News Roundup No. 2 on Sen. Obama's Proposed Faith-Based Office

If elected President, Sen. Barack Obama would maintain the federal effort to encourage government partnerships with religious groups but make changes that he said would improve the endeavor by making it more effective and substantive. According to a speech the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate gave on July 1, an Obama Administration would create a Council of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, following on some of the work of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, which President George W. Bush created in 2001. The announcement spurred a flurry of news reports over the last week. Some of them are assembled here. (For news articles published on July 1, click here.)

07/08/2008

Christian Science Monitor
Christian Science Monitor
07/08/2008

Last week, Barack Obama came out in favor of federal spending for faith-based social work - not the Sunday bean-pot suppers but the soup-kitchen kind that helps the disadvantaged. He would improve on what Presidents Clinton and Bush started, but also add this troubling detail: He wants such taxpayer-funded charities to lobby Congress.

If elected, Mr. Obama would use this federal lever over religious aid groups to enlist them in setting what he calls "our national agenda." Specifically, as he indicated in a speech on faith last week, he wants them to walk the halls of Capitol Hill and whip up support for new social programs.

He would, in effect, spend public money to create private lobbies for more public spending. And this is "change" from the grass roots? Or would it be subtle coercion?

To his credit, Obama defied many within his own party by generally supporting the work of President Bush's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. And he acknowledges that some problems "are simply too big for government to solve."

This former community organizer has experienced the power of small groups in making a difference for the powerless. He has tapped into that wellspring of giving in which about 1 in 3 American adults spends an hour or more each month in volunteer community service (and that doesn't include religious work).

These religious aid groups often help people that government cannot reach. They create innovative solutions. Under Bush's program for the last fiscal year, they were given $2.2 billion in competitive grants by 11 different federal agencies. They helped reduce homelessness, matched up children of prisoners with adult mentors, and did other worthwhile social work.

This idea of government money for religious charities has spread beyond the federal level, with more than 70 mayors and 35 governors of both parties now practicing it. One 2006 study in Philadelphia found congregations provide social services that would otherwise cost government about $250 million.

It's an idea Obama could not ignore (John McCain simply endorses the Bush program), but one which he would try to redirect.

He would, for instance, bar religious charities from favoring people of their faith in hiring - something which would discourage many groups from participating and perhaps violate the religious exemption of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and Supreme Court decisions. The effect would be to secularize religious charity - beyond the current rules that require such groups to give equal treatment to all clients and not to proselytize. Such a hiring mandate isn't imposed on church-backed hospitals and universities that receive federal funds.

To Obama, Bush's program hasn't gone far enough. Critics of the program claim money has often been directed to groups in favor with the White House. Obama himself would realign these charities closely with government. He offers no figures on how much more money he would spend on such private work, only that it would be "central" in his social policy.

At the least, though, such funding should not come with tacit conditions that religious charities join a president's political crusade in his dealings with Congress.

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The New York Times
To the Editor
07/08/2008

To the Editor:

Re "Obama Seeks Bigger Role for Religious Groups" (front page, July 2):

Senator Barack Obama says that religious organizations should receive federal funds to help deliver social services because "we need an all-hands-on-deck approach" toward dealing with our nation's challenges.

But insisting that faith-based charities adopt secular nondiscrimination standards that conflict with the charities' religious beliefs would in fact exclude a good number of hands from the deck. Such insistence is simply a polite way of saying that many religious groups should not be eligible to receive government financing.

No self-respecting religious organization would ever trade its sacred tenets for a pot of government lentils.

David Zwiebel New York, July 2, 2008

The writer, a rabbi, is executive vice president for government and public affairs at Agudath Israel of America

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The Kansas City Star
Mary Sanchez
07/08/2008

Barack Obama is channeling JFK these days. Oddly, he's doing it through one of George W. Bush's more controversial policies.

"I won't just ask for your vote as a candidate. I will ask for your service and your active citizenship when I am president of the United States," Obama told audiences in conservative Colorado Springs, Colo.

Sounds a lot like that famous quote of John F. Kennedy from his 1961 inaugural address: "Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country."

And, just as Kennedy established the Peace Corps as soon as he took office, Obama has promised to establish new citizens corps to make it easier for Americans to volunteer.

Of late, Obama has tried to re-position himself as the "more patriotic than you thought" candidate.

He needs to convince voters stuck on whether he wears a flag lapel pin or not that he is red, white and blue enough to be their president.

Now, for extra leverage, he also seems to be cozying up to so-called values voters. That makes a certain amount of sense as November approaches. Only a political fool would cede the substantial evangelical and Catholic vote to the Republicans without a fight.

He is embracing - planning on expanding, even - a controversial program of the Bush administration that invited religious groups to provide social services. Bush's first executive order was to create the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. All cabinet agencies were ordered to eliminate barriers that could prohibit religious groups from tapping government coffers for their social service programs.

Obama has dismissed the Bush program as a mere "photo op," but he surprised many supporters by suggesting he'd establish a similar program.

He wants to call his effort the Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. He claims his effort will strictly not allow proselytizing and that federal money will only go to secular programs.

Obama is walking a fine line here.

Polling shows that about two-thirds of Americans support allowing faith groups some slice of federal dollars. But they are rightly leery of the devil lurking in the details.

Obama is emphasizing that his programs would differ from Bush's in two critical respects: He would ensure that religious groups getting funding did not discriminate in hiring, and they would have to prove their worth. Nothing would be taken on faith.

Which means that church-run charities would have to hire folks who don't necessarily conform to their ideals of godliness.

And those abstinence-only programs that sucked millions from the U.S. Treasury in the last seven years would have to prove that their programs are keeping virgins virginal.

To make his program work, Obama will need to strike a delicate balance. If he delves into the preachy realm, he will be labeled a phony and irk voters rightfully skittish about crossing the boundary between church and state.

If he delivers on his pledge to ferret out religious groups that do not meet a high level of accountability, he'll risk being accused of political favoritism.

In theory, nothing is wrong with harnessing the power of faith to promote good works within the U.S. The problem comes in fairness. Who and what efforts receive the blessing of funding, and who gets cast out?

But if Obama spreads the funding around - say, by ensuring that the true religious diversity of the United States is represented - he could find some extra benefits for the nation.

Consider the impact of a prominent poverty- or illiteracy-fighting program successfully operated by Muslims. It could go far to dispel the idea that all followers of Islam are terrorists.

And yes, the man whose name is Barack Hussein Obama might just be the right one to usher this through.

What matters most to the day-to-day health of the nation is that people commit some portion of their lives to aiding those in need. Bless all those who do - and if federal policies can enhance the outcomes of their good works, Amen.

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Ventura County Star (California)
Jay Ambrose
07/08/2008

Barack Obama is catching hell from some for his endorsement of faith-based government services, and, yes, there is reason to worry about his position. But don't suppose for a minute that all the critics know what they're talking about.

Listen to some and you'd think it was George W. Bush who came up with the idea of granting religious organizations government funds to provide social services. In fact, that very thing has been going on for years, and it was in the administration of Bill Clinton - not that of Bush - that such programs took a decisive turn as Congress acted to loosen up some of the rules.

The innovation was something called Charitable Choice, which said religious organizations could simultaneously receive federal funds and hire people only of the faith, thus retaining their identity. Bills that Clinton signed made it clear these organizations could not exclude anyone from help by reason of their beliefs, but did not insist their federally funded operations somehow convert themselves into something wholly secular.

Bush's largely unrealized plan was mainly to fund more of these faith-based services than before. Now we've got Obama wanting to accomplish what Bush aimed for, but with a big difference. His program would insist those accepting federal funds agree to hire people of other faiths or no faith.

It's a bad idea that points to one of the major threats of making churches into conduits of federal largess. A religious organization is what it is because of its distinct perceptions of ultimate truths, and a religious organization can cease to some degree to be what it has been when its employees can be opposed to its worldview.

One argument I ran across notes that a secular version of the same requirement would instruct Planned Parenthood that it must hire people opposed to abortion.

Federal law does entitle religious groups to hire only within the faith, but forget all that when federal funding steps into the room. It's not that the law changes, but that the government at this point has a means of getting you to conform to its wishes - go along with what it wants or lose the money you've come to depend on.

Telling religious groups what to do about hiring could be just step one in a long list of adjustments churches will have to make if they choose to replace gifts from the heart with government grants.

While I would not argue that all federal funding of religion-related social services stop - a number of well-established programs do considerable good and will never, ever establish a state religion - a far-reaching expansion does not strike me as a splendid idea even if there were no risk of religions misplacing their substance.

It's a social, political benefit to have multiple approaches to helping people, to have private, essentially unregulated efforts because of dangers of an ever larger welfare state and also because of the innovations that can come from people freed of bureaucratic restraints.

Years ago, I met a Catholic nun in Denver who headed up a literacy program deemed perhaps the best in the West. She told me she refused to accept federal money, and when I asked her why, she said it was because the government would make her do things that did not work, and she would rather struggle to find money and actually teach people to read than to secure the money easily and accomplish nothing.

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The Kansas City Star
The Kansas City Star
07/08/2008

Like President Bush, Barack Obama is relying on faith-based groups to help struggling families. But if the government performed its function "to promote the general welfare," this initiative would be superfluous.

Obama assures us that the money this time won't be used to proselytize and that the churches, synagogues, and mosques won't be able to discriminate against prospective employees on the basis of their religion.

But the faith-based initiative, no matter the clunky name Obama affixes to it (Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships), will amount to the same old government subsidy for religious groups.

If you give a church a million-dollar grant to cover a program it's already running, that frees up a million bucks for that church to go find converts. Is that really what our tax dollars should be doing?

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The Kansas City Star
The Kansas City Star
07/08/2008

Obama applauded the principles of the faith-based initiatives and the need to expand it while acknowledging that a good program had been taken down a bad path by unscrupulous politicians who twisted it into a partisan tool.

He made clear that while it was appropriate for government to support faith programs that were providing support for the least of these in our society, government dollars could never be used to proselytize or discriminate.

No doubt, some on the left will be upset by Obama's remarks (and some on the right who will nit-pick them or reject them completely). After all, there will always be those who fear the end of war (even a culture war) because they know that their power and influence will fade when the enemy is gone.

But this is a wise political move for Obama, and one that I expect most Americans will applaud. We can hope that at the end of the day, the real winners won't be Democrats or Republicans but the "least of these" who will finally get some of the help they so desperately need.

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07/07/2008

The Boston Globe
James Carroll
07/07/2008

Last week, Barack Obama made front-page news by announcing he would expand so-called faith-based initiatives, channeling federal money into social services through religiously affiliated institutions. The move was seen as a wily appeal to conservative Christians. Liberals were skeptical. Under President Bush, "faith-based" is a fig-leaf for the naked removal of government from its role as social service provider. Bush has crassly exploited religion for partisan political purposes, even while drafting religion into the Republican war against "big government." Was this Obama's push-back?

A former community organizer, the Illinois senator and Democratic presidential candidate declared that struggles against poverty and disease require "all hands on deck," as if acknowledging the limits of government. He may not be old enough to have enlisted in President Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty, but he surely knows that religiously affiliated institutions were one of its fronts. As anyone who remembers, say, Martin Luther King Jr.'s Poor People's Campaign, knows, "faith-based" can be code as much for progressive social change as for conservative reaction. Many of Obama's predecessor community organizers were paid through congregations with grants from Johnson's Great Society.

But the discussion of faith-based initiatives suggests that Obama's religion problem goes deeper, even, than rumors about his being Muslim or the Jeremiah Wright controversy. The social liberalism that defines much of the Democratic Party, and, apparently, Obama, upholds an ideal of tolerance that transcends religious identity. It refuses to brand the irreligious, or even the antireligious, as somehow less human than those who worship God. Indeed, liberalism regards the openly secular character of the political realm to be an essential note of democracy - not a necessary evil, but a positive good. "Secular" is not a pejorative. Its tolerance tolerates even religious conservatives who are intolerant.

Such tolerance is a political virtue, but it can be a deeply religious virtue as well. Religion is mostly discussed, in the US political context, as if the main argument is between believers and nonbelievers. But the most important disagreement is between religious people who value the secular character of American politics and religious people who regard it as impious. The Republicans have benefited from this dispute because Democrats who are religious have failed to defend the liberal ideal of public religious neutrality as necessary not only for politics, but for authentic religion. It is not only atheists who need to be protected from the intrusions of a faith-defined government. So do the faithful.

The much-celebrated freedom that is the ground of the American consensus is, above all, freedom of mind and heart; freedom to think and believe as one chooses; freedom of conscience. Without that, there is no genuine democracy. But, more to our point, without that, there is no genuine religion. The only possible guarantor of such freedom, as the Founders understood, is a magistrate who acts with absolute religious neutrality. Religious people, that is, need the separation of church and state as much as atheists do. That separation, in fact, is why religion thrives in America.

But in recent years, as US politics was yoked to brands of conservative religion that wanted to blur the line between church and state, those religious believers for whom the secularity of liberal democracy is a value have been mute. In the public sphere, questions of religion have been treated as the province of the right wing, presided over by "values voters." Thus "faith-based initiatives" have been put forward - and opposed - as if church basements have not been incubators of progressive social reform for generations. But religious liberals have feared that to make the argument for the expressly religious value of secularity in a democratic society is to offend nonreligious voters by even speaking of religion, and religious voters by affirming secularity. Lose, lose.

Obama seems ready to offend. He does not shy from the label "liberal." He talks openly of religion's meaning in his life. He has credentials as one who has long embraced faith-based social activism, even while affirming government's central role as provider of services. Whether he will convincingly recast the shallow discussion of religion and politics that has defined the last American generation remains to be seen. But in this, as in much else, we can only wish him well.

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St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Missouri)
Sarah Lohman
07/07/2008

Barack Obama's surprise declaration of support for the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives means that a pet project of President George W. Bush could live on despite signs that it had lost its momentum.

Obama said last week that not only would he continue Bush's program, but that he would expand it to direct more federal money to religious groups.

The announcement by the Democrats' presumptive nominee was met by suggestions that he was merely trying to curry favor with religious voters, a segment of the electorate in which he has failed thus far to carve inroads. Four years ago, Democratic nominee John Kerry captured just 22 percent of the white evangelical vote.

