Recently in Faith-Based Initiative Category

...for supporting what the Romans did. 

And the the Advisory Council of the White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships completed their report and saw that it was good and presented it to the president. So what comes next?

The recommendations range across a wide range of government departments, and include both highly specific programmatic suggestions and airy hopes for good things. The Council members, who will be going their separate ways with the appointment of a new Council, can use their inside contacts and bully pulpits to urge the administration to follow what recommendations they hold most dear.

But for those of us concerned about of Office's aboriginal business of facilitating faith-based social service provision, the focus remains on the need to amend President Bush's December 2002 executive order, "Equal Protection of the Laws for Faith-Based and Community Organizations." The report includes a host of recommendations, most of them unanimous and a couple not, that would go a long way towards remedying the constitutional shortcomings of the Bush approach. It shouldn't be too hard for the White House counsel's office and the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel to whip these into an amended executive order.

Of course, the torturous hiring issue, which the Advisory Council was specifically ordered to take off its plate, remains to be decided. Sooner or later, the lawyers are going to have to belly up to that one. The sooner the better.

Or at least its Advisory Council. A year in, Faith-Based 2.0 (aka the Office for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships) has come in for a fair amount of snarking, most notably from David Waters on WaPo's Under God blog, but also from this corner. Because its mission has broadened to the point of fuzziness and its activities have been more anodyne than newsworthy, it's been easy to miss the significance of what's been going on.

And that consists above all in the Report that the 25 members of the OFANP Advisory Council have been laboring over lo these many months. Their several task forces have delivered reports with recommendations for the Administration on engaging the faith community on issues ranging from the environment and global poverty to fatherhood and economic recovery. I've read through the drafts and, yes, many of the recommendations do not go beyond the kinds of pious wishes you would expect from 25 varied professionals of good will. But that's not at all true for the recommendations from the task force on the reform of the office itself.

In particular, recommendations 4-10 on "strengthening constitutional and legal footing of partnerships" (see after jump) would go a long way towards addressing some of the major problems created by the Bush Administration's all-out effort to get faith-based organizations into the act of social service provision without restraint or accountability. And these reflect consensus positions on the need for assuring church-state separation that have been adopted by Catholics, Orthodox Jews, and evangelicals as well as the usual separationist suspects.

To be sure, the Administration took the thorny issue of faith-based hiring off the Council's plate. And on a couple of issues--separate incorporation of entities receiving federal funds and the display of religious imagery--no consensus could be reached. And, of course, there's many a slip between an advisory council's recommendations and actual implementation in an amended executive order and/or federal regs.

Still, what the Council puts forward in the next month or so as the right way to do faith-based social service provision will be hard to ignore. And on the ground, it will make a difference.

On November 9--that's almost four weeks ago--the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships (OFANP) inaugurated a blog, whose initial post from Director Joshua DuBois announced:

In the coming days, you can expect this blog to:

• Provide more information about the day-to-day work of the White House Office and Centers at Federal agencies;
• Highlight the latest work of the President's Advisory Council on Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships;
• Point nonprofits to federal resources that can help them implement effective programs; and
• Spotlight innovative local organizations that are strengthening our communities

I'm looking forward to using this blog to communicate important information to local organizations and community leaders.

Since then, there have been a handful of posts having to do with meetings of the OFANP Advisory Council, HHS's flu program and celebration of National Adoption Day, and a USDA hunger program. But not a peep about health reform.

OK, so OFANP is supposed to be about non-controversial Good Things. No mucking around with that pesky faith-based hiring issue, for example. And yes, let Congress take the lead in negotiating the grubby programmatic details. But the White House should be taking charge of making the moral case for covering the uninsured, for doing the right thing for those overwhelmed by health care costs. Can't OFANP show a little faith-based initiative here?

Yesterday's WaPo article by Carrie Johnson on the Obama administration's approach to the contentious hiring issue for faith-based organizations (FBOs) receiving public funds tells you what you need to know--up to a point. To wit: It's a really complicated issue, there are partisans on both sides, and the Justice Department has placed it firmly on the back burner.

