Ask Minister Louis Farrakhan, and he'll say I was created by a mad scientist named Yakub, just like every other white devil. A lab mistake! But help is on the way, says Farrakhan. A Mother Ship is up there, hovering just above the clouds, ready to drop down and topple the white government and turn the keys to the White House over to the Nation of Islam.

Ask someone like Minister Jay Merrell of the Phineas Priesthood, now serving time for bank robbery and pipe-bombing a Planned Parenthood clinic, and it's a wholly different creation story. Here I'm part of the lost tribe of Israel and inherently of better quality than Jews, blacks and other non-whites and non-Christians, collectively referred to as the "mud people." Here, too, help is on the way from just above the clouds, ready to drop down so people of my birthright can enjoy an everlasting and non-muddy hegemony.

Here's the question: Under George W. Bush's new White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, should either of the aforementioned get federal tax dollars, say, to fight crime or run a drug program?

As it's turned out, we're already on our way with the Clinton administration's award of some $15 million to the Nation of Islam to police housing projects in D.C. and eight other cities. It didn't matter what Minister Farrakhan said about Jews controlling major sports figures and running Hollywood, or about Jews operating the slave trade and loaning money to Hitler, or about the crazy scientist and the pulsating Mother Ship. Just so the job got done. And it did get done, says Rep. Charles Rangel: "By every criteria, the Nation of Islam did a fantastic job."

And the money, it appears, will keep pouring Farrakhan's way, based on what the Bush team told the New York Times: "Any religious group, including controversial organizations like the Church of Scientology and the Nation of Islam" will be allowed "to compete for government money if their social services programs had proven results."

The Phineas Priesthood, too, if they put together a good soup kitchen and lay off the pipe-bombings?

Who decides? Coming off a history of religious warfare and persecution that had bloodied up Europe for centuries, the United States was founded on a set of principles that aimed at replacing the old model of established state churches and religious intolerance with a pluralism that celebrated diversity and the right of individual conscience. And so, now, given this national ethos of religious freedom, who in Washington is going to decide if the Nation of Islam, on its spiritual side, is too pervaded by anti-Semitism and too anti-white and if the Phineas Priesthood is too anti-black?

Here's how Wendy Kaminer of Radcliffe College stated the dilemma on PBS: "Government bureaucrats will be talking about the difference between legitimate and illegitimate religions. That's very dangerous." Adds Jewish World Review columnist Nat Hentoff, "It is dangerous because it violates the free exercise of religion clause of the First Amendment."

The idea at the White House is that we can separate the religion from the social work, and publicly fund only the latter. The government "cannot and will not fund religious activities," explained President Bush, only the "social service side" of an operation. Or as former Indianapolis mayor Stephen Goldsmith put it, speaking for the administration: "The government can fund the soup, it can fund the shelter, but it can't fund the Bibles."

For others, the disconnection isn't so easy. "Money is fungible," says Hentoff. "Before government funds arrive, money already budgeted for the soup kitchen can be freed for a purely sectarian purpose. Is there going to be pervasive government auditing to check for the misuse of government funds?"

More than that, why should we even expect politicians to be interested in running tough audits when a more free-wheeling approach to handing out government money can buy more votes in the next election? Why defund the Nation of Islam while you're seeking to broaden the party's African-American base?

None of this is to deny that faith-based groups can play a vital role in social service strategy, or to deny that these organizations are struggling with virtually unlimited problems and insufficient resources. The problem is about funding and control, both for taxpayers who aren't in accord with certain religious beliefs and for churches that value their autonomy.

Brent Walker, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee, poses a key question: "How can religion raise a prophet's fist against government when its other hand is open for a handout?"

Columnist George Will, too, warns of the "creeping secularization and politicization of religious organizations," pointing to the time that the Department of Housing and Urban Development asked the Catholic archbishop of Los Angeles to change the name of the St. Vincent de Paul Shelter to the Mr. Vincent de Paul Shelter.

The solution, it seems, is to skip the central plan and simply boost the incentives in the tax code for charitable giving so that the same amount of money will flow to the soup kitchens and alcohol programs as is now planned for the White House operation -- only with more local control, less politics and more individual attachment.