Others welcomed Obama's promise, which he reaffirmed during a speech in St. Louis on Saturday before delegates attending a national conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Those who applaud Obama's vow see it as a step in the right direction, toward a lasting partnership between faith-based organizations and the government that would not violate the separation of church and state.

Obama proposes a $500 million-a-year program to provide summer learning for 1 million poor children. He said it could be funded by better management of surplus federal properties, reducing growth in the federal travel budget and streamlining the federal procurement process.

Melissa Bode said Big Brothers Big Sisters of Eastern Missouri could benefit from Obama's plan. The White House office has helped her organization expand its program for mentoring children with incarcerated parents from around two dozen children five years ago to more than 300 this year, she said.

Bode, the group's vice president of development, said federal grants help the organization find and screen volunteers and match them with children.

But experts like Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, a political scientist who has been studying the office since its inception in 2001, said an Obama faith-based office would probably encounter the same problem as Bush's: lack of support from Congress.

Tenpas said she wonders whether Obama really is passionate about the issue or if he's trying to tap in to a segment of voters that looks to be more up for grabs than in 2004.

"By saying you're going to expand it or do something more, you're in many ways raising expectations. And so to me, making a promise like that, I'm not sure how much goodwill it's going to buy him," she said.

Dan Buck, chief executive officer of the St. Patrick Center - part of Catholic Charities of St. Louis - said he worries about the future of the White House office. The next U.S. president needs to talk to faith-based organizations to get a real picture of the impact the office has had, he said.

"I'd hate to see us go back to the old days of telling faith-based organizations that, 'Oh, yeah, you do great jobs, keep doing your work, but we can't fund you,'" Buck said.

He said the White House faith offices set up in federal agencies have helped the center go from housing a few hundred homeless people in 2000 to more than 1,000.

Before 2000, faith-based and community organizations faced discrimination, Buck said. "We were not allowed to even apply for federal dollars even though we provide the exact same services" as state-run organizations, he said.

The White House office was established in 2001 under Bush's first executive order. His second order established 11 counterparts in federal agencies. Since its creation in 2001, the office has expanded to include 35 states with their own faith-based offices.

Last year, Missouri faith-based and community organizations received $212 million through 295 federal grants, $69.7 million of which went to faith-based organizations. The grants do not come directly from the office. The role of the office is to educate organizations about grants they qualify for and how to apply.

Without legislation expanding its mission, the White House office in recent years had a lower profile than in its early days. It also came under fire when David Kuo, former deputy director of the faith-based office, published a book in 2006 contending that Bush had lost interest in the program after starting it to "win political points."

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The Anniston Star (Alabama)
The Anniston Star (Alabama)
07/07/2008

In 2000, George W. Bush rode to the White House promising to reach out to faith-based charities, lowering the federal government's stringent "establishment clause" rules that had, in his estimation, tied the hands of these "armies of compassion."

In reality, it didn't work out that way.

Faith-based efforts turned out to be a method of paying off religious-right supporters who supported Bush's run for president. Call this holy spoils system by its proper name, "evangelical pork."

On his way out the door, Bush's first director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives told a reporter, "There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus. What you've got is everything, and I mean everything, being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis."

Almost eight years later comes Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, who last week vowed to reinvigorate the faith-based movement.

"The challenges we face today -- from saving our planet to ending poverty -- are simply too big for government to solve alone," Obama said. "We need an all-hands-on-deck approach."

The issue, however, has never been about the number of hands on deck. It's about how government dollars are used. Government money comes with necessary government strings, including rules against discriminatory hiring and otherwise misusing taxpayer dollars.

Bush's faith-based push looked like it wanted to have it both ways. Give money to the churches while weakening the establishment clause.

That's not how it should work. Keep the business of the church or the mosque or the synagogue separate from the mission of the charity and there's no problem with faith-based nonprofits applying for taxpayer funds.

Obama appears to agree. His proposal says that faith-based recipients of federal aid could not use the money to proselytize, nor could they discriminate against nonbelievers or those of other faiths.

To do otherwise would break the Constitution's warnings against the government establishing one religion over another.

Faith-based charities unhappy with those rules can go their own way, forgoing government money while pursuing their mission. Houses of worship have been doing just that for years without the assistance of the Mayberry Machiavellis.

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Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (Little Rock)
Pat Lynch
07/07/2008

The latest thing to get the blogosphere in an tizzy is Sen. Barack Obama's supposed drift to the political middle ground.

Specifically, in response to a recent Supreme Court ruling, he has announced support for individual gun ownership. He also has come out backing continued federal financial subsidies of so-called faithbased programs.

Although these intriguing developments are perfectly suited for stimulating commentary, let us deal first with a few foundational issues. John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, is going to be the next resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. It may be close, but he will find a way. A small army of desperate rich people is counting on him to keep up the longstanding national policy of corporate coddling and tax breaks for the wealthy. Although it is not much comfort for committed Democrats, we should all keep in mind that there is more wrong with this country than one man can fix by himself.

Now that everyone clearly understands that this is a theoretical discussion, we can move ahead to analyze Obama's centrist strategy. His statement on guns was nothing more than a necessary stall to buy time before the ideological carpetbombing begins.

Who would believe that Obama might ever say anything, even after hours of relentless waterboarding, that would satisfy the National Rifle Association? To the professional firearms lobby, his actual position on Second Amendment issues is a lot less important than his existence.

The discussion of what we sometimes call faith-based initiatives is bursting with potential for contrasting viewpoints. Of course, from the strictest constitutional standard of keeping the government's grimy mitts out of the business of religion, it's a terrible idea. Even though church organizations have done much to benefit secular society, a dollar spent for a worthy worldly ministry makes another donor's dollar available for sectarian purposes.

The point is that government has favored one set of spiritual beliefs over others, and that is never allowable.

Obama has a political radar capable of deflecting the wimpish, unworkable and idealistic notions so typical among people like myself. He remembers Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, and John Kerry, and that is enough to make any competent political strategist's blood run cold. Obama is teachable, and that is a presidential virtue. It certainly never hurt Ronald Reagan.

It may be that Obama sees this business of helping religious organizations from a perspective that is unfamiliar to social liberals, and entirely foreign to the rigid Republican right. Perhaps an illustration would better explain what he might have in mind. Stay with me.

There is a particular breed of religiously observant person who is vigorously in favor of doing the things that would establish a certain strain of American Protestantism as the de facto "established" religion. That advocacy includes mandatory school prayer and Bible studies, Ten Commandments displays and various other exhibitions of public piety. These are generally well-meaning people who are accustomed to having things go their way.

These kinds of expectations must necessarily be filtered though personal experience. In parts of the South, for example, members of certain prevalent denominations could never imagine being outnumbered by people from a different, and perhaps hostile, culture. Growing up as a Roman Catholic in Alabama, let me tell you that it is no fun being on the wrong side of the majority denomination.

If Muslims were the dominant local force, just to draw a stark and easily understandable example, you can rest assured the fundamentalist minority would quickly run for cover under the First Amendment's wide protective covering.

My friends on the left are in equally unfamiliar territory since Obama's suggestion on helping church-sponsored social ministries, and there also is an aspect of this which has, so far, generally escaped conservative thinkers.

Now this is a complete hypothetical, offered in good clean fun for the sole purpose of provoking serious reflection, but what if a future Obama administration began doling out lots of federal tax dollars to the left-leaning, old-school, mainline Protestant denominations? Those are the ones that have espoused every imaginable liberal political cause from gay marriage to immigration reform and abortion.

Can't you see the headline now? "Religious Right discovers `establishment clause.' " Very often, how you see things depends on where you sit. If a Democratic president started handing out government money to the church social programs of the religious left, we would rightly expect the most energetic opposition. Right-wing activists might even call out the ACLU. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

In the same way that some Southern fundamentalists cannot begin to conceive of being forced to tolerate the religious practices of a differing majority, the progressive wing of the Democratic Party is having a hard time imagining itself wielding any real power.

History teaches that when minority sects become a dominant cultural force, they aren't usually very nice people anymore. My evidence would be the occasional notable episodes of religious intolerance by Puritan newcomers to the American Colonies. They quickly forgot how it felt to be on the receiving end. Nothing is so intoxicating as the first taste of power.

Based solely on principle, government funding should never go to any church. It's bad public policy and destructive of religious liberty. No matter which political polarity comes out ahead at the moment, it's just plain wrong. Once those on the religious right figure that out, they might also try remembering who it was that opened the door for Obama in the first place.

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The Baltimore Sun
Editorial
07/07/2008

Doesn't Sen. Barack Obama realize that all the pandering in the world won't get religious fundamentalists to vote for him and that the only thing his talk of expanding faith-based government-financed programs is sure to do is alienate his political base ("Obama advances faith-based plan," July 2)?

Some of us are tired of having our pockets picked for the benefit of religious groups.

As someone who sees no good coming from a possible John McCain presidency and hopes to be able to vote for Mr. Obama, I certainly hope that the senator from Illinois comes to his senses before it's too late.

Kenneth A. Stevens, Savage

No need to divide church and state

It is gratifying to see a liberal Democrat such as Sen. Barack Obama proposing to expand government funding to faith-based organizations ("Obama advances faith-based plan," July 2).

It is disappointing, however, to see Mr. Obama simultaneously advance the fiction that such funding must respect the so-called separation of church and state as a matter of constitutional law.As Mr. Obama surely knows, the phrase "separation of church and state" does not appear in the Constitution. The phrase comes from a letter written by Thomas Jefferson more than 10 years after ratification of the First Amendment, which argued for his own rather tendentious interpretation of the religion clauses of that amendment.

A better authority on the topic is the president who was serving when the First Amendment was ratified, George Washington.

Washington never believed - before or after ratification of the First Amendment - that government and religion should be kept separate from one another.

As he said in his farewell address: "Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports."

Mr. Obama should eschew the false talk of "separation" and instead take pride in his plan to follow in the footsteps of President Washington.

Tara Ross, Dallas

Joseph C. Smith Jr., Denver

The writers are co-authors of the book "Under God: George Washington and the Question of Church and State."

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07/06/2008

The Philadelphia Inquirer
Editorial
07/06/2008

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's announcement last week that he, like President Bush, wants government to bankroll faith-based efforts to help America's downtrodden is being written off by some as a political ploy.

Let's hope not. The work that could be done is too important.

Both Obama and Republican candidate John McCain have had a hard time gaining traction with evangelical Christians, whose votes could be key in several battleground states.

Some polls show as many as 10 percent of Americans think Obama, whose father was a Kenyan Muslim, is also Muslim. Obama again and again has stressed he was raised Christian.

McCain still suffers from a speech he made when running for president in 2000, linking Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell to Louis Farrakhan and Al Sharpton as "agents of intolerance."

But the Christan right appears ready to forgive McCain. About 90 of their leaders met Tuesday in Denver to discuss endorsing McCain. Many want McCain to choose former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, a Baptist minister, as his vice president. Regardless, many Christian conservatives will vote for McCain whoever his running mate is.

"The only evangelicals who will support Obama are the ones who haven't read their Bible," said Phil Burress, leader of an Ohio group called Citizens for Community Values. "The more and more we learn about Obama, the closer and closer we get to McCain."

So, there was a political incentive for Obama to reach out with his own faith-based initiative, taking the opportunity to declare: "While I could sit in church and pray all I want, I wouldn't be fulfilling God's will unless I went out and did the Lord's work."

But it doesn't take an act of faith to believe Obama. After law school, he worked as a community organizer for a Roman Catholic group in Chicago. In his book The Audacity of Hope he wrote that it was its community outreach that drew him to the black church.

Those questioning Obama's motives for proposing a new faith-based initiative should also consider that the move risks alienating liberal voters who insist on a strict separation of church and state.

Anticipating that complaint, Obama said his program - unlike Bush's - would not permit church groups to discriminate against nonbelievers in hiring staff for outreach programs. He also said government money could not be diverted toward proselytizing.

It makes sense to aid religious groups that are helping people get off drugs, find a job, get an education, and find housing. At least 40 percent of all welfare-to-work organizations in Philadelphia are faith-based. Typically, such groups provide services at a fraction of the cost of a government agency.

Bush's faith-based initiative helped him direct significant money to religious leaders who then gave him political support. Obama says he doesn't want to see that repeated. Neither does the rest of America.

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Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Pennsylvania)
Editorial
07/06/2008

It's an age-old formula to get elected president: The candidate tacks to the left (or right) during the primary season to appeal to the party base, then navigates a more centrist course in the run-up to November. Sen. Barack Obama is under full sail on just that course.

We understand. As a different candidate, Mr. Obama has different waters to cover than most. Some of his campaign's hurdles -- Muslim father, outrageous former Christian minister, his party's legacy of alienation from the Christian right -- suggest that it would be wise to reach out to religious groups that have not lately been supportive of Democrats.

Which explains what Mr. Obama was doing on Tuesday in Zanesville, Ohio, saying things that might be sweet music to religious voters. Visiting the East Side Community Ministry, he made a pitch for more government cooperation with faith-based groups, beyond the program started by President Bush with the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, one of the administration's more controversial efforts.

This is beyond understanding. Mr. Obama went so far as to say that the Bush effort had been consistently underfunded and was used to promote partisan interests. Far from being warned off, he wants do more. He promised a new Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships that would strengthen faith-based groups by setting up training programs to educate them in what opportunities were available.

While reaffirming that as a teacher of constitutional law he believes in the separation of church and state, and setting out various conditions in his plan that might be unacceptable to some faith-based groups -- federal money couldn't be used to proselytize or discriminate and funds could be used only for secular programs -- Mr. Obama sought to placate those who might bristle at the injection of yet more religion into the American body politic.

America, being the spiritually inclined nation it is, will always have faith in the public square. The question is how much. The Bush administration has given people of all faiths and none reason for some bristling.

The age-old separation of church and state, the distillation of the founders' wisdom, has been breached. In the last 71/2 years, under the color of faith, a way has been found to divert taxpayers' money to churches. Those ineffective abstinence-only efforts for teens are a notable example of what happens when religion becomes mixed with politics.

Of course, religious charities often do excellent work, but they also have tax-exempt status to help them do it. If Mr. Obama were keeping faith-based programs that work, that would be one thing. But his suggestion goes way beyond that.