That said, there are a couple of things that require looking into. First, since the administration has said that the questions will be dealt with on a case-by-case (and now, it seems, program-by-program) basis, has anyone out there actually raised a question and received an answer to whether a particular FBO operating a particular program with public funds is free to hire only its own co-religionists?

Second, what about finding someone who supports a compromise solution? Between strict separationist Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va) and World Vision's "it's our right to hire our folks" Steven McFarland and Richard Stearns, you'd think there was no middle ground. There is. Come to think of it, maybe this is an issue for the commongroundniks to explore.

Blogging from the Religion Newswriters Association meeting in Minneapolis, USA Today's Cathy Grossman reports some unhappiness on the part of members of the 25-member advisory board of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships (OFANP). They seem to feel a bit like window dressing, in the sense that they are not being given the chance to deal with the big policy issues, like immigration and housing and health care. In the case of the big faith-based policy issue--the question of what the hiring rules should be for faith-based recipients of public monies--the White House booted resolution over to the Justice Department, which has so far not delivered itself of anything that's seen the light of day.

In fact, it's a tribute to the political adroitness of the White House that it's managed to focus virtually all the modest amount attention paid to the Faith-Based 2.0 (the Obama version) on the advisory board, and not on what the administration might or might not actually be doing to continue to curtail the extensive Bush administration efforts to pump up faith-based social service activity. Advisers are, well, just advisers. Is anything going on in the agencies themselves? Thus far, the reporting has been non-existent.

The OFANP Advisory Council has been meeting in D.C. the past couple of days, hearing reports from its various task forces. In his account over on WaPo's GinG, William Wan notes that although the contentious hiring issue has been formally taken off the Board's plate and assigned to the lawyers, questions about it were nonetheless voiced yesterday. Specifically, a representative of the ACLU "got up to make a pointed statement near the end about the legal implications of allowing World Vision, a Christian group focused on helping children, to hire [to government funded positions] based on religious views." (World Vision president Richard Stearns, who serves on the Council, announced a couple of days ago that the organization has had to lay off 4-5 percent of its U.S. workforce.)

Now one might suppose that the hiring issue is so contentious because those engaged in the discussions are divided into two implacably opposed camps: strict church-state separationists and faith-based providers. But in fact that's not the case. There's a significant group of professionals--lawyers, social scientists, and service provider types--who 1) are concerned about letting faith-based providers use religious criteria to discriminate in hiring for government-funded jobs; 2) recognize the difficulties in strictly separating functions in many faith-based organizations; and so 3) are willing to agree to reasonable compromises. The problem is that faith-based advocates like Stearns have thus far signalled no such willingness--or if they have, no one I've talked to is aware of it.

Under the circumstances, why not let the Advisory Council actually try to address the issue? Unlike, say, abortion of same-sex marriage, faith-based hiring is eminently accessible to common ground solutions, and it should not be beyond the capacity of sophisticated insiders to work them out.

Anyone interested in following the fortunes of Son of Faith Based: the Obama Years needs to download "Taking Stock: The Bush Faith-Based Initiative and What Lies Ahead," a Pew-sponsored report of the Rockefeller Institute of Government's Roundtable on Religion and Social Welfare Policy released this month. Author David J. Wright gives provides a fine (if at times understated) narrative of the Initiative since it was just a twinkle in John Ashcroft's eye, including the extent of the Bush administration's embedding of the thing in the federal administrative machinery, largely without congressional warrant. As Wright puts it:

Whatever the future may hold, however, and whether or not one agrees with the policy objective, the methodical character, breadth, depth and scale of the Bush Faith-Based Initiative mark it as a remarkable example of executive action.

Would that the Bushies had devoted half so much attention to, say, post-Katrina or Iraq reconstruction. That said, the actual impact of the Bush initiative--in terms of shifting the weight of social service provision towards faith-based organizations (FBOs)--was negligeable. Those FBOs that saw their share of the pie increase were the big regional and national agencies, not those at the congregational, municipal, or even statewide levels. So maybe, in the end, this was just another example of Bushian ineffectuality.

