Faith, Hope, and Government

A former Bush adviser explains why the consensus
favoring federal support for faith-based
social services collapsed - and why it must be revived

By John J. Diiulio Jr., 6/22/2003
BOSTON GLOBE

QUICK, GUESS WHICH prominent politician preached the
following social policy sermon: 

The Founders had faith in reason.... I would add that
they had faith in God, from whom the
ability to reason is a great gift.... If government
goes too far, and seeks to go beyond separation
from religion to outright hostility toward religion,
you can end up with something like the Soviet
Union.... Government works in partnership with
religious institutions.... to promote public
purposes-feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless.
Faith inspires those good works, to be
sure. But tax dollars are properly used to channel the
energies of the faithful in a direction that
helps our society as a whole.

George W. Bush? Joe Lieberman? John Ashcroft? Nope, it
was Senator Hillary Rodham
Clinton, speaking at New York's Abyssinian Baptist
Church on Dec. 17, 2001. Don't be too
surprised. Clinton is a person of faith, and more
moderate on many domestic issues than people
suppose. ''It takes a village,'' she believes,
including the village congregations.

Besides, it was the senator's husband who, in 1996,
signed into law the first major federal
statutes prohibiting government from discriminating
against religious organizations seeking public
funds available to groups that deliver social
services. Under these ''charitable choice'' statutes,
faith-based organizations can now compete for public
funds on the same basis as all other
nonprofits, provided they honor all federal
civil-rights laws, do not discriminate against any
employee or client on the basis of religion, and do
not use the funds to proselytize, lead worship
services, or support sectarian activities. Neither
federal nor state government can require an
otherwise qualified faith-based organization to remove
religious art, icons, scripture, or other
symbols as a condition for applying for or receiving
public funds.

But today, faith-based social service programs still
receive only a small percentage of available
federal funding, despite the importance and proven
effectiveness of the work they do. What's
more, the political consensus behind the charitable
choice laws has largely unraveled-to the
detriment of the very communities the law was supposed
to serve.

It all looked very different four years ago. During
the last presidential campaign, Al Gore and
George W. Bush agreed that charitable choice laws
ought to be more widely implemented. On
May 24, 1999, Gore, speaking at a Salvation Army drug
treatment center in Atlanta, declared
that faith-based groups, in ''partnership with
government,'' can ''weave a resilient web of life
support under the most helpless among us.'' On July
22, 1999, speaking at a black church in
Indianapolis, Bush proclaimed that it ''is not enough
to call for volunteerism.... Without more
support, public and private, we are asking them to
make bricks without straw.... Government
cannot be replaced by charities, but it can welcome
them as partners, not resent them as rivals.''

Prior to the election, I met with both candidates and
advised both campaigns on various
domestic issues. When George W. Bush became president,
he asked me to join his senior staff
as the first director of the new White House Office of
Faith-Based and Community Initiatives
(OFBCI). As I told the president and stated publicly
at the time, for health and professional
reasons, I would serve for only six months or just
long enough to complete and publish the
charitable choice implementation study expressly
mandated by the executive orders that
established the new office. I announced my resignation
on Aug. 20, 2001, the morning after we
released ''Unlevel Playing Field,'' a report detailing
grant-making patterns in five federal
departments.

The report remains posted at the OFBCI link at
www.whitehouse.gov. It suggests that, in
defiance of Clinton-era charitable choice statutes and
related laws, government continues to
discriminate wantonly against demonstrably effective
community-serving religious organizations,
even when those organizations abide by the rules
against proselytizing.

This discrimination is especially pronounced in
inner-city communities, where faith-based
organizations supply the lion's share of services but
receive no public money or just crumbs from
tables set by large secular nonprofit organizations.
From North Central Philadelphia to South
Central Los Angeles, hundreds of black churches and
other faith-based groups have run
exemplary after-school education and literacy
programs, as well as programs to help adult
parolees and drug addicts get a fresh start. But in
2000, such groups received only 25 out of
more than 1,000 discretionary grants administered by
the Department of Education across 11
programs, and less than three dollars out of every
1,000 granted by the Department of Justice.

These inner-city groups have been harmed by the
political infighting over faith-based initiatives.
Once in office, President Bush immediately tried to
make good on his pledge to promote
charitable choice while honoring legitimate limits on
church-state collaboration. ''We will,'' he
repeated both in public and in private, ''keep a
commitment to pluralism, not discriminating for
or against Methodists or Mormons or Muslims, or good
people of no faith at all.'' Senate
Democrats, including Joe Lieberman and Hillary
Clinton, were eager to support the
administration's push to implement and expand
charitable choice laws.

But the consensus on faith-based programs collapsed
when a few influential religious
conservative leaders publicly demanded that Congress
and the administration step way beyond
charitable choice. These critics, including several
who had once publicly cheered charitable
choice, dismissed the great legislative achievement
championed by then Senator John Ashcroft
as weak tea brewed to suit the tastes of antireligious
liberal Democrats. They now called for
new laws permitting religious organizations to
proselytize with public funds and enjoy virtually
unfettered rights to discriminate against employees on
the basis of religion.