This costly course is headed for the choppy seas that the founders wisely avoided. Sadly, it seems Mr. Obama needs his own wall of separation between pandering and policies.

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The Times Union (Albany, New York)
The Times Union (Albany, New York)
07/06/2008

Despite some key differences, Sen. Barack Obama's plan to give faith-based initiatives an expanded role in his administration if he is elected in November sounds much like a similar program put in place by President Bush nearly eight years ago. We find Mr. Obama's plan as troubling as Mr. Bush's, and for the same reasons. Faith-based initiatives promote church-state partnerships that aren't necessary. And they blur the line of separation that should exist between religion and government.

Like Mr. Bush, Sen. Obama says religious groups can help complement government programs to provide the vital social services for many Americans in need. When Mr. Obama was a neighborhood worker in Chicago, he witnessed firsthand how the local Roman Catholic churches provided help for so many. Yet for all the good that religious organizations can do, there is still a need to keep them separate from government programs. Sen. Obama says that unlike the Bush program, which administers programs through the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, his plan would not allow faith organizations to discriminate in hiring based on religion, and that the programs these organizations administer would be secular in nature. Maybe, but some critics who have examined the details of his plan say there are loopholes that would allow such discrimination.

Worse, Sen. Obama's plan would keep in place the Bush framework that allows religious organizations to receive money directly from the federal government. If there must be such programs, then some kind of neutral oversight is necessary to prevent abuses.

When Mr. Bush first advanced his faith-based initiative eight years ago, some conservative Christian leaders expressed reservations. They worried that by accepting government funds, their tenets might be compromised because some of their most successful programs would have to be secularized to qualify for federal funds.

Those fears remain. Meanwhile, the Bush program itself has proven to be a colossal failure. A former administration official, David Kuo, has openly criticized the White House for making no new funds available for faith-based programs, only shifting money around. And as John Dilulio, Mr. Bush's first overseer of faith-based initiatives, has long acknowledged, there is no evidence that the religious groups that received government money have a better record of delivering vital social services than secular programs.

It's hard to see how embracing the failed Bush program will help Mr. Obama appeal to the evangelical voters he is trying to win over. They have heard such promises before, and witnessed the consequences. And they are more than likely wary of any new promises from either the right, left or center.

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The San Francisco Chronicle
David Davenport
07/06/2008

One program many thought would not outlive the Bush presidency is his faith-based initiative. Seemingly fueled by his personal evangelical Christianity and enacted unilaterally by his first executive order as president, this has been a signature program of President Bush from the start, that is, allowing religious organizations to receive government funds to perform social services.

Imagine the surprise, then, when presumptive Democratic nominee Sen. Barack Obama announced that, as president, he would continue a faith-based initiatives program. Some on the right dismissed this as political posturing, an effort to appeal to regular churchgoing voters who turned out heavily for Bush, and who currently favor likely Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain, 49 to 37 percent.

Others from the left were dismayed that Obama would continue a policy they believe promotes government establishment of religion prohibited by the First Amendment. The Rev. Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State said, "This initiative has been a failure on all counts and ought to be shut down, not expanded."

In fact, Obama's support of faith-based programs reinforces that these programs are not merely short-term priorities of one president, but instead have become a new way of doing business.

The roots of faith-based initiatives can be traced back a decade earlier than Bush's executive order in 2001. President George H.W. Bush, building on Ronald Reagan's "devolution" of many social programs from Washington, D.C., to state and local governments, began his "thousand points of light" initiatives. Speaking of a "kinder, gentler" nation, Bush 41 used the bully pulpit of the presidency to recognize and encourage volunteer efforts, religious and otherwise, in local communities.

Next came President Bill Clinton's charitable choice initiatives. As part of welfare reform, job training and drug treatment programs, charitable choice allowed religious providers of these services to receive federal funding along with other nonreligious charities.

These charitable choice programs gave religious organizations a seat at the table of social service, at least in the specific areas covered by the legislation.

The Bush faith-based initiatives then broadened the involvement of faith-based charities in delivering social services. What had begun in three or four specific areas through charitable choice was expanded, with faith-based offices set up in 11 federal agencies to assist religious charities with government funding for their social work.

As in the charitable choice legislation, federal funding could be used only to provide services, not for the religious aspects of the nonprofit's work. But religious organizations now provide a vast array of government-funded services, from operating prisons (with lower recidivism rates) to dealing with gangs and providing shelter for the homeless.

Not well known but reported by the White House seventh-year report on the initiatives, is that, by now, 35 states - 19 with governors who are Democrats and 16 who are Republicans - have adopted their own versions of faith-based initiatives, as have 70 municipal governments. As Obama points out, these religious organizations are generally local and closer to the need than the federal government, and this has led to some significant successes.

Although McCain has not yet spoken extensively on the topic, he has also supported faith-based initiatives, voting for them in the Senate and championing specific programs, such as charter schools.

McCain has said that he, too, would continue a faith-based initiatives program.

Of course, there is still plenty of disagreement about the details. Obama would not allow religious providers to discriminate in hiring based on their doctrines, a pill many of these groups could not swallow, and a policy neither Bush nor McCain would support.

But, in the end, it seems clear that faith-based social services supported by government funding are here to stay. It is not just a Bush program, as many thought, but for nearly 20 years, through several presidents, and in most states and many cities, it has quietly become part of the social service fabric.

David Davenport is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.

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07/05/2008

The New York Times
Peter Steinfels
07/05/2008

On Tuesday, Senator Barack Obama did his best to reclaim for Democrats the idea of partnerships between government and grass-roots religious groups -- and except for six little words he did a very smooth job.

First, he recalled his own community service in Chicago, noting that it had been church supported.

Then he reminded listeners that it was President Bill Clinton who signed landmark legislation widening the role religion-based groups could play in government-financed programs, and Al Gore who in 1999 first proposed a full-scale religion-based initiative.

While Mr. Obama acknowledged President Bush's promise to "rally the armies of compassion" through such an initiative, he maintained that the promise had gone unfulfilled because of too little financing and too much partisanship -- and that he, Barack Obama, would not only carry out but also expand what Mr. Bush had pledged.

He was two-thirds of the way through his remarks when he inserted the six words with the potential to put his whole effort at risk. Speaking "as someone who used to teach constitutional law," he spelled out "a few basic principles" to reassure listeners that such partnerships between religious groups and the government would not endanger the separation of church and state.

"First," he said, "if you get a federal grant, you can't use that grant money to proselytize to the people you help, and you can't discriminate against them -- or against the people you hire -- on the basis of their religion."

That little phrase between the dashes -- "or against the people you hire" -- ignited a political explosion. "Fraud," declared Bill Donohue of the Catholic League. "What Obama wants," Mr. Donohue said, is "to secularize the religious workplace." In its newsletter, the conservative Family Research Council called Mr. Obama's position "a body blow to religious groups that apply for federal funds." No less heated reactions came from the other end of the political spectrum, where the Obama proposal was denounced not for that short phrase but for what liberals saw as an abandonment of their principles and part of a suspicious move toward the center.

The intense reaction on both sides was pretty predictable, but some people offered more analytic reactions. They welcomed Mr. Obama's stance, yet made it clear that those six words pointed to deeper questions about religious freedom that could very well seal the fate not only of any new and potentially improved partnerships between government and religious groups but also even those partnerships that, in reality, had been operating for decades.

Religious groups that know the law have long agreed that federal money cannot be used for proselytizing or discriminating against beneficiaries. But they have never agreed that taking religious considerations into account in hiring personnel -- certainly for top positions if not for all staffing -- should be considered discrimination. And they point to the religious exemption in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and subsequent legislative and Supreme Court decisions to back this assertion.

The law, in fact, has its ambiguities and inconsistencies, as one might expect. But when the Bush administration's religion-based initiative was debated in 2001, Jeffrey Rosen, who teaches law at George Washington University and is a regular contributor to The New York Times and other publications, pointed out the logic in an article in The New Republic.

"It's not hard to understand why faith-based organizations need to discriminate on the basis of religion to maintain their essentially religious character," Mr. Rosen wrote. "A Jewish organization forced to hire Baptists soon ceases to be Jewish at all."

Mr. Rosen also noted that "without the ability to discriminate on the basis of religion in hiring and firing staff, religious organizations lose the right to define their organizational mission enjoyed by secular organizations that receive public funds." If Planned Parenthood could refuse to hire people disagreeing with its views about abortion, why should churches, mosques and synagogues not have the same right?

Of course, eight years of polarization over Bush administration policies in general, plus specific accusations by former administration officials that its religion-based initiative was cynically bent to political purposes, have inflamed discussion of such questions. Add in the old conflicts over abortion and new ones over same-sex relationships, and today even longstanding government interactions with venerable religious charities, educational institutions and medical providers can no longer be taken for granted.

Beneath these immediate conflicts, generally pitting liberals against traditional faiths, is a more basic tension between two understandings of religious freedom. One is an individualistic understanding that emphasizes protecting the personal conscience, especially the dissenting conscience, from coercion. From Jefferson to Emerson to most of today's intellectuals, this strand is typically suspicious of religious institutions, which it sees as more likely to be antagonistic than favorable to true religion.

The other is a more communitarian understanding that emphasizes the role of religious communities in nourishing conscience and providing a framework for living out its commitments. This strand has typically worried about protecting minority faiths from the pressures of the religious majority but has become increasingly sensitive to protecting any distinctive faith from being pressed to conform to a common-denominator culture.

Mr. Obama's six little words on hiring by religious groups are not apt to be his last comment on the subject. "As someone who used to teach constitutional law," he is surely aware that the law on religious hiring is much more complicated than a condensed reference to discrimination might suggest. And his personal combination of liberal politics and religious experience probably makes him better placed than most American politicians to realize fully what, beyond electoral gambits, is at stake.

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The San Diego Union-Tribune
The San Diego Union-Tribune
07/05/2008

Sen. Barack Obama is borrowing an idea from President George Bush. And, luckily, it happens to be one of the president's better ideas.

Obama said this week that, if elected, he would build upon Bush's faith-based initiative and use churches and religious organizations to deliver social services.

Bush tried something similar, but his program got sidetracked by politics, opposition from the separation-of-church-and-state crowd and concerns that the administration was secretly advancing a conservative agenda. Obama plans to make a few refinements in what Bush proposed, prohibiting organizations from proselytizing to the people they help or discriminating against the people they hire.

The idea is to make the delivery of federal funds more efficient by streamlining the process and cutting through the often self-perpetuating federal bureaucracy. What matters is that the poor and needy get the help they want, and that may mean relying more on grass-roots and religious organizations.

This is not how liberal Democrats normally talk. Too often, what they care most about is feeding the federal bureaucracy -- and its army of government workers -- and not cutting it down to size. There is a very vocal and powerful secular wing in the Democratic Party that has often led it astray by thwarting initiatives that appeal to hard-core Democratic constituencies such as the working-class, African-Americans and Latinos.

If Obama keeps his promise, he might do more than find a new way to serve the poor. He might also serve his party by teaching Democrats that, as the saying goes, freedom of religion isn't the same as freedom from religion.

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07/04/2008

Mississippi Press
Jay Ambrose
07/04/2008

Barack Obama is catching hell from some for his endorsement of faith-based government services, and yes, there is reason to worry about his position. But don't suppose for a minute that all the critics know what they're talking about.

Listen to some and you'd think it was George W. Bush who came up with the idea of granting religious organizations government funds to provide social services. In fact, that very thing has been going on for years, and it was in the administration of Bill Clinton - not that of Bush - that such programs took a decisive turn as Congress acted to loosen up some of the rules.

The innovation was something called Charitable Choice, which said religious organizations could simultaneously receive federal funds and hire people only of the faith, thus retaining their identity. Bills that Clinton signed made it clear these organizations could not exclude anyone from help by reason of their beliefs, but did not insist their federally funded operations somehow convert themselves into something wholly secular.

Bush's largely unrealized plan - similar to what Democrat Al Gore pledged during the 2000 presidential campaign - was mainly to fund more of these faith-based services than before. Now we've got Obama wanting to accomplish what Bush aimed for, but with a big difference. His program would insist those accepting federal funds agree to hire people of other faiths or no faith.

It's a bad idea that points to one of the major threats of making churches into conduits of federal largesse. A religious organization is what it is because of its distinct perceptions of ultimate truths, and a religious organization can cease to some degree to be what it has been when its employees can be opposed to its world view. One argument I ran across notes that a secular version of the same requirement would instruct Planned Parenthood that it must hire people opposed to abortion.

Federal law does entitle religious groups to hire only within the faith, but forget all that when federal funding steps into the room. It's not that the law changes, but that the government at this point has a means of getting you to conform to its wishes - go along with what it wants or lose the money you've come to depend on.

Through this device, the government has coerced private universities to obey all kinds of rules some at these institutions don't like, and states to toss pieces of their usual authority out the window. Telling religious groups what to do about hiring could be just step one in a long list of adjustments churches will have to make if they choose to replace gifts from the heart with government grants. Big Brother could take over where people once felt they heard the call of holiness.

While I would not argue that all federal funding of religion-related social services stop - a number of well-established programs do considerable good and will never, ever establish a state religion - a far-reaching expansion does not strike me as a splendid idea even if there were no risk of religions misplacing their substance.

It's a social, political benefit to have multiple approaches to helping people in need, to have private, essentially unregulated efforts because of dangers of an ever larger welfare state and also because of the innovations that can come from people freed of bureaucratic restraints.

Years ago I met a Catholic nun in Denver who headed up a literacy program deemed perhaps the best in the West. She told me she refused to accept federal money, and when I asked her why, she said it was because the government would make her do things that did not work, and she would rather struggle to find money and actually teach people to read than to secure the money easily and accomplish nothing.

Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado. He can be reached at SpeaktoJay@aol.com

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The Washington Post
Editorial, Michael Gerson
07/04/2008

If I may be permitted a moment of nostalgia, I witnessed the beginnings of the faith-based initiative.

It was the height of the Gingrich revolution in 1994. A few perceptive (and lonely) Republicans, including Sen. Dan Coats of Indiana, were convinced that an exclusively anti-government approach would be both morally incomplete and politically self-destructive -- that a party with nothing hopeful to say about addiction, disadvantaged youths or homelessness would not remain a governing party for long. As a young staffer, I worked with Coats's legislative team on a package of legislation called the Project for American Renewal, designed to promote the work of community and faith-based charities.