Apart from the details, what's striking is how the Initiative came to define the Bush administration as religion--besotted. It proved a boon for secularist groups like the Freedom From Religion Foundation, which saw their membership rolls swell during the Bush years. Probably nothing did more to strengthen the Democratic Party's hand with non-religious voters.

Congrariwise, the Obama administration has hung its own faith-based shingle from the White House to assure the religious that it feels their faith. And it has studiously avoided taking sides in the single most contentious aspect of the Initiative: allowing FBOs to hire only their own religious kind if they so choose. This tangled question now lies buried deep within the bowels of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, awaiting resolution even as the Initiative rolls on, with different rules applying to different federal programs depending on how the relevant provisions of particular laws and executive orders were written.

For example, the Workforce Investment Act, which comes up for reauthorization this year, was only temporarily extended last time because Congress refused to go along with providing the FBO hiring discrimination exemption that the Bush administration wanted. Perhaps the Obama adminstration will dodge the issue by just plumping for the status quo ante. That won't be so easy next year, however, when Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF), the major federal program for the poor, itself comes up for renewal. TANF was where the country started down the current faith-based road, and it comes with the FBO hiring exemption. There will be major Democratic opposition to continuing the exemptions. WWOD--What Will Obama Do?

Say what you like about, George W. Bush's Office for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives had a real public policy commitment; to wit: "Our Vision is to educate and assist new and existing Faith-Based and Community Initiatives to apply and qualify for competitive Federal Funding." Before his administration was run over by the events of 9/11, George Bush's most notable--only notable?--policy commitment was to enable religious organizations to put their faith-based shoulders to the public wheel with the help of government funds. He hired the country's most distinguished academic advocate of faith-based social service provision, John DiIulio, to run the office, and though DiIulio soon departed in anger, federal legislation hit a wall, and the operation became mired in partisan political finagling (see David Kuo's Tempting Faith), the animating vision of the thing remained in place.

So it was natural that, when Barack Obama announced that he would continue the office under new management, the assumption was that it would have basically the purpose in mind, only in a Democratic way. (For example, on the bitterly contested issue of whether FBOs could discriminate in hiring for publicly funded positions, candidate Obama said no way.) After all, the Office for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships sounds like just another name for the same thing.

But now, in the sixth month of the new administration's existence, it is becoming clear that it bears only a passing a resemblance to its predecessor. For starters, a large amount of its energy has been spent on creating and managing a 25-person Advisory Board whose mission (according to  William Wan's GinG account of its conference call last week) is "to find ways faith groups and government can work together on issues ranging from climate change to fatherless families to abortion rates."

In fact, there's nary a mention of faith-based social service provision as such, the Bush office's raison d'etre. The hiring issue has been off-loaded onto the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. The bottom line is that Obama has turned the office into a broad-gauged exercise in religious outreach, including on the international front. "Neighborhood" is pretty much a dodge. What we've really got is, simply, an Office of Faith-Based Partnerships.

Over at CT Politics, Douglas Koopman is unhappy with the Obama administration's faith-based initiative so far. A political science prof at Calvin College, Koopman is one of those center-right evangelical types who was disappointed at the politicizing of the Bush effort but nevertheless remains an enthusiast of the approach. His is not the clearest exposition ever committed to writing, but the bottom line is that he thinks DuBois and company have been distracted by extraneous responsibilities like whomping up the OFANP advisory council and finding the Obamas a new church (how's that going?). And then there's that annoying hiring issue.

Koopman thinks the Obamaites underestimated Democratic opposition to following the Bush rules on permitting religious groups to limit government-funded hiring to their own kind--and expects that the new lawyer-run approach will chip away at what he calls their "rights to use religious criteria in hiring decisions." I'm inclined to agree. What's missing from his discussion--and from most of its ilk--is the acknowledgement that while no one objects to religious bodies hiring their own kind for their own purposes with their own money, many have a real problem with letting them do so for public purposes with public money.