WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration has quietly altered regulations for the nation's leading job training program to allow faith-based organizations to use ''sacred literature,'' such as Bibles, in their federally funded programs. Civil liberties activists say the new rules blur the line between religion and government.
The change, made by the US Labor Department last month, could allow faith-based groups to use religious books as historical texts or as inspirational stories for job seekers, as long as organizations do not proselytize or conduct prayer sessions.
In a separate action, the House is expected today to approve a change allowing private groups that run job training programs to discriminate on the basis of religion when they hire people to run them. That change, part of legislation to renew the overall program, would lift a ban that has existed in federal law for two decades.
The two changes represent efforts by the Bush administration and sympathetic members of Congress to give more latitude to faith-based organizations that receive grants under the Workforce Reinvestment and Adult Education Act of 1998, which provides more than $6 billion annually to states, colleges, and private groups. Advocates of the changes say they are intended to free faith-based groups to employ people of the same religion without facing the threat of discrimination lawsuits.
But critics say the moves are a violation of civil rights laws.
''The notion that you need to allow religious groups to discriminate to receive federal funds is a lie,'' said Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Newton. ''If you dip your fingers in the federal till, you can't complain if a little democracy rubs off on you.''
Congress has wrangled several times on the question of how to handle religious groups that receive federal funds. An unresolved battle over the separation of church and state helped quash President Bush's faith-based initiative. But he signed an executive order in December allowing faith-based groups to compete for federal grants.
Opponents complain that Bush and his backers are using federal rules and bills authorizing individual social programs to get what he could not win in his broader faith-based initiative.
Religious groups have long been exempted from a ban on religious discrimination in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, on the theory that a Roman Catholic parish, for example, would not want to hire someone of another religion to say Mass.
But when the job training law, formerly the Job Training Partnership Act, was crafted in 1982, the rules were fine-tuned, and religious organizations were barred from discriminating on the basis of religion in hiring for the federally subsidized jobs program. The rule did not affect the ability of faith-based groups to make religion a factor in hiring for activities not funded by the government.
But the bill scheduled for action on the House floor today has been stripped of the longstanding language banning discrimination on the basis of religion. Democrats sought to restore the ban when the legislation went through the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, but they were defeated on a party-line vote.
Religious groups have run programs under the job training act, and ''that has been no problem,'' said Representative John A. Boehner, an Ohio Republican and the committee's chairman.
''But there has been a concern on our part . . . that someone could go after them based on civil rights issues'' and keep religious groups from continuing to provide secular job training, he said.
Tom McCluskey of the Family Research Council, a conservative advocacy group, said he was unfamiliar with the moves to change rules governing the job training programs. But he said faith-based groups would be wary of getting involved in providing such training, because they could face discrimination lawsuits.
Boehner said the committee would seek to put similar protection for religious groups in bills reauthorizing national service programs, such as AmeriCorps.
The changes in regulations for job training grants, published late last month, are subtler but equally worrisome to civil liberties advocates.
In guidelines published on April 4, the Labor Department said the job training grants ''may not be used for instruction in religion or sacred literature, worship, prayer, proselytizing, or other inherently religious practices.''
''The services provided under these grants must be secular and nonideological,'' the guidelines said then.
But in amended guidelines published in the Federal Register on April 18, the words ''sacred literature'' were removed, along with the sentence saying that the services provided must be secular and nonideological.
A Labor Department spokeswoman said there was no one available to explain why the language was changed. The office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives at the White House did not return a telephone call.
Christopher Anders, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, called the change ''a wink and a nod to religious organizations'' to use religious literature in their secular work.
''They went to the trouble of putting out an amended notice to strike [a] section and to strike out `sacred literature,' '' Anders said. ''It's making very clear that they want to have this ambiguity'' in how much religion faith-based organizations can use in job training programs, he said.