The Republican leadership listened to our ideas politely, as one listens to a slightly batty uncle -- then proceeded to shut down the government in 1995. The Clinton administration did more than listen. By 1999, Vice President Al Gore was calling for a "new partnership" between government and "faith-based organizations." But it was Texas Gov. George W. Bush who ran with the idea as a centerpiece of compassionate conservatism.

So Barack Obama's recent announcement of "a new project of American renewal" that will "empower faith-based organizations" rang a peal of mental bells for me. The power of a political idea is largely measured by its influence on the other party. By this measure, the faith-based initiative is now a permanent feature of American life.

Obama's proposal immediately won the right supporters, including John DiIulio, one of the most principled compassionate conservatives of the early Bush administration. It also earned the right critics. When Barry Lynn of Americans United for Separation of Church and State says, "I am disappointed," Obama is on the right track. My own reaction: Obama has done himself and his country a service and reminded many of us why we found him a compelling political figure in the first place.

In his speech, Obama -- both presidential candidate and professor of constitutional law -- affirmed the central intellectual commitment of faith-based welfare reform: that government can support the secular social work of sectarian groups within the bounds of the First Amendment. And this, he argued, is not merely appropriate but necessary, because some problems are "simply too big for government to solve alone." So he pledged to keep a faith-based office at the White House, encourage larger religious charities to give technical assistance to smaller groups in getting government funds, and focus new efforts on summer education programs for disadvantaged children. DiIulio calls this a "balanced, centrist, faith-friendly plan" that avoids both "orthodox sectarianism and orthodox secularism."

Of course, Obama felt a political need to contrast his approach with the past eight years. Bush's effort, he said, was "consistently underfunded" -- which is hard to dispute. It was also "used to promote partisan interests" -- a charge that is not fair. Or maybe as fair as the charge of partisanship against a Democratic presidential candidate who announces his faith-based program in the battleground state of Ohio.

Obama is characteristically opaque on the issue of hiring -- seeming to promise that religious parent institutions can select employees based on their beliefs, while denying this right (depending on local law) to their social service adjuncts. And many of Obama's proposed reforms -- building local capacity and focusing on outcomes -- are a precise description of current Bush administration policies.

But Obama's attempt to brand the faith-based initiative as his own is a tribute to the idea itself. No politician borrows and expands a failure.

Obama's proposal is a sign of political maturity -- the rejection of a foolish notion that anything associated with Bush is irreparably flawed. It is politically smart, appealing to that margin (broad or narrow) of gettable evangelicals. But the proposal also has the virtue -- unlike Obama's recent ideological evolution -- of evident sincerity.

As a former community organizer, Obama is familiar with the geography of hope in American cities. He knows that religious groups are irreplaceable in desperate places -- and that a rigid secularism would decimate the very institutions that the poor depend on most. He also understands that these charities are often overwhelmed and that they deserve and require public support.

In his speech, Obama explained, "while I could sit in church and pray all I want, I wouldn't be fulfilling God's will unless I went out and did the Lord's work." These are welcome words from a Democratic presidential candidate -- and a good example of moderation without cynicism.

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The Washington Post
E. J. Dionne Jr.
07/04/2008

Barack Obama keeps trying to end the wars over culture and religion, and good for him. The 1960s are so 40 years ago. But Obama's opponents, as well as some of his friends, won't let him do it.

His latest foray is on a subject dear to my heart: the effort to find constitutional ways to build partnerships between government and faith-based groups doing essential work for the poor and the marginalized.

The outline Obama offered Tuesday suggests that he wants to learn from President Bush's failures in this area, not simply reject an idea because it has Bush's name on it.

And give Obama points for acknowledging how hard it is to find the right balance between avoiding excessive entanglement of government with religion on the one hand and respecting the identity of religious charities on the other. "Some of these questions are difficult," he said in an interview, "and I don't have them all worked out."

The truth is that government and religious groups have long cooperated on social ventures that posed no threat to religious freedom. Students should be able to get government loans whether they go to Fresno State, Notre Dame or Yeshiva. Religious hospitals get Medicare and Medicaid money.

Moreover, the government has had partnerships for many years with Catholic Charities, Lutheran Services, the Jewish Federations and other religious groups. And why not? If the religious charities disappeared, both the poor and the taxpayers would be in a lot of trouble.

Unfortunately, while Bush loved to talk about the "armies of compassion," he did not put much money or muscle behind a domestic compassion agenda. As David Kuo, former deputy director of Bush's White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, wrote in 2005: "From tax cuts to Medicare, the White House gets what the White House really wants. It never really wanted the 'poor people stuff.' "

In suggesting that the faith-based policy be mended but not ended, Obama starts with the right reforms. "There was a lot of political and partisan decision making in the office," he told me. He wants his faith-based agency "working with everybody," and clear measures, applied equally, to guarantee "high standards" in both secular and religious programs.

Under Bush, he said, "you took resources from some programs and gave them to others without clear criteria for why the funds were shifted." Obama would emphasize using large groups such as Catholic Charities "to train smaller organizations that are doing good work" in the ways of applying for and administering government funds.

There is a cosmetic quality to some of the changes Obama proposes, including his desire to rename the office as the "Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships." Still, his use of the word "partnerships" points in the right direction by stressing that support for religious groups can't be an excuse for government backing out of its responsibilities.

Bush's effort was plagued by a liberal-conservative battle over hiring discrimination within faith-based programs, particularly on the question of sexual orientation. Obama would keep the religious exemption from federal civil rights laws for congregations but apply them to specific programs sponsored by the congregations that accepted federal money. There is no federal law against discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation. But there are some local laws, and Obama says that religious groups taking federal funds would have to abide by these.

"I realize this is going to be a sensitive issue in some circumstances -- in very narrow circumstances, I think," Obama said.

Culture warriors who would prefer a fight rather than a consensus on how to do well by those who do good may be eager to battle on this narrow issue. But this would be a case of misplaced priorities. With his faith-based proposal, at least, Obama is living up to his promise to cut through partisanship and ideology.

Since everything in a campaign is seen through a political lens, Obama's plan is being read as part of his effort to reach religious voters. Obama replies that he has a long history of working with religious organizations, which is true, but he makes no bones about trying to win new allies.

"I certainly think that there's greater openness among evangelical leaders to begin discussions with Democrats and listening to viewpoints that are not narrowly defined by the religious right," he said. "That's particularly true of younger evangelicals."

Yes, seeking peace in the culture war is in Obama's interest. But does that make ending it a bad thing?

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07/03/2008

The Washington Times
Editorial
07/03/2008

Barack Obama's announcement that he would change the title of the White House Office of Community and Faith-Based Initiatives - which President Bush created in 2001 - to the White House Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, gives an indication of how different his approach will be. Mr. Obama said "leaders in both parties have recognized the value of a partnership between the White House and faith-based groups."

Mr. Obama mentioned Bill Clinton's loosening of constraints on faith-based groups to work with government, Al Gore's plan to expand on that and he quoted President Bush, saying, "[Mr. Bush] came into office with a promise to 'rally the armies of compassion'. " I still believe it's a good idea," Mr. Obama said on the stump Tuesday in Zanesville, Ohio. This subject is no surprise at all coming from an activist who spent his early 20s working with faith-based community groups in Chicago, trying to feed and shelter the homeless, train people for jobs, provide counseling for alcohol and drug abuse, curb youth violence and tackle a host of other social problems.

But then Mr. Obama let loose the politics in Zanesville. Mr. Obama chastised the Bush administration for running its program in a partisan fashion, shortchanging certain groups that didn't fall in line. The faith initiative's first director, John J. Dilulio Jr., made those criticisms after he resigned 6 months into the job. The Democratic nominee went on to say that the office never lived up to its promise of helping distressed communities because it was underfunded. But the fact is it will always be underfunded; there isn't enough money to cure all the nation's ills.

Still, the left is in full flight. "Senator Obama's speech on government partnerships with faith-based and grassroots social service groups included a clear commitment to constitutional principles, something that has been sorely lacking during the Bush administration," said People For the American Way President Kathryn Kolbert, who is supposed to be a staunch defender of separation of church and state. The crux of the criticism was to question how "potentially ... problematic" the plan could be if federal funds were sent

directly to houses of worship "That's a bad idea," Mrs. Kolbert said. The Rev. Barry Lynn, director of the Americans United for Separation of Church and State, was slightly more agitated: "This initiative has been a failure on all counts, and it ought to be shut down, not expanded." But Mr. Lynn was pleased to hear Mr. Obama say that he would "bar government-funded proselytism and religious discrimination in hiring when tax dollars are involved."

Take the other party's idea, criticize it, adapt it, rename it and praise it. Sounds like traditional Washington politics.

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The Capital Times (Madison, Wisconsin)
Dave Searles Brodhead
07/03/2008

Dear Editor: This is an open letter to Sen. Obama.

I heard your announcement on NBC Nightly News concerning your support for more funding for faith-based programs. Unless you back off from this faith-based funding and programs proposal, you will have lost my vote and I will be forced to endorse someone else for president. It won't be McCain or Barr.

I'm a very strong believer in separation of church and state. In fact, I'm a member of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Faith-based funding and programs using federal and/or state money is a clear and flagrant violation of the principle of separation of church and state. It is an insult to Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and the Democratic Party.

In 2000, I voted for Ralph Nader because Al Gore ignored the issue of the environment and would not shut up concerning religion and would not stop catering to religious fanatics. In 2006, I endorsed and voted for the Green Party candidate for Wisconsin governor because Gov. Jim Doyle created a faith-based funding and programs office.

You should be taking a page from former President Jimmy Carter's playbook. Although Jimmy is a very religious person, he was a firm believer in separation of church and state.

If you continue to push this proposal for faith-based funding and programs and catering to the religious fanatics, you are going to split the Democratic Party and give the election to the Republicans. We do not need or want a repeat of 2000, but that is what is going to happen.

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St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Missouri)
Sylvester Brown, Jr.
07/03/2008

Independence Day is a holiday that's always stirred mixed emotions in me.

It's a tad awkward celebrating the signing of a document demanding the "unalienable right" of equality and liberty for a new nation that, at the time, condoned slavery.

Still, independence is a noble cause - even if it was deferred nearly 190 years until the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Thankfully, presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama and a religious convention here Friday give me cause to reflect on independence from a different, refreshing perspective.

Obama recently announced that, if elected, he would expand President George W. Bush's faith-based initiatives. The program was designed to deliver social services through religious organizations. Unfortunately, it became bogged down in debates over church and state separation, partisan favoritism and "faith" as a condition of employment.

If distributed evenly and without religious bias, faith-based initiatives always appealed to me. Unlike neighborhood schools, churches are still the axis of community interaction and social action.

Someone like Father Greg Boyle could surely benefit from a re-energized faith-based federal program. Boyle, founder of the Homeboy Industries program in Los Angeles, has helped get gang members off the street and ex-cons fresh from prison trained to operate businesses, develop and market "Homeboy" merchandise, and become productive citizens.

When Bush announced his initiative during his first term, I immediately thought of Floyd Flake, a former congressman and pastor of the Greater Allen African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Cathedral in New York. In the mid-1970s, Flake spearheaded a grand mission to "expand community development" in southeast Queens. To date, the church has created a school, affordable home developments, a shopping mall, health centers, drug addiction and teen pregnancy programs, while employing hundreds of people.

Independence is a part of the AME Church's foundation.

It was founded by a slave, Richard Allen, who bought his freedom toward the end of the Revolutionary War. In 1787, Allen and a group of free and enslaved blacks sought to create a church where they could control their own religious lives. They purchased a blacksmith's shop in Philadelphia and converted it into a church. With an anvil as his pulpit, Allen became the church's first preacher.

The African Methodist Episcopal Church went on to establish schools, colleges, a hospital and its own newspaper. Today, there are more than 3 million members and 7,500 churches worldwide.

About 30,000 members are expected to attend the church's "48th Quadrennial" conference, which starts Friday downtown.

The church has grown, but the mission hasn't changed, said Bishop John R. Bryant, presiding bishop of the Fifth Episcopal District (which includes Missouri) and conference host.

"Most churches were started over theological issues. But the AME Church was born out of the need for social gospel. It started over justice," Bryant said.

It would be a "biblical error," he added, if the church addressed only spiritual needs.

"God cares about the whole person. This church looks at the educational, economic and political needs of the community."

Bryant said he welcomed Obama's call to expand the role of churches in order to address societal ills. But, he added, the church will continue its global mission regardless.

At the convention, Bryant said, one of the issues will be an invitation from congregations in India that want to replicate the AME's mission of "self-help and self-determination."

I applaud the group's outreach efforts, but I wonder about the impact organizations like the AME might have in this country if more resources were available.

Critics dismiss Obama's call as a political maneuver to attract skeptical white evangelicals.

That may be.

But, as Obama said, the challenges are "too big for government to solve alone." His call for an "all-hands-on-deck approach" to fixing our country is a welcomed detour from a bloody and costly effort to fix "democracy" in the Middle East.

I probably won't spend too much time dwelling on the hypocrisy of Independence Day.

I'll spend more time thinking about a slave who dreamed of freedom while the country fought the Revolutionary War - a man who established a church to address the sordid conditions of his fellow man.

AME's legacy gives the holiday a hopeful spin. More than likely, I'll be thinking about Allen and the promising possibilities of "independence"

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The Washington Post
The Washington Post
07/03/2008

Because Jim Towey was director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, the program associated with that office is dear to his heart ["Who'll Keep the Faith-Based Initiative?," op-ed, June 28]. Mr. Towey complained that the presidential candidates have not and are not addressing faith-based initiatives.

As an example of the good work that the office accomplished while he was director, Mr. Towey cited helping the Seattle Hebrew Academy to get disaster relief money for its recovery from earthquake damage. He said that "the White House pushed a policy change to ensure that the school was treated the same as any other school."

An important fact is missing: The academy is not like "any other school." It is a school exclusively for Jewish children.

It is absurd that it should receive taxpayer money. And it is absurd to argue that this example of giving justifies, in any way whatsoever, the continuation of the White House's faith-based initiative.

PRESLEY HARPER

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The New York Sun
John Mcwhorter
07/03/2008

No matter what, a good number continue to think Barack Obama is a Muslim. They don't do their homework.

