out one or another of the social service and education programs that ARRA funds. Among those nonprofit organizations will be many faith-based organizations...