Under the 1964 Civil Rights Act and other laws, as
upheld by the federal courts, religious
organizations already enjoyed a so-called ministerial
exemption from antidiscrimination laws with
respect to most employment decisions. But the new
critics of charitable choice now demanded
more. House Republican staff drafted a bill that
reaffirmed charitable choice principles in some
parts but reflected the critics' demands in other
parts, most controversially by introducing
''beliefs and tenets'' provisions that many Democrats
read as tantamount to giving religious
organizations an unqualified right to proselytize with
public funds and discriminate in hiring.

On July 19, 2001, the bill passed on a virtual
party-line vote, with all Republicans but only 15
Democrats voting in favor. The bill was predictably
dead on arrival in the Senate. Since then, no
new charitable choice bill has been proposed, and the
public debate over faith-based programs
has only grown more polarized and confused.

A valuable opportunity has been lost. What the public
needs is a clearer understanding of the
variety of faith-based programs, and the different
ways that they use religion to motivate
employees, volunteers, and clients. Under the right
circumstances, all of these programs can
operate effectively within the restraints of
charitable choice and the church/state separation
mandated by the constitution.

At one end of the spectrum are faith-mobilized
programs: These rally religious volunteers to
assist secular organizations or public agencies that
perform good works. Big Brothers Big
Sisters (BBBS)-Amachi, one of three faith-based
programs vividly profiled in the documentary
''God and the Inner City'' (airing this Thursday on
WGBH-Boston), is a multi-city faith-
mobilized program for mentoring the children of
prisoners. (I helped develop the program in
Philadelphia; Senator Clinton is on the program's New
York City advisory board.) The seed
funding was supplied by the Pew Charitable Trusts, a
national foundation based in Philadelphia.
The program also receives some city and federal
assistance.

President Bush, who has met twice with the program's
leaders, volunteers, and families, has
proposed a $150 million initiative to support programs
like BBBS-Amachi so that they can
reach at least 100,000 children all across the
country. Were charitable choice expanded, faith-
mobilized programs like it-focused on housing
rehabilitation, job placement, and public health
programs-could reach millions more in need.

Next along the spectrum are faith-motivated programs.
While organized and led by religious
clergy and volunteers, these have few, if any,
inherently religious components, never proselytize,
and normally work through ecumenical, inter-faith, or
religious-secular partnerships. In Boston,
examples include the Ella J. Baker house ministry and
the National Ten Point Coalition, which
are best known for their antiviolence partnerships
with police and other local justice agencies.

The PBS documentary profiles Dorchester's peripatetic
Reverend Eugene F. Rivers III as he
races from a counseling session with adult inmates at
a local prison to a visit with ministers from
Memphis to a visit alongside two police officers to
the home of a young man whom they believe
might need their help. While Rivers is surely
one-of-a-kind, there are literally thousands of street
pastors all across America who do such work daily.

At the most controversial end of the spectrum are
faith-saturated programs. These deliver vital
services in ways that are inextricably linked to
fostering a lifelong religious commitment to a
particular faith. Teen Challenge, a national program
for substance abusers staffed by evangelical
Christians, is one such example. In the PBS
documentary, we see Pastor Mike Zello admonish
the first man he counsels that his latest drug binge
''has nothing to do with the Holy Ghost.'' We
also meet Larry, a hard-core drug addict in his 20s
who comes to Teen Challenge after being
arrested for firing a gun at parked cars while high on
crack cocaine. We watch him pray and
sing while also engaging in nonsectarian program
activities such as work and schooling.

Can and should the federal government support
faith-saturated organizations like Teen
Challenge? In his recent book ''The Separation of
Church and State,'' Philip Hamburger of the
University of Chicago Law School reminds us that even
in its most strident opinions supporting
the separation of church and state, the Supreme Court
has always made an exception when it
comes to publicly funding the nonsectarian components
of otherwise highly sectarian
organizations. As I argued in the March 2003 edition
of the Harvard Law Review, the
challenges posed in funding transportation, building
maintenance, and other nonreligious aspects
of faith-saturated programs are no different than the
challenges of fiscal accountability and
administration faced by other organizations that
receive public funding, such as private
universities, large secular nonprofits, and nominally
religious mega-charities. In fact, the record
thus far suggests that community-serving religious
groups that receive public dollars are more,
not less, scrupulous in ensuring that the funds are
used only for prescribed public purposes.

With or without greater public support, faith-based
organizations and programs of each and
every type will continue to serve millions of people
in need. But if we want to strengthen their
programs while also protecting civil rights,
implementing and improving charitable choice
remains our best bet. The Democratic presidential
aspirants ought to declare publicly whether
they agree with Senator Clinton that constitutionally
permissible church-state partnerships to
benefit the poor are a great idea. Attorney General
Ashcroft ought to be empowered by the
Bush administration to reiterate his good reasons for
drafting charitable choice legislation as he
did in 1996.

Together, Clinton, Ashcroft, and others could
resurrect the bipartisan character of faith-based
lawmaking and related public-policy efforts. While
practically nobody wants to see proselytizing
with public funds, the American people, by 3-to-1
majorities within both parties, remain strongly
in favor of assistance for community-serving religious
programs. It should not take a miracle,
only common sense and compassion, to offer this
assistance before the 2004 presidential
campaign is in full swing.

John J. DiIulio Jr. served as director of the White
House Office of Faith-Based and Community
Initiatives in 2001. He was pro bono principal content
adviser to the PBS documentary ''God
and the Inner City.


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