One could say the same thing of people claiming we "don't know what Obama believes," that he is a smooth talker devoid of substance.

That indicates a certain discernment, a resistance to being seduced by surfaces. But all you have to do to get a sense of what Barack Obama is about is look at his Web site. There is plenty of policy there; he does not hold back.

The problem is less that he does not tell us what he is about than that what he is about is not a matter of memory-friendly sound bites. It's that sort of thing, such as his opposition to the summer gas tax holiday, that sticks in people's minds.

This is less true of things like his proposal this week to continue and expand President Bush's Faith-Based Initiatives. That's unfortunate, because this is big news. It means that one thing Mr. Obama is "about" is helping poor people, especially ones of color.

It's easy to dismiss Mr. Obama's "bipartisan" intentions as a mere matter of sloganeering. However, the Faith-Based Initiatives are Exhibit A in splitting the difference between left and right.

The idea is to earmark funds for churches and other religious organizations to assist those in need in their communities. The orientation is bottom-up, along the lines of the self-help paradigm dear to conservatives, but funded by the government, as liberals support.

Under the radar, Faith-Based Initiatives have been funded by the Bush administration for several years now. For example, the Ready4Work program provides a web of services and ongoing mentoring to ex-cons. It was established as a pilot program in 17 sites in 2003 while the press was focused on the war in Iraq.

After a year, only half as many of its clients were back in prison as the national average. A year later President Bush announced the Prisoner Re-entry Initiative, and it lives on.

However, few are aware of this or other Faith-Based Initiatives programs, and this is because what the Bush administration proposed as a major plank of legislation funded to the tune of billions ended up being a back door affair funded by mere millions.

There was, in the end, more interest in attracting the support of evangelicals than going on to justify it, especially after September 11. Plus there was a tsunami of opposition to organizations possibly discriminating on the basis of religion.

Much of this resistance was from Democrats, and it was one of the party's sadder moments. Black inner-city ministers were standing hat in hand ready to take advantage of funding to make things better in their communities, and people claiming to be speaking in their interests were evidencing a sudden obsession with the finer points of the separation of church and state.

The dismissal of the Faith-Based Initiatives idea among these people was founded partly in a visceral resistance to anything proposed by Republicans. Many of them, as secular Blue America sorts, also were ignorant of the central role that churches and religious faith play in struggling black and brown communities.

The result was people issuing sage warnings about potential discrimination who have no problem with the potential for discrimination against whites in racial preference policies. To them, if Affirmative Action means a degree of discrimination against whites, then it's tolerable collateral damage amidst a larger, nobler goal.

But if a black preacher chooses a devout Baptist as a marriage counselor over someone with no professed religious affiliation, then the moral fabric of the nation is torn asunder, regardless of the good that the church is doing for people who need help.

This resistance to the Faith-Based Intiatives was sandbox politics in the guise of sincere moral commitment, and Barack Obama is to be lauded in stepping aside from such partisan pettiness and making assistance to religious organizations, the "moral center" of his platform.

What helps people is teaching them to help themselves. Recall, for example, the old adage about teaching someone to fish rather than giving them a fish. This can be done via government funding, but the funds must go to organizations that provide counseling by trusted intimates and fellow members of a community, not faceless bureaucrats.

Here in New York, Mr. Obama gave a speech a year and half ago, not much covered by the press, in which he said that for him, a key part of changing the country would be teaching people about the power in their own hands. That's what Faith-Based Initiatives are, and that's what he's about.

Let some people assume that he's a Muslim, or that he doesn't say the Pledge of Allegiance, and so on. I would hope that the rest of us can pay attention to what matters, even when it is not easy fodder for water cooler chatter.

Mr. McWhorter is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

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07/02/2008

The Roanoke Times (Virginia)
Editorial
07/02/2008

Barack Obama wants to expand on President Bush's faith-based social services initiative by adding dollars and pushing more of them farther down the money chain to grassroots religious and secular charities that help the needy in their communities.

They certainly could put more money for social services to good use.

And in a speech Tuesday about his vision for a new Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, the Democratic candidate for president offered needed assurances of his deep belief in an inviolable principle of fair, representative governance: the separation of church and state.

Still, an early report on the speech by The Associated Press had an unnamed senior adviser to the campaign explaining that Obama supports letting religious organizations that get federal funding consider religion in employment decisions -- but only in those parts of their activities that are not funded by taxpayers.

What exactly does that mean?

That a faith-based charity won't endanger its funding if the sponsoring congregation considers matters of faith in hiring or firing its pastor/priest/rabbi/imam? That would be only reasonable.

But what if, say, a congregation's beliefs allow -- even require -- discrimination against gay people, and the work of its staff within the church/synagogue/mosque includes work related to its federally funded social ministry? Would that be OK?

In our view, it would not.

Talk of trying to give tax-funded, religion-based charities greater leeway to hire and fire based on faith invites endless scenarios in which public money might be put toward furthering religious beliefs that a good portion of the public finds intolerable.

Obama is making a bold and often well-received effort to win over evangelical Christians, who have voted heavily Republican in past elections. He is seeking common ground with people of faith who want to pursue peace and social justice and, literally, to save the world from ecological disaster.

Obama's talk, too, of healing bitter partisan divisions is commendable.

He must be clear, though, that nothing he promises would lower that divide that separates church and state, and frees every American to be true to his or her beliefs.

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The Christian Science Monitor
Jane Lampman
07/02/2008

But in supporting religious charities, he runs the risk of alienating some Democrats.

In a campaign already strongly emphasizing faith, Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama announced his intent to make federal funding of religiously based organizations a key part of his push to help the needy.

His plan would overhaul and expand the controversial faith-based initiative that was an early cornerstone of President Bush's domestic program, which Senator Obama said had "never fulfilled its promise."

Obama's proposals, announced Tuesday, are likely to appeal particularly to African- Americans, who already lean Democratic, and to Evangelicals of various political stripes who are increasingly concerned about issues of poverty. He has stepped up his religious outreach in recent weeks, including seeking inroads into the Republicans' Evangelical base. But his proposals also run the risk of alienating Democrats opposed to funding religious groups for any purpose.

Obama said America's problems were too big to solve through government alone. "I believe that change comes not from the top down but from the bottom up, and few are closer to the people than our churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques," he said, during a visit to Eastside Community Ministry in Zanesville, Ohio.

The senator was careful to highlight key areas of difference between that initiative and his own proposal for a Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.

"Make no mistake, as someone who used to teach constitutional law, I believe deeply in the separation of church and state, but I don't believe this partnership will endanger that idea," Obama said.

He emphasized that those receiving funds could not proselytize the people they help nor could they discriminate in hiring practices on the basis of religion. Faith-based groups could only use federal dollars for secular programs. And he committed to ensure that taxpayer dollars would only go to "programs that actually work."

These "guiding principles" were aimed at defusing criticisms surely to come from many in the Democratic camp as well as watchdog groups, which have won some court cases where faith-based groups were found using dollars for religious purposes.

"Proselytizing and discrimination in hiring have been two of the big problems with the president's program," says the Rev. Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. "The devil is in the details on whether the Obama plan would fully correct those, but he's moving in the right direction.

"The unfortunate thing is that the idea of giving religious bodies government funding is easily a formula for misuse and politicizing. We've seen that in the last seven years," Mr. Lynn adds.

Religious groups hiring only those of their faith to operate federally funded programs remains a key issue, which Obama's campaign needs to clarify further, says Marc Stern, a lawyer for the American Jewish Congress.

"You can't mention the Salvation Army and Catholic Charities as models of what's appropriate [as Obama did], and then say you can't engage in religious discrimination in employment, because both of those organizations do discriminate," Mr. Stern says.

For some religious groups, hiring people who share their mission is as critical, they say, as it is for political campaigns or other types of nonprofits. Obama's stance could present challenges for his bid to woo Evangelicals away from the Republican Party, an effort that has included a lengthy meeting with national religious leaders and an outreach program to young Christians.

At the same time, two former White House officials responsible for the Bush initiative have responded positively to the Obama proposal. John DiIulio, the first director of the White House Office for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, says Obama has offered a "principled and problem-solving vision."

David Kuo, who left the White House disillusioned over its implementation of the faith-based effort, says, "They've clearly taken a very close look at the failures of the Bush administration's effort and have made a systematic attempt to address them." But Mr. Kuo, who is now Washington editor for Beliefnet.com, cautions that there have been lots of promises in the past, and "the test will be whether he has the commitment to fulfill the promise."

The Obama plan would create a new President's Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships in the White House and retain the offices in various federal agencies that oversee grants to faith-based and other community groups. The council would launch a training effort - by which larger charities trained smaller local organizations - and also hold grant recipients accountable by conducting rigorous performance evaluations.

His plan also envisions a $500 million per year summer learning program to focus efforts on closing the education achievement gap of poor and minority students. He aims to serve a million children in the effort.

Obama began his career as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago working with church groups to improve living conditions in poor neighborhoods. In his view, the Bush program was consistently underfunded and promoted partisan interests.

Others have charged that the program simply shifted grants to other recipients within a shrinking pie of funds. In 2006, a study by the Roundtable on Religion and Social Policy reviewed some 28,000 social service grants made by nine federal agencies from 2002 to 2004. While faith groups' share of grants awarded rose from 11.6 percent in 2002 to 12.8 percent in 2004, the total amount of the grants dropped from $670 million to $626 million. Total funds available from the programs during that period dropped by more than $230 million.

In his speech July 1, Obama emphasized that leaders in both parties have recognized the beneficial role that faith groups can play. Polls have also shown that two-thirds of Americans support the idea in principle but many have concerns about how it is implemented.
 

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The Jewish Daily Forward
Anthony Weiss
07/02/2008

Senator Barack Obama's proposal to expand federal funding for faith-based organizations is drawing a warm response from some Jewish communal groups who deal with church-state issues.

Obama's speech on July 1 was building on the Bush administration's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. That program has drawn fire from a number of Jewish groups who criticized the program for allowing groups receiving government funds to discriminate in their hiring practices and for being too lax about letting religious groups proselytize while carrying out government programs.

Marc Stern, general counsel for the American Jewish Congress, said that Obama's position, as laid out in the speech, differed from Bush administration policy in two significant respects. One was that Obama pledged to ensure that groups using government funding do not proselytize — a count on which Stern said the Bush administration had been weak. Obama also asserted that religious groups could not discriminate in their hiring practices based on faith, a position that Stern said could lead to problems, particularly for positions that involve both secular and religious components.

Those problems were evident in a statement put out by Nathan Diament, public policy director of the Orthodox Union, which has been supportive of Bush's program. Though Diament praised Obama for embracing the value of faith-based groups, he warned that Obama's stance on hiring practices could prevent the O.U., and other religious groups, from participating at all.

"Insisting that faith-based groups waive their legally protected rights may well undermine Sen. Obama's stated goal of having 'all hands on deck' as many faith-based groups, especially small ones, will opt out of government partnerships if this is the price of admission," Diament said in a statement.

However, other groups praised Obama for striking the right balance.

"It's important that when government funds are used for social services that those funds not be used to support religion-based hiring decisions" for the positions that receive funds, said Richard Foltin, director of legislative affairs for the American Jewish Committee. "On those general points, it seems [Obama's] approach gets it right."

At the root of the problem, said Stern, is the inherent difficulty raised by using religious groups to carry out government objectives.

"The question we should be asking is, Can you use religion at government expense to achieve social services?" said Stern. "Once you say you can, it's hard to say you can treat religious institutions as if they were secular institutions. You're inherently going into dicey territory and you ought to recognize that you're going into dicey territory."

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Belleville News-Democrat (Illinois)
Margaret Talev and William Douglas
07/02/2008

Sen. Barack Obama said Tuesday that if he were elected president he would have his own version of President Bush's office of faith-based initiatives that would "help set our national agenda" and inject morality into policy debates about everything from AIDS to genocide.

Obama, who has criticized Bush's initiative as politicized and underfunded, would prohibit religious discrimination in hiring or services by the groups that received federal funds from his "Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships." He estimated that the program would cost about $500 million per year. He said he would keep Bush's 11 faith-based offices and expand participation by smaller religious groups.

A former constitutional law professor, Obama said he was committed to ensuring the constitutional principle of separation of church and state. He said federal grants would go only to secular programs run by religious groups, programs that don't proselytize religion.

The prospective Democratic nominee's remarks drew much attention, as Obama again is presenting a more centrist image to voters than he did in party primary contests.

"There are some who bristle at the notion that faith has a place in the public square," Obama said. "But the fact is leaders in both parties have recognized the value of a partnership between the White House and faith-based groups." His remarks followed a visit to a community ministry in Zanesville, Ohio.

John DiIulio, a former director of Bush's faith-based program turned critic, praised Obama's proposal as "much that was best" of what Bush set out to do.

"Especially in urban America, all the empirical evidence continues to show that local faith-based organizations can make a measurable civic difference," DiIulio said in a statement released by Obama's campaign.

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The Blade (Toledo, Ohio)
Jim Provanceo
07/02/2008

Democratic nominee-to-be Barack Obama yesterday vowed to fulfill the promise President Bush made in 2000 to "rally the armies of compassion" by arming more faith-based organizations with the funds to fulfill missions where government has failed.

After mixing with children in a summer education program at Eastside Community Ministry in downtown Zanesville, the Illinois senator said he would create a high-level council on faith-based initiatives and find about $500 million to provide 1 million at-risk kids access to summer learning programs like the one he visited yesterday.

"Few are closer to the people than our churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques," he said.

"That's why Washington needs to draw on them. ... We need an all-hands-on-deck approach."

The federal grants, however, could be used only for nonreligious programs and not for preaching. Discrimination on the basis of religion would be prohibited when it comes to any hiring fueled by those dollars.

Mr. Obama met privately with a handful of local representatives of churches and nonprofit organizations before touring the ministry's center, which relies heavily on local private and nonprofit support for its food and clothing pantry and education programs.

He rejected a suggestion that a proposal like this that would likely appeal to Republicans is an example of him moving to the center to win votes.

"What happens is I get tagged as being on the left and, when I simply describe what have been positions consistently, some of the people act surprised," he said. "There hasn't been substantial shift."

