As I’ve noted before, I’ve been following presidential faith-based initiatives since early in the Bush Administration. I’ve hitherto been underwhelmed by faith-based 2.0, the Obama version.
But Obama’s Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships must be doing something right (by my lights), since it’s attracting much the same kind of criticism from the same sources that its predecessor received.
Consider this piece by Sarah Posner , which repeats the tired canard about government-sponsored discrimination:
Under some fairly consistent pressure from church-state separate advocates, Obama did recently, and after a substantial delay, issue an executive order making some improvements to the constitutional issues that remained from the Bush-era faith-based office and that Obama had promised to correct. One major problem hasn’t been fixed, though: faith-based groups receiving government grants can still discriminate against employees and applicants on religious grounds. That $50 million of taxpayer money to Catholic Charities, for example, would not prohibit the group from refusing to hire someone because they are gay. Many more tens of millions went to other religious groups.
Her point of departure is an article reporting on what proportion of the stimulus funds went to faith-based organizations.
POLITICO searched the federal database at Recovery.gov for grants to faith-based groups and found a wide range of grants going to an array of denominations. Catholic groups, receiving about $90 million, were the largest; Protestant groups received at least $45 million; and Jewish groups received at least $6 million.
Groups associated with other faiths got substantially less. One Muslim charity in Chicago, the Inner City Muslim Action Network, received $277,000 for a green jobs program through the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Much of the money went to fund the secular activities of religious institutions like schools and charitable organizations. Department of Education and Department of Agriculture grants went mostly to schools — Head Start programs, school lunch programs and other education-related programs.
Charities and social services organizations received funding through the Departments of Housing and Urban Development, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security and Justice. And the Department of Energy administered a number of energy-efficiency programs that some religious institutions qualified for.
The Politico article goes out of its way to note that there’s no obvious favoritism in the dispensation of funding, quoting Joshua DuBois, Director of the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, to the effect that all that was intended was the achievement of a “level playing field,” language first used in explaining the Bush Administration’s initiatives. Churches, denoiminations, and faith-based organizations were apparently eligible for stimulus funding in accordance with neutral criteria. (This, by the way, does not distinguish Obama version 2.0 from Bush version 1.0, despite frequent efforts of Bush’s critics to argue otherwise.)
This isn’t to say that there are no grounds for quarrelling with this expenditure of stimulus money. Consider this comment from Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United: “We believe that the heating and cooling of religious institutions is a job for the congregation, not the American taxpayer.” To be sure. But does Rev. Lynn hold the same view about every private organization? Shouldn’t they all be responsible for their own HVAC systems? Or would he only leave religious institutions out in the cold, so to speak? Some might be inclined to level the playing field by not giving any puyblic money to improve anyone’s physical plant.
But I digress. The bottom line seems to be that thus far there’s not all that much difference between the Bush and Obama faith-based initiatives. If you objected to Bush’s, you have similar grounds for objecting to Obama’s. If you liked Bush’s, then you might be inclined to like Obama’s.
Well, I’m not sure I would go quite that far. As I have argued elsewhere , there is a subtle and yet important difference between Bush and Obama: however flawed his means and imperfect his execution, President Bush’s ultimate aim was to help civil society grow. For him, government was secondary and civil society primary. That most emphatically cannot be said about President Obama. We might well be reminded now of Ronald Reagan’s “nine most terrifying words.”
