Recently in Faith-Based Initiative Category

Back in May of 2010, intrepid WaPo religion reporter Michelle Boorstein disclosed the surprising news that the Democratic National Committee had disbanded the six-person religious outreach team that, under previous DNC chair Howard Dean, helped flip Congress to the Democrats in 2006. Dean's successor Tim Kaine lamely insisted that religious outreach would get cranked up again for the midterm elections, but it never happened.

With the 2012 election cycle under way, new chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz has sent a signal that religion will again figure in the DNC operation. To wit: Last Thursday, a press release announced the appointment of Derrick Harkins, pastor of Washington's 19th Street Baptist Church, to head an outreach effort. Harkins has a good resume--for a pastor. But there's no evidence that he has ever done any political work. By contrast, his predecessor, Leah Daughtry, came to the job after serving as Acting Assistant Secretary for Administration and Management at the Department of Labor, and left to become CEO of the 2008 Democratic National Convention. Harkins mostly seems to be a pal of Joshua DuBois, director of the White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships.

Be that as it may, since the party effort will be spearheaded by a sitting president this time around, the true indicator of the Democrats' seriousness about religious outreach is not who's got the portfolio at the DNC but who's got it at Obama campaign headquarters in Chicago. In 2008,it was DuBois who had it, but if he or any of his minions assume the position again, the president will end up like George W. Bush--besmirched by a faith-based initiative that looks like it's all about electoral politics. And that would be almost as bad as no religious outreach at all.

Can religion save America's inner cities? On his blog over at the American Interest, Walter Russell Mead makes a plea that harks back to the last millennium, when Clintonian welfare reform was new under the sun and the Bush faith-based initiative but a glint in its progenitor's eye. Mead, a liberal expert in foreign policy, has been hanging around with his old friend Gene Rivers, the Pentecostal pastor in Boston who back in the day seemed like he had The Answer.

Well OK. But a lot of water has passed under the bridge since Rivers graced the cover ("God vs. Gangs") of Newsweek in 1998. Houses of worship, whether located inside or outside urban neighborhoods, have proven to have only limited capacity to offer the kinds of spiritual outreach and social services that Mead envisages.

That's not to say that religious institutions are incapable of helping to address the dislocations of the underclass. But comprehensive studies of congregations conducted by Duke sociologist Mark Chaves and others have shown that they need to be integrated into the web of government agencies and large non-profit agencies, secular and religiously connected, that constitute the country's complex system for providing social services to the poor.

The weakness of the Bush initiative was its insistence that faith-based is inherently superior to secular and governmental. The weakness of the Obama reincarnation (the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships) has been its failure to advance public understanding of the necessity of an integrated approach.

To understand how the latter can succeed, interested Washingtonians should get themselves over to the Urban Institute on M Street at noon next Monday to learn about the Welfare Liaison Reform Project, a $100 million faith-based nonprofit workforce development corporation in Greensboro, N.C. The presenters will be Odell Cleveland and Bob Wineburg, the black reverend and Jewish academic who created the project, made it a model for local faith-based social service provision in our time, and wrote a book about their experience. You won't be disappointed.

Last Friday, the White House rolled out the first dozen names of those who will serve on the second iteration of the 25-member Advisory Council of the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships (OFANP). Given that the last Council wrapped up its work a year ago, you wonder why not just wait for the full 25. But the wheels of nomination grind exceedingly fine in the Obama administration, and an unofficial body with no designated task to perform is not going to be way up on the vetting agenda.

So far, the list is very strong on prominent Protestants, including the top bishops of the Episcopalians and the Lutherans (ELCA) plus the head of the National Association of Evangelicals. The White House also scored the Greek Orthodox archbishop. A couple of semi-prominent Jews are thrown in as well.

There's no sign yet of non-Judeo-Christians, however. And the absence of major Catholic figures is getting embarrassing. Last time around, the Council counted the head of Catholic Charities and the legal counsel for the USCCB--institutional players, to be sure, but hardly the kind of prominent cleric rounded up from other religious bodies. The only official Catholic on the new list is Sr. Marlene Weisenbeck, a Franciscan nun who once headed her order and served as president of the Leadership Council of Women Religious. If the Obama White House can't round up a single Catholic bishop for this Council, it should be ashamed of itself. (Indeed, the administration's inability to establish decent relations with the Catholic hierarchy represents its single biggest faith-based failure.)

Exactly what the new council will do is another question. The first body, supplemented by other religious and social service types, was organized into task forces that came up with a long list of policy recommendations. The most important of these, on reforming the office itself, usefully rectified some of the inadequacies of the Bush faith-based effort. Something new will have to whomped up for this round.

Nothwithstanding WaPo blogger Jacques Berlinerblau's smack of last week, the Obamaites have done a reasonably good job of transforming the Bush effort from a largely misguided and contentious policy initiative to a non-controversial exercise in government-sponsored do-goodism--as regularly cataloged on the OFANP blog. This has been made possible in no small measure by the Advisory Council, which has drawn the bulk of such media coverage as there has been, and succeeded in dressing the effort in the cotton-wool of ecumenical good cheer. But to keep the thing going, there's got to be something for the advisors to appear to be doing.

OMG, Politico is reporting, in a front-of-the-site, top of the page story by Ben Smith and Brian Tau: "Obama's stimulus pours millions into faith-based groups." And some of those groups were pleased at the manna from heaven! Who knew? Thanks for toting it up, Politico.

But let's see what all that pouring has amounted to. The millions, 140 or them to be exact, represent less than 2/100ths of one percent of the $787 billion stimulus package. I'd say the money changers on Wall Street are still quite a bit ahead of faith-based social service providers, stimulus-wise.

Smith and Tau pretend to be astonished that the Obama administration has continued to provide support for agencies like Catholic Charities. As if that hadn't been going on long before the faith-based initiative was a gleam in the eye of George W. Bush. And they make a little trouble by (unsuccessfully) seeking comment from faith-based Republican members of Congress who otherwise despise the stimulus package.

But as stories go, this is, as the lawyers say, de minimis.

...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.