He said his support for faith-based organizations does not translate into support for federal vouchers for religious schools to educate American children. He said such a program would siphon needed funds from public schools.

Swing-vote Appalachian Ohio twice supported Mr. Bush for president while simultaneously sending Democrat Ted Strickland to Congress and then to the governor's mansion. It preferred Hillary Clinton over Mr. Obama during Ohio's March Democratic primary.

"I haven't spent enough time here," Mr. Obama said. "If the people have a chance to compare myself and John McCain and ask, 'Who's going to make the most difference in my life?' I think I'm going to do very well."

Scott Johnston, pastor of Market Street Baptist Church in Zanesville, participated in the meeting with Mr. Obama, pushing for more support for the elderly. A registered Independent, he said he hasn't decided whom he will support on Nov. 4, but he said Mr. Obama scored points by visiting Eastside yesterday.

"I don't see anybody getting excited about John McCain," he said. "Just the fact that [Mr. Obama] would come here -- this is his only stop, I understand -- speaks a lot of him."

While Mr. Obama wanted to focus on faith-based initiatives yesterday, his campaign continued to wrestle with the fallout from comments that supporter Gen. Wesley Clark made Sunday.

"I don't think getting in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to become president," General Clark said.

Mr. Obama's campaign has attempted to distance itself from the comments, and Mr. Obama praised Mr. McCain's military service again yesterday. But he rejected comparisons of the comments with the "swift boat" ads attacking Democrat John Kerry's military record in 2004, and he said the speech he gave Monday in which he praised the presumptive Republican nominee's service was written a couple of months ago and was not a reaction to General Clark's comments.

"The fact that somebody on cable and news shows, Wesley Clark, said in an inartful way something about John McCain, I don't think that's the thing that's keeping Ohioans up at night," he said.

State Sen. Steve Stivers (R., Columbus), a lieutenant colonel in the Ohio Army National Guard and a congressional candidate, challenged General Clark's defense of his comments in subsequent interviews.

"General Clark's comments were outrageous the first time he made them, but even after speaking with the Obama campaign, his attacks continue," he said. "This shameful strategy of attacking John McCain's service is politics at its worst, and the American people deserve better."

The trip marked Mr. Obama's second visit to Ohio in less than two weeks. Last week Mr. McCain campaigned in Cincinnati and Warren, at one point meeting with Ohio evangelical leaders who were a factor in Mr. Bush's narrow 2004 win over Mr. Kerry in the battleground state.

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The Boston Globe
Joseph Williams
07/02/2008

Democrat Barack Obama said yesterday that if elected president he would set aside more than $500 million a year in federal funds for religious organizations to help the disadvantaged, sharply expanding a Bush administration program that has strong support from evangelical Christians.

In Ohio, Obama said his plan would get religious charities more involved in solving the nation's social problems, including feeding the needy, helping poor children learn, and providing job training for those who need work. Unlike Bush's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, Obama said, his plan would not be used to "promote partisan interests" - and it would lay out far more money than Bush's program, which depends largely on a network of grants.

"The challenges we face today, from putting people back to work to improving our schools, from saving our planet to combating HIV/AIDS to ending genocide, are simply too big for government to solve alone," he said. "We need all hands on deck."

Political analysts said Obama's proposal appeared to be part of an attempt to shift to the center and recruit moderate, evangelical Christians and mainstream Catholics, two voting blocs that consistently supported Bush and have embraced Republican candidates.

If Obama succeeds in breaking the GOP's grip on those voters, it would upend a calculation that Bush and Karl Rove, his top strategist, used to great effect in 2000 and 2004. But some liberal critics suggested that Obama was outdoing the president himself by building on Bush's faith-based initiatives, which some groups have said come close to violating First Amendment protections separating church and state. Others noted that Obama's proposal does not completely ban faith organizations from discriminatory hiring practices based on religion, even while receiving federal funds.

"I find it a tad worrisome, to be perfectly honest," said Randall Balmer, professor of religious history at Columbia University. While it could pass muster under the Constitution, he said, any proposal combining religion and federal money carries "the potential for a lot of mischief."

In a statement yesterday, the Rev. Dr. C. Welton Gaddy, a Baptist minister and president of the Interfaith Alliance, said Bush's faith-based initiative "has been a colossal failure." He said Obama's plan - which, like Bush's, allows religious organizations to receive money directly from the government rather than through a separate nonprofit entity - needs "much stronger safeguards" to guarantee separation of church and state and to keep religious organizations from hiring only people of the same beliefs.

In his announcement yesterday, Obama said he firmly believes government and religion should remain separate, "but I don't believe this partnership will endanger that idea" as long as safeguards are in place.

Groups cannot use the money to proselytize those in need, he said, and they cannot refuse to hire someone of a different religion. Federal dollars granted directly to churches, temples, and mosques can only be used on secular programs, Obama said, adding that close monitoring will "ensure that taxpayer dollars only go to those programs that actually work."

The People for the American Way, a liberal public-interest group, issued a statement yesterday applauding Obama for those safeguards, but questioning why he would allow direct government payments to houses of worship, something that "is neither necessary nor appropriate."

If Obama allows it as president, "it would create both a constitutional problem and logistical mess, pitting oversight and accountability for public funds against the autonomy of churches, synagogues, and mosques," the statement said.

Douglas L. Koopman, a political science professor at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich., said Obama's intention to prevent discriminatory hiring will be difficult to enforce. Though the law bans hiring solely on the basis of religious beliefs, it is less clear on whether a fundamentalist Baptist organization, for example, can refuse to hire a candidate because of his or her sexual orientation, or position on abortion rights.

According to his campaign, Obama wants to streamline the process by which faith-based organizations get federal money; maintain the 11 faith-based offices currently embedded in government agencies such as the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Justice; study the effectiveness of both the charity and the government's assistance to it; and create a network between the federal faith-based offices and their local counterparts across the nation.

Obama's campaign did not give a cost for the entire program, saying only that the educational component - involving reading programs and free summer school for 1 million poor children nationwide to address the achievement gap with wealthier children - would cost about $500 million a year. That would be paid for through savings accumulated through more efficient management of surplus government property, holding down spending in the federal travel budget, and streamlining the federal purchasing process, the campaign said.

The White House's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives maintains the 11 regional offices, which help community and religious charities obtain federal grants. A press representative for the office said it does not have a formal budget; it is funded in part by the White House through grants and through budget adjustments from different federal agencies.

Political analysts say Obama's announcement is the latest attempt to broaden his appeal by moving away from the Democratic Party's liberal base as the general election nears.

John Green, a political science professor at the University of Akron in Ohio, said Obama's announcement "does suggest a move toward the center," much the way President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore did when each ran for the presidency.

Yesterday's speech also allowed Obama to talk about his Christian faith, contradicting persistent rumors that he is a Muslim, Green said. And the announcement "does fit into a broader pattern of `values' speeches"' Obama has delivered recently, including Monday's speech on patriotism and an address on the military scheduled for later this week.

Steve Waldman, editor of Beliefnet.com, a news website dedicated to religious issues, was more skeptical in assessing Obama's announcement: "Politically, it's very bold. Substantially, it remains to be seen how dramatic it is." Obama's announcement risks alienating liberals who did not like Bush's faith-based initiatives, Waldman said, but his plan was short on details and funding specifics.

Nevertheless, Obama "basically concluded the biggest problem with Bush's faith-based organization is it didn't go far enough," Waldman said. "Obama said maybe there might have been some problems at the margins, but the biggest problem is it didn't deliver on its promise."

David Kuo, the Washington editor for Beliefnet.com and a former deputy director for Bush's Faith-Based Initiatives office said Obama builds on those initiatives with "a very smart, thoughtful plan" that intensifies the efforts to help the poor. Still, "the poor and faith-based practitioners have heard promises before," said Kuo, who left the administration and wrote a book alleging the Bush administration made empty promises on faith-based initiatives.

"The only question that matters here is, `Can he do this? Will he do this?"' Kuo said. "This is really hard work."

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Chicago Tribune
Mike Dorning
07/02/2008

Courting evangelicals and other religious voters, Barack Obama called Tuesday for an expansion of President George W. Bush's initiative distributing federal aid to church-based groups that provide social services.

Obama promised the faith-based initiative would be central to his administration if he is elected.

"The challenges we face today -- from saving our planet to ending poverty -- are simply too big for government to solve alone. We need an all-hands-on-deck approach," Obama said at a news conference outside a community ministry in Zanesville, Ohio.

The Obama campaign has been targeting evangelical and religious voters, many of whom have shown waning enthusiasm for the Republican Party as they have become disenchanted with the Iraq War. Meanwhile, a younger generation of evangelical leaders has expanded the movement's political agenda from divisive cultural issues to include such concerns as climate change, AIDS, genocide and poverty.

The Illinois senator could gain tremendous political advantage even if he does not win over the group but merely cuts into the commanding leads Republicans held among evangelical voters in Bush's 2004 re-election.

Presumptive Republican nominee John McCain comes to this campaign without the same strong connections to evangelicals as Bush. McCain has a history of strained relations with conservative religious leaders and does not have the life-changing story of personal salvation that helped Bush bond with Christian conservatives.

Early in his Senate career, Obama gave a high-profile speech supporting a greater role for religious faith in political debate, and has cultivated relationships with evangelical leaders. But, amid false rumors he is a Muslim and controversy over incendiary sermons by his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama struggled to win over white religious voters during the primary season.

Ohio, where Obama spoke Tuesday, is a battleground state in which the GOP effort to mobilize religious voters played a key role in Bush's 2004 victory. Evangelical voters are a key constituency in the state's Appalachian region, where Obama announced the initiative.

Still, secular voters play an important role in the Democratic Party. And even as Obama's program won advance praise from a former director of Bush's initiative, a liberal-leaning group that advocates for separation of church and state criticized Obama.

"I am disappointed," said Rev. Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, "that any presidential candidate would want to continue a failed policy of the Bush administration."

Obama promised to establish a President's Council of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships that would help religious groups obtain federal funding to provide social services, such as summer learning programs. He said religious organizations would not be allowed to use taxpayer funds to proselytize and would be prohibited from violating federal civil rights laws in providing services or in hiring staff for government-funded work.

Obama said federal anti-discrimination laws do not cover discrimination based on sexual orientation. But Obama said he believes local laws in some states prohibiting discrimination against gays would apply to faith-based social programs funded with federal money in those states.

Obama criticized Bush's faith-based initiative, a theme of Bush's 2000 campaign, as "underfunded" and too often "used to promote partisan interests." The Illinois senator said he would set up the program to encourage broad dispersion of the funding to include programs run by smaller congregations.

Funds and faith

Some federally funded activities cited by the White House's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives:

Fugitive surrender: In Cleveland, a four-day Fugitive Safe Surrender program resulted in 842 people surrendering to authorities through churches, including 324 individuals wanted for felony crimes.

Military families: In Minnesota, online and printed guides help organizations support families separated by military service.

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The Commercial Appeal (Memphis, TN)
Lindsay Melvin
07/02/2008

Rebecca Foote has seen mothers unable to feed their own children come to her in a panic.

And with the difficulty she has had keeping six food pantries across the city stocked, the executive director of United Methodist Neighborhood Centers is a little panicked herself.

"Memphis probably has more than our fair share of people that need help," she said.

Foote is among a long list of people who would like to see the government direct more funds toward religious charities.

As Sen. Barack Obama attempts to appeal to the social conscience of people of faith, the Democratic presidential candidate unveiled plans on Tuesday to expand government funding to faith-based organizations.

"The fact is, the challenges we face today - from saving our planet to ending poverty - are simply too big for government to solve alone. We need all hands on deck," said Obama, according to a transcript provided by his campaign to the New York Times.

The candidate is proposing a $500 million a year budget for aid to faith-based groups.

During an early morning speech in Zanesville, Ohio, Obama said he would deliver a promise that hasn't been fulfilled during the Bush administration.

Bush's community- and faith-based initiative has been a "photo-op," he said, adding that it has been used to promote partisan interests while shortchanging smaller organizations.

"Anything that will draw more dollars into Memphis, I'm supportive of," said Dr. Scott Morris, director of the Church Health Center of Memphis.

Morris soured on the government program when it was getting off the ground nearly five years ago.

He went to Washington, where he found nonprofit groups looking to secure funding by promising political support.

"It sickened me," he said.

The Church Health Center, which serves uninsured working people, now depends solely on private donations.

Yet if other faith organizations had more resources, it could positively impact his patients' lives, he said.

"If MIFA can provide housing for my patients, which many have substandard living, it would directly affect patients' health," he said.

Burt Waller, executive director of Christ Community Health Services, which has four Memphis locations and one mobile unit, doesn't believe the current program needs any fixing.

Under the Bush faith-based initiative, he said, "Christ Community is viewed as one of the great success stories."

The nonprofit group, which offers physical and spiritual services to low-income residents, gets 10 percent of its budget from state and federal funds.

The organization was recently featured as one of the White House's success stories during a community- and faith-based initiative conference.

"It's put community-based organizations on a more-equal footing," Waller said "If Senator Obama is committed to continuing that approach, I would be very supportive."

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The Columbus Dispatch (Ohio)
Joe Hallett
07/02/2008

Many Appalachian residents are known to be God-fearing and government-loathing, and Sen. Barack Obama pitched for their support yesterday by promising to expand President Bush's faith-based initiatives to fight poverty.

In his first visit to a key swing area of Ohio since effectively wrapping up the Democratic presidential nomination, Obama courted so-called values voters by outlining his plan to get more religious organizations involved in government programs that provide services to impoverished citizens.

In hard economic times and with federal resources stretched, Obama said Washington needs to draw on faith-based organizations to meet social needs.

"The fact is, the challenges we face today, from saving our planet to ending poverty, are simply too big for government to solve alone. We need all hands on deck," he said after touring the Eastside Community Ministry, which provides food, clothing and emergency services to the needy.

"I know there are some who bristle at the notion that faith has no place in the public square. But the fact is, leaders in both parties have recognized the value of a partnership between the White House and faith-based groups."

Badly beaten in the 29-county Appalachian Ohio region in the March 4 primary election by Sen. Hillary Clinton, Obama sought to woo religious voters on the second leg of a tour focused on values and patriotism heading into the Fourth of July.

