Proselytizing is condescending. Making it a condition of food and shelter is vile. The Constitution tasks the secular state with “providing for the general welfare” and exempts establishments of religion from all responsibility. By categorizing the exclusion of such organizations as “freedom of religion” we ignore that the founders had a long history of religious efforts to manage comunities to refer to and determined that arrangement did not work. Beter to rely on individuals to define their needs and request assistance.

It was probably a mistake to append prohibitions to the directives outlined in the main body of the U.S. Constitution. However, how else were the founders to address their experience with competing centers of power, including the eleemosynary folk.