Feature Story - October 2009
Revamped Faith-Based Office is Assessed
President Obama and Joshua DuBois
President Obama's revised and renamed Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships was part of a panel discussion during last month's annual meeting of the Religious Newswriters Association held in Minneapolis.
Weeks after assuming office in January, the President signed an executive order renaming the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives that was started by former President Bush.
President Obama named Pentecostal minister, Joshua DuBois, his top religion advisor during the 2008 campaign, as executive director of the office, and a new advisory board comprised of 25 religious and secular leaders, who will serve one-year renewable terms.
A main task of council members is to advise the President on coordinating government programs with local community groups. The President has named four priorities for the office: poverty, abortion reduction, responsible fatherhood and promoting interfaith dialogue abroad.
Among the participants at the panel discussion was former Southern Baptist Convention President, Frank Page, an advisory board member who is on the subcommittee for responsible fatherhood.
Page said he did not believe much will be done with the council members' recommendations.
"Nothing of great substance will come from this. They'll say you're doing well, or this could be done, but they're focusing on the low hanging fruit. I do feel I will privately be able to give advice on policy, and I have.
I'm somewhat frustrated but honored to be a part of this council. I'm thankful that I can have a voice at the table. My voice is perhaps more conservative, but I do appreciate having a place at the table."
Page continued, "There's been a relatively small amount of time where the council has got to dialogue with one another. We dialogue on issues that could polarize each other. I'm honored to be a part of it, and I do appreciate being asked. I have serious disagreements with our president, but I do pray for him every day.
I appreciate his care for the poor, but I disagree with how they can best be cared for. As a pastor and an ethicist by training, I do believe that Jesus manifested in his earthly life a deep concern for the poor. Evangelicals should do the same," Page said.
Another panel discussion member and advisory board member, Rev. Peg Chemberlin, president-elect of the National Council of Churches, said she believes their work is more than political expediency for the White House.
"I don't think that this is primarily about political cover, but I think this is about affirming that the faith community's got something to offer. The nonprofit community is a huge and important sector in building the common good.
Bringing the Good News can't be done without bringing the news. The Bush administration brought this issue to light for us," Chemberlin said.
Both Page and Chemberlin expressed hope that the White House might succeed in its efforts to reduce the need for abortion.
"That's probably the only common ground that I can see coming forth on that issue," Page said.
The other panelist was Dan Gilgoff, a senior writer for U.S. News & World Report, who penned an article on the Faith-Based office prior to the Religious Newswriters' meeting. Among some of Gilgoff's observations, "For all the controversy that George W. Bush's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives generated over the proper line between church and state, President Obama's faith-based office has given religious figures a bigger role in influencing White House decisions. Before Obama's May address to the Muslim world from Cairo, for example, the office organized a conference call with American religious leaders to help shape the speech. In August, Obama's office launched a national tour of town hall meetings on fatherhood that will collect ideas for shaping family policy.
Six months after its rollout, Obama's office has dramatically shifted gears from the one that Bush started from scratch in 2001. Bush's office sought to ‘level the playing field' for faith-based and community groups seeking federal grants to deliver social services, like counseling drug addicts and mentoring at-risk youth. Obama, by contrast, has tasked his office with four broad policy goals.
Yet some of the biggest questions surrounding Obama's office when it launched remain unanswered. The administration has not decided whether to allow religious groups to hire only fellow believers with federal funds, a hugely controversial issue. The outside faith advisory council, which will formulate proposals for achieving the office's policy goals–and for combating climate change and reforming the office itself–won't formalize its recommendations until next year. And the office is still devising metrics by which to measure its effectiveness, a subject of much debate during the Bush years.
A recent report by the Rockefeller Institute criticized Bush's faith-based office for politicizing its work, sending staff to rallies for Republican candidates, and concentrating training sessions in swing states. While commending the office for easing government resistance toward funding faith-based groups, the report found that those groups received the same share of federal dollars under Bush as they had previously, largely because Bush cut discretionary grant programs. And charges that Bush's office helped funnel money to favored political constituencies helped provoke the Obama White House's decision to de-emphasize the office's role as grant facilitator.
Instead, the Obama office is focused on building non-fiduciary relationships with faith and community groups through satellite offices at a dozen federal agencies. The satellite office at the Homeland Security Department, for example, is working to bring churches and other faith groups into the government's hurricane preparedness training," Gilgoff stated.
In response, Gilgoff quoted DuBois as saying, "We can look at a community asset map and show that we trained x-thousands of community organizations to respond to a flood or tornado or H1N1 (influenza). Making sure faith-based groups are partners in the federal response to pandemic flu is just as important as receiving a grant."
Mollie Hemingway, a columnist for Christianity Today, in a recent Op-Ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, suggested the Obama administration is getting a free pass with regard to the faith-based initiative.
"Now that Mr. Bush is gone, however, no one seems particularly worried about the entanglement of the federal government with religious organizations. A recent study sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trusts found that President Obama's ‘faith-based initiative has so far generated little of the contentious press coverage associated with Bush's effort.'
According to Pew, the media ran nearly seven times as much coverage of President Bush's faith-based initiative during his first six months in office as President Obama's. And the stories on Mr. Bush's initiative were almost 50% more likely to be on the front-page, emphasizing the controversial nature of the program. The stories on Mr. Obama's initiative were buried deeper in the paper and focused on procedure. Few, if any, stories questioned whether the current president would use his office to advance a religious agenda, a major theme of coverage during the Bush administration.
This scant media attention is all the more incredible, given that, as Americans United for Separation of Church and State has noted, Mr. Obama has left ‘the entire architecture of the Bush faith-based initiative intact–every rule, every regulation, every executive order.' More controversially, the office has become a major hub of political outreach. In frequent conference calls, the administration informs faith-based leaders of its policy initiatives, as when it recently asked rabbis around the country to give sermons on health-care reform during the high holiday season last month.
Barry Lynn, head of Americans United, was a vocal critic of Mr. Bush's faith-based office. Now, under Mr. Obama, he serves on the advisory council's task force to improve the functioning of the office. Explaining his turnaround, he said he doesn't view Mr. Obama's office as partisan–the way Mr. Bush's was. But acknowledging that there was no substantive difference between the offices yet, Mr. Lynn said: ‘We have a guarded optimism that when the advisory council, Justice Department and the White House act and get down to the nitty gritty, they will make this a constitutionally protected program. However, we have no proof of that and no guarantee,'" Hemingway quoted Lynn as stating.
In response to the WSJ commentary, Americans United spokesman, Rob Boston, said, "When Bush unveiled the faith-based initiative, it was his first domestic program. It was seen as new and ground-breaking, so it was big news.
Obama is merely continuing Bush's approach. Fair or not, from the media's perspective, that's just not as newsworthy. You're not going to see headlines in the paper reading, ‘Existing Program to Continue.'
We've run articles in Church & State about our concerns over Obama's approach. I don't think anyone could look at this material and fail to understand that we're disappointed. AU wants Obama to fix the initiative's glaring constitutional defects. We have not been shy about saying that.
Obama has put both proponents and opponents of the faith-based initiative on the task force and other bodies that advise him on this subject. We interpret this to mean that he and his staff must want to hear all perspectives, and that's what AU is doing: giving them the separationist view.
Will it make a difference? Will the faith-based initiative eventually be changed in a way that pleases AU and its allies? We don't know yet," Boston said.
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