In Zanesville, Obama proffered his faith-based initiative at a ministry that is the largest pantry in Muskingum County, last year providing groceries to 3,653 people and distributing clothes to 21,000.

As president, Obama said he would create a Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships and empower it to, among other things, oversee $500 million per year he is proposing to provide summer learning to 1 million poor children.

While embracing one of Bush's key programs, Obama said the president's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives never has fulfilled its promise because support for the poor has been consistently underfunded.

Obama made clear that he would put stipulations on religious organizations that receive federal money, including a prohibition on using the money to proselytize and to prevent them from discriminating in hiring or against the people they serve. Taxpayer dollars could be used only on secular programs and initiatives.

In a statement, the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said Bush's faith-based initiative "has been a failure on all counts" and it should be shut down rather than expanded. But Lynn said Obama was correct to attach certain funding prohibitions.

"Obama has promised that he will not support publicly funded proselytism or discrimination in hiring, and that's an important commitment," Lynn said.

Frederick A. Davie Jr., president of Public/Private Ventures, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit company that has worked on faith-based initiatives across the country, attended Obama's event yesterday and praised him for continuing Bush's initiative.

"As we see more and more people who can't find jobs, as we see kids graduating from high school unable to get jobs, it's important that faith-based institutions be there to help these people make the kinds of transitions they can't afford to make without help."

Some Republicans ascribed purely political motivations to Obama's plan.

"This is pandering to the nth degree," said Columbus-based GOP consultant Jeff Longstreth, who directed former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee's Ohio campaign. "I think it's fraudulent and people are going to see right through this stuff. It's like Rush Limbaugh telling a rally in San Francisco that he supports gay rights."

But yesterday, Obama said he came to value the service of faith-based groups after he graduated from law school and worked as a neighborhood organizer in Chicago.

"We're talking about somebody whose very roots in public service are grounded in the work of faith-based organizations on the South Side of Chicago," said Isaac Baker, Obama's Ohio spokesman.

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Coshocton Tribune (Ohio)
Leonard Hayhurst
07/02/2008

Eastside Community Ministry has reached out to the community for 50 years.

Offering a clothing bank, a food pantry, special outreach programs and an emergency relief fund, the ecumenical ministry is the type of faith-based program Senator Barack Obama wants to support.

The Democratic presidential candidate made a stop in Zanesville Tuesday to tout faith-based initiatives -- causes he wants to expand upon if elected president.

"Faith-based groups like Eastside Community Ministry carry an important meaning for me. In a way they are what led me to public service," he said.

Obama said a Catholic group named the Campaign for Human Development helped fund the work he did in Chicago years ago to bolster neighborhoods affected by the closure of a local steel plant.

"I didn't grow up in a particularly religious household, but my experiences in Chicago showed me how faith and values could be an anchor in my life and in the community," he said. "I wouldn't be fulfilling God's will unless I went out and did his work."

Obama said there are many groups trying to do good in communities through faith-based programs, such as Ready for Work that ensures former criminals do not return to a life of crime and Catholic charities that feed the hungry.

"These groups are often made up of people who have come together around a common faith, but they are usually working to help people of all faiths or no faith at all," he said. "I've often said that I believe that change comes not from the top down, but the bottom up and no one is closer to our people than our churches, our temples, our synagogues and our mosques."

Obama was critical of the Bush administration's efforts, saying Bush did not fulfill the promise made eight years ago to establish a new department of faith-based and community initiatives. In fact, he said these groups were often "short changed" by the Bush administration.

"I still believe that it's a good idea to have a partnership between the White House and grass-roots groups, both faith based and secular, but it has to be a real partnership and not a photo op. That's what I will establish when I'm president," he said.

Obama wants to create a council of faith-based and neighborhood partnerships, which would be a critical part of his administration. He said he was still unsure whether this would become a new cabinet position or a governmental group that he would have access to himself.

He believes that a separation of church and state can still exist with this new group and laid down some ground rules for it.

First, any group that accepts a governmental grant cannot discriminate hiring based on religion. Second, federal money that goes to church organizations can only be used on secular programs. He also wants to make it easier for faith-based groups to apply for grants and for them to know more about what is available to them.

"Smaller congregations and those that aren't well connected don't know how to apply for federal dollars or know how to navigate a government Web site to see what grants are available or know how to comply to federal laws and regulations. We rely too much on conferences in Washington and not getting technical assistance to those who need it on the ground," he said.

The group will also help to target and deal with key issues, like education.

"All across America and right here in Zanesville, too many children can't read or perform math at their grade level. A problem that grows worse for low-income students in the summer months and after-school hours," he said.

Obama wants to expand summer programs to not only help educate children, but keep them off the streets.

He also feels that faith-based groups can help with such wide-ranging issues as poverty and AIDS among others.

"We need people of faith on Capitol Hill talking about how these challenges don't just represent a security crisis or a humanitarian crisis, but a morale crisis as well," he said. "We know that faith and values can be a source of strength. That's what it's been in my life and that's what it's been to many Americans."

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Los Angeles Times
Peter Wallsten And Peter Nicholas
07/02/2008

Barack Obama pledged Tuesday to expand a controversial White House program that funnels federal money to religious charities, embracing a core piece of President Bush's legacy as he tries to win over Republican-leaning evangelical voters.

The presumed Democratic presidential nominee said he would make it easier for churches and small community groups to win grants and would spend $500 million to help schools and churches run summer reading programs.

Obama delivered his speech at the Eastside Community Ministry in this key battleground state, home to many of the religious voters who backed Bush. With his proposal, the Illinois senator embraced a theme that has been closely associated with Republicans -- and one that has drawn scorn from many Democrats and civil liberties groups who believe it infringes church-state separation.

"I know there are some who bristle at the notion that faith has a place in the public square," Obama said. "But the fact is, leaders in both parties have recognized the value of a partnership between the White House and faith-based groups."

Obama, who worked for a Roman Catholic group as a community organizer in Chicago in the early 1980s, said the "challenges we face today -- from saving our planet to ending poverty -- are simply too big for government to solve alone."

Mollifying some critics in his party, Obama distanced himself from some controversial aspects of the Bush program.

He signaled he would not fund church groups that make hiring decisions based on an applicant's religion and would make sure federal money was not used to proselytize.

He also echoed critiques from two ex-officials of Bush's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives who had charged that it was exploited for partisan purposes -- to build GOP support in battleground states -- and served as a convenient "photo-op."

Obama argued that the office "never fulfilled its promise." He said he would rename it and ensure that small groups were not short-changed.

Both ex-officials -- former director John J. DiIulio and deputy director David Kuo -- advised Obama on his plan, and praised it Tuesday. But another former director, H. James Towey, dismissed the candidate's criticisms.

"It could be argued that his speech was a photo-op on faith," he said. "I'm not going to judge his motive, but he has to be careful making those kinds of accusations."

And Obama took criticism from unusual quarters: liberal groups that want a Democratic administration to curtail the government's engagement with religious charities.

People For the American Way greeted with alarm Obama's proposal to send federal money to churches, saying it is a "bad idea" and a "tricky business." "It would create both a constitutional problem and logistical mess," the president, Kathryn Kolbert, said, "pitting oversight and accountability for public funds against the autonomy of churches, synagogues and mosques."

Obama's speech comes as his campaign launches what many Democrats say is the most aggressive outreach to religious voters ever by the party's presidential nominee.

The campaign is targeting young and politically moderate evangelicals who are not excited about presumptive GOP nominee John McCain.

One new pro-Obama group, the Matthew 25 Network, run by several Democratic strategists who have pushed the party to court religious voters, began airing an ad Tuesday on Christian radio stations, playing a clip in which Obama recalls becoming a Christian.

"Kneeling beneath that cross on the South Side, I felt that I heard God's spirit beckoning me," Obama says in the ad. "I submitted myself to his will, and dedicated myself to discovering his truth."

In giving Obama another chance to remind voters of his Christianity, Tuesday's announcement carried an added political benefit for a candidate whose religious affiliation has been the subject of rumor and controversy. He quit his church after his longtime pastor made explosive comments, and he has tried to quash false reports that he is a Muslim.

Still, Obama's announcement marked a pivotal moment in the Democratic Party's stance on faith. Though other Democratic presidential candidates, such as Bill Clinton and Al Gore, also have embraced federal funding for faith-based charities, congressional Democrats have led the charge against Bush's initiative.

The Bush White House used the program, and Democratic opposition, to build alliances with influential pastors -- particularly in black and Latino communities -- some of whom would campaign for the president's reelection. Bush often mentioned the initiative in speeches to religious groups, and the White House often held events in battleground states.

Some Democrats now believe their party's opposition to Bush's initiative helped Republicans paint Democratic candidates as hostile to faith and have pushed to be more welcoming to evangelical voters.

"He's definitely taking on the secular wing of his own party," Kuo said. "If the old stereotype was that Republicans don't care about the poor and Democrats don't care about faith, Obama is saying, yes, Democrats care about faith."

McCain, who has struggled to win over skeptical evangelical voters, has expressed some support for faith-based initiatives, and his campaign said Tuesday that he "recognizes their important role in our communities."

"There's many examples of where faith-based organizations have been very successful," McCain said in April. "There are times when they haven't -- so you learn the lessons. But I think the overall experiment has probably been good for America."

Obama advisors said he would more rigorously oversee the program than Bush, whose administration has been criticized for failing to strictly monitor how religious groups have spent government money.

Obama pledged to maintain the 11 federal agency offices that distribute faith-based grants but to encourage close coordination with state and local governments that also have opened faith-based offices.

But Robert Wineburg, a University of North Carolina-Greensboro professor who has written books on the initiative, said he worried about sending more money to small, grass-roots charities.

"No business would send venture capital to shaky little organizations. You have to build them up," he said.

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The New York Times
Jeff Zeleny And Michael Luo
07/02/2008

Senator Barack Obama said Tuesday that if elected president he would expand the delivery of social services through churches and other religious organizations, vowing to achieve a goal he said President Bush had fallen short on during his two terms.

"The challenges we face today -- from saving our planet to ending poverty -- are simply too big for government to solve alone," Mr. Obama said outside a community center here. "We need an all-hands-on-deck approach."

Some Democrats have previously backed similar efforts, but Mr. Bush's version, a centerpiece of his first-term agenda, has been a lightning rod for criticism from those concerned about the separation of church and state and those who argued that Mr. Bush had used it to further a conservative political agenda.

In embracing the same general approach as Mr. Bush, Mr. Obama ran the political risk of alienating those of his supporters who would prefer that government keep its distance from religion.

But Mr. Obama's plan pointedly departed from the Bush administration's stance on one fundamental issue: whether religious organizations that get federal money for social services can take faith into account in their hiring. Mr. Bush has said yes. Mr. Obama said no.

"If you get a federal grant, you can't use that grant money to proselytize to the people you help and you can't discriminate against them -- or against the people you hire -- on the basis of their religion," Mr. Obama said. "Federal dollars that go directly to churches, temples and mosques can only be used on secular programs."

Mr. Obama's position that religious organizations would not be able to consider religion in their hiring for such programs would constitute a deal-breaker for many evangelicals, said several evangelical leaders, who represent a political constituency Mr. Obama has been trying to court.

"For those of who us who believe in protecting the integrity of our religious institutions, this is a fundamental right," said Richard Cizik, vice president for governmental affairs for the National Association of Evangelicals. "He's rolling back the Bush protections. That's extremely disappointing."

Early in his first term, Mr. Bush issued executive orders expressly allowing religion-based groups receiving federal money to consider religion in their employment decisions, although confusion often remains in this area because of conflicting federal, state and local laws.

Martha Minnow, a professor of law at Harvard University who has written about religion-based initiatives and has advised the Obama campaign on the issue, said Mr. Obama would move to "return the law to what it was before the current administration," in other words barring the consideration of religion in hiring decisions for such programs that receive federal financing.

"I don't think there's anything too controversial about that," said. "Any religious organization that does not want to comply with that requirement simply doesn't have to take the money."

But evangelical leaders said not allowing religious groups to hire based on their beliefs would strip them of the very basis for religion-based programs.

"If you can't hire people within your faith community, then you've lost the distinctive that is the reason why faith-based programs exist in the first place," said Richard Land, head of the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention.

The idea of augmenting government delivery of social services through community and religious organizations has won varying degrees of support across the ideological spectrum. Although research on the effectiveness of religion-based organizations remains spotty, Mr. Obama said groups would be regularly evaluated on effectiveness.

Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, who has struggled to overcome wariness from some evangelicals, has stepped up his outreach to evangelicals and is a proponent of religion-based initiatives as well. A McCain campaign spokesman, Brian Rogers, said Mr. McCain "disagrees with Senator Obama that hiring at faith-based groups should be subject to government oversight."

Mr. Obama's plan -- his campaign said it would be the "moral center" of his administration -- was unfurled against a backdrop freighted with electoral ramifications. Mr. Obama is signaling that he wants to make a push among white evangelical Protestants.

By focusing on centrist and more liberal evangelicals, who have been pushing the movement to broaden its agenda beyond traditional social issues, Mr. Obama is hoping to chip away at a margin that has favored Republicans. His campaign selected Ohio to announce the plan, a state where Mr. Bush engaged in a sprawling voter turnout effort among evangelicals.

Mr. Obama's proposal was met with praise from leaders like the Rev. Jim Wallis, a prominent spokesman for more liberal evangelicals. Mr. Wallis applauded the fact that Mr. Obama, as a Democrat, was willing to talk about his Christian faith and "wants a faith-based program that's even better than the Bush program."

Several former Bush administration officials who had a hand in shaping the current policy, including John J. DiIulio Jr., director of Mr. Bush's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in 2001, also applauded Mr. Obama's proposal. Though the program is widely associated with Mr. Bush, similar ideas have been supported by Democrats.

"His plan reminds me of much that was best in both then-Vice President Al Gore's and then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush's respective first speeches on the subject in 1999," Mr. DiIulio said.

But the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, criticized Mr. Obama's support of a program that Mr. Lynn said had undermined civil liberties and civil rights. "I am disappointed that any presidential candidate would want to continue a failed policy of the Bush administration," Mr. Lynn said. "It ought to be shut down, not continued."

In one example of how he would use the approach to carry out a policy goal, Mr. Obama proposed $500 million per year to provide summer education for one million poor children, with a goal of closing the achievement gaps between wealthy students and poorer ones. The campaign did not provide a cost proposal for the full program, but said the educational piece could be financed by reducing the growth in the federal travel budget and streamlining the management of surplus government property.

If elected, Mr. Obama said, he would call for a pre-inauguration review of all executive orders pertaining to the religion-based program, particularly those dealing with hiring. The program would "be central to our White House mission," he said, and would consider elevating the director of his Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships to a cabinet-level post.

As he announced his proposal on Tuesday, standing outside the Eastside Community Ministry in Zanesville, Mr. Obama harked back to his early days as a community organizer in Chicago, where Roman Catholic charities financed his programs.

David Kuo, who was deputy director of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives under Mr. Bush but eventually grew disenchanted and left, said the Obama plan seemed to address some of the shortcomings with the Bush administration's efforts, making, for example, religion-based initiatives part of the domestic policy structure.

Mr. Kuo, who has criticized the Bush effort as getting bogged down in partisan politics, was asked by the Obama campaign to review its proposal.

"I think it is a bold, smart, engaging attempt to use religious organizations to help the poor and to do for the faith community what the Bush administration could not," Mr. Kuo said. "But I'm concerned that his position on hiring rights will bog down this initiative just like Bush's position on the other side did the same thing."

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The New York Sun
Josh Gerstein
07/02/2008

Senator Obama is calling for an expansion of one of President Bush's signature domestic initiatives: a hotly debated program to deliver more federal aid through so-called faith-based groups affiliated with churches and other religious institutions.

"While these groups are often made up of folks who've come together around a common faith, they're usually working to help people of all faiths or of no faith at all and they're particularly well-placed to offer help," Mr. Obama said in remarks prepared for delivery at an appearance yesterday in Zanesville, Ohio. "I believe that change comes not from the top down, but from the bottom up, and few are closer to the people than our churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques."

Mr. Obama's embrace of the faith-based program was seen by many analysts as part of a concerted shift to the political center by the presumptive Democratic nominee, though he denied yesterday that any such shift was under way. He said the idea to solicit more involvement by religious groups had roots in the work of President Clinton and Vice President Gore, as well as Mr. Bush.

A former head of Mr. Bush's faith-based initiative, John DiIulio Jr., lavished praise on Mr. Obama's proposal. "Many good community-serving initiatives can be built, expanded, or sustained on the common ground that Senator Obama has staked out for us here," Mr. DiIulio said.

Early reports from the Associated Press and elsewhere about Mr. Obama's plan triggered a wave of concern in some quarters that he was planning to permit groups to fire and hire on the basis of religion while operating government-funded programs.

"There was a bit of panic around here when the first reports came in," a spokesman for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, Robert Boston, said. However, the panic subsided as it became clear Mr. Obama did not intend to allow religious-based discrimination with taxpayer money. "It's not full-blown like we first thought," Mr. Boston said.

During a news conference following his speech yesterday, Mr. Obama was asked to clarify his stance. "If a church or a synagogue wants to hire using its own money for its own membership, they can obviously hire people of their own faith. That makes perfect sense. If they are getting federal money to run programs that are providing services to the public, then both in the provision of those services and in the hiring they have to abide by" anti-discrimination laws, he said.

Asked about hiring gays in such programs, Mr. Obama noted there is no federal law against sexual-orientation discrimination, but he said religious groups would have to abide by state laws that bar the practice.

In a written statement yesterday afternoon, the executive director of Americans United, the Reverend Barry Lynn, described Mr. Obama's faith-based foray as misguided. "I am disappointed," he said. "This initiative has been a failure on all counts, and it ought to be shut down, not expanded."

However, the church-state separation activist welcomed the presumptive Democratic nominee's talk about enforcing the anti-discrimination rules. "It is imperative that public funds not pay for proselytizing or subsidize discrimination in hiring," Rev. Lynn said. "Obama has promised that he will not support publicly funded proselytism or discrimination in hiring, and that's an important commitment."

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Catholic Online
Editorial, Deacon Keith Fournier
07/02/2008

Obama's announcement he will expand the "Faith Based and Community Initiative" may represent his greatest effort, at least thus far, to reach out to alienated Catholic voters.

CHESAPEAKE, VA (Catholic Online) - In a turn of events which signals the beginning of an aggressive outreach to faith based voters, Senator Barack Obama announced that he not only supports the "Faith Based and Community Initiative",but that he will expand it's reach if he is elected President.

Further, the Democratic candidate indicated that he will support the constitutional right of faith based groups to choose whom they hire and fire based upon the tenets of their deeply held religious convictions.

Many of the Press Reports concerning this stunning announcement have referred to this endorsement of such a significant Policy initiative as a matter of the Democratic candidate for President somehow "reaching out to evangelical voters".

However, this may be much more. It may represent the greatest effort of the Obama campaign, at least thus far, to reach out to Catholic voters.

The candidate has a serious problem with Catholics who accept the clear, infallibly declared, unbroken teaching of the Catholic Church that every procured abortion is the taking of an innocent human life, period!

Though Senator Obama has recently referred to abortion as a serious "moral concern", he has not backed off his unqualified acceptance of the current approach precipitated by the US Supreme Court's decision in Roe v Wade and its progeny, which legalized abortion throughout the entire nine months of pregnancy, for any reason.

That is absolutely unacceptable. Concern for the poor must begin with protecting the lives of those who have no voice, our youngest neighbors in the first home of the whole human race, their mother's womb.

The candidates' highly publicized meeting with thirty Christian leaders several weeks ago did little to alleviate the growing opposition within the Catholic community to his candidacy because of his support of this so called "abortion right".

The subsequent announcement that two social justice oriented evangelical Protestant ministers, Rev. Tony Campolo and Rev. Jim Wallis, will try to persuade the candidate to somehow temper his advocacy on this fundamental human rights issue has not even been mentioned in most Catholic circles.

However, Catholics adamantly refuse to accept the sometimes bigoted argument, too often leveled against all those who are Pro-life, that they are "single issue" voters because they call abortion a fundamental human rights issue.

Rather, they insist, and properly so, that they embrace the entire teaching of the Catholic Church that every human person, from conception to natural death, has a right to life.

That right to life includes the recognition that every human person has that same human dignity at every stage of their life. This understanding includes the recognition that we have obligations in solidarity to care for one another.

In other words, we are "our brother's (and sister's) keeper".

This important announcement from Senator Obama's campaign of his support for the Faith Based and Community Initiative came during a campaign visit to one of the many examples of its success.

Central Presbyterian Church operates a food bank which assists the hungry and a thrift store which clothes the needy.It also sponsors an outreach to at risk youth, helping them to turn their lives around by breaking the destructive cycles and behaviors which so often accompany family brokenness.

All of this good work is done through its non profit Eastside Community Ministry in Zanesville, Ohio. Eastside is one of the many efforts, all over the United States, which are an integral part of the faith based and community initiative's effort to enlist what were so often called the "armies of compassion" in the early years of the Bush administration.

In this recently announced Policy initiative, Catholics should recognize the application of the Social teaching of their Church.

Among the principles found within that teaching are the obligations we have in solidarity for one another and our call to have a "love of preference" for the poor. Finally, the policy demonstrates an application of the principle of subsidiarity, a social ordering principle which affirms that governance is best when it is exercised by the groups closest to those in need.

Faith based and local community associations are an example of the mediating institutions which can and should participate in good governance.

Much of the philosophical framework for this Policy initiative term was advanced by a key Catholic leader in the first term of the Bush Administration, Jim Towey. Mr. Towey served as the Director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives from 2002 to 2006. He is now the President of a Catholic College, Saint Vincent College in Latrobe, Pa.

In an editorial in the Washington Post on June 28, 2008, Towey, who is a Pro- Life and Pro-Poor faithful Catholic Christian, and a Democrat, noted "Since no one has asked the candidates these important questions, I will." He followed this observation with several insightful and important questions to both candidates.

His goal was to draw the candidates out so that voters could discern which one of them would keep the program. We now set those questions forth in full below:

"Will you keep open the 11 faith-based offices that President Bush established in government, including the one in the White House?

These offices play critical roles in helping religious charities fight discrimination. In Sioux Falls, S.D., they helped a Catholic soup kitchen that risked losing federal funding because organizers led a voluntary prayer. Paul Revere's Old North Church couldn't receive a "Save America's Treasures" grant until President Bush's change in policy.

The Seattle Hebrew Academy received disaster relief money to recover from an earthquake after the White House pushed a policy change to ensure that the school was treated the same as any other school. Without these offices, none of this would have happened.

Will you rescind President Bush's executive order mandating equal treatment of faith-based organizations by the federal government?

Previously, religious charities faced discrimination if they had, say, a cross on a wall, an all-Jewish board of directors or a Bible verse on a brochure. When Congress blocked legislation to end such discrimination, federal faith-based offices shepherded 13 regulations through seven agencies that helped faith-based charities compete on a level playing field. What will you do with these regulations and the executive order?

Will you expand the Bush pilot project allowing addicts to choose their own treatment program?

Before George W. Bush's presidency, addicts nationwide were forced to use the same treatment providers even if they had repeatedly failed with them. In states where the new Access to Recovery program is operational, addicts can choose a faith-based approach to recovery. Will you support more programs that allow choice?

Do you support the right of faith-based charities to hire on a religious basis without forfeiting federal funds?

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and a later Supreme Court case permit religious groups to hire on the basis of faith. An Orthodox Jewish organization, after all, could not maintain its identity if it were forced to hire Southern Baptists or atheists.

If these same groups want federal funding to support their good works, however, they face a maze of contradictory rules. In the case of some poverty-fighting programs, Congress prohibits religious hiring; yet with others, such hiring is expressly permitted. This has led to a logjam of social welfare legislation in need of reauthorization. How will you break this impasse?

Will you promote competitiveness so that the best provider of social services -- be it sacred or secular -- prevails?

Those who advocate on behalf of huge government anti-poverty programs often focus on increasing the levels of spending instead of achieving results. Powerful lobbies and resistant congressional committees have thwarted attempts to focus on outcomes. Take Head Start, the government's multibillion-dollar early-childhood initiative.

President Bush tried to build accountability and to tie funding to outcomes rather than follow the well-traveled path of perpetual funding. He lost, and so did many qualified faith-based programs that remain spectators because of the stranglehold that current grantees have on funding; 95 cents of every Head Start dollar goes to secular providers.

Does this seem fair to you? If not, what will you do about it?"

In concluding his editorial, Towey than made a final observation, what should be considered by all Catholics, other Christians, and other people of faith and good will as we proceed into the General Election campaign for the Presidency of the United States:

"Talking about God on the campaign trail might appear faith-friendly, but it is no substitute for articulating a sound policy position on this critical initiative. As our economy frays, this strong new thread in our social safety net must be preserved. The next president needs to get specific."

Catholic Online is committed to engaging both candidates on the issues which matter most during this vital Presidential campaign.

We share Jim Towey's concern.

We want to hear specific policy proposals which will demonstrate each candidates committments to those issues which matter most to Catholics.

Concern for the poor in our midst is not a matter being "liberal" or "conservative" to Catholics, but a matter of being human.

Utilizing the mediating associations in our National self governance,including the faith based and community based mediating associations,is not only an application of the principle of subsidiarity but it is good Public Policy.

Mr. Towey, who has the credibility to ask those questions, has now challenged both candidates.

Senator Barack Obama has responded. We hope to see even more specifics in the days ahead from his campaign. He should be commended for having responded.He is getting specific, at least on these issues concerning the Faith Based and Community Initiative.

We now call on Senator John McCain to do the same.

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06/26/2008

PR Newswire
PR Newswire
06/26/2008

The following are the remarks prepared for delivery by Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey at the White House Office on Faith-Based and Community Initiatives 2008 National Conference:

Good morning. It's a pleasure to join you in celebrating the work of the Faith-Based and Community Initiative. I'd like to thank the President for his leadership on this important issue, and Jay Hein for inviting me to join you.

Seven years ago, the President launched the Faith-Based and Community Initiative. When he did that, he called on each of our agencies to put faith-based and other local community organizations at the center of the government's efforts to respond to human needs. And we have answered that call. Throughout the federal government - and even beyond, because many state and local governments also followed the President's lead - we are working as never before in partnership with faith-based and community organizations, to achieve real results.

Take the Department's efforts to promote rehabilitation in prison and to try to smooth out what is often a rough transition from prison back to free society. Working with faith-based and community organizations, the Department's Federal Bureau of Prisons operates Life Connections, a voluntary faith- and character-based in-prison reentry program in five facilities. An interim study of this program showed that graduates were about 50% less likely to commit acts of serious misconduct in prison.

Similarly, the Administration's Serious and Violent Offender Reentry Initiative has provided more than $100 million to 69 state agencies, all of which work with faith-based and community organizations to assist ex-prisoners in getting jobs, housing, and other services they need to help keep them from re-offending. Preliminary results show that these ex-prisoners have done better on almost every measure, from housing, to employment, to avoiding alcohol and drug abuse.

Or consider our efforts to combat gang violence. Although prosecutions obviously play a large part in the fight against violent crime, prevention does too. Enforcing the law by taking those who terrorize our streets off those streets is important, but our ultimate goal is to keep kids out of gangs in the first place.

Faith-based and community groups are key partners in these efforts. Through our Gang Reduction and Intervention Program and our Comprehensive Anti-Gang Initiative, we have funded large numbers of faith-based and community groups that aim to give kids and their families healthy - and safe - alternatives to gang involvement. The results have been impressive. For example, the Dallas-Fort Worth site reports that, of 900 former gang members and other at-risk youth who participated in its programs in 2007, not one - that's right, not even a single one - committed an offense during that school year. Moreover, their school attendance and family relationships improved during the same period.

I could go on and on, but these examples are enough to make my point: that working with a full range of local groups, including faith-based and community organizations, is often the best way to tackle problems, especially local problems. Programs like these, that build on the existing structures of local organizations, can help tremendously in a lot of what we are trying to do to make peoples' lives better, and to keep them safe.

The results produced by these programs are among the many accomplishments of the Faith-Based and Community Initiative that we appropriately celebrate today. But perhaps the most significant and lasting accomplishment of the Initiative is not the results of any one program, but the mere fact - and there's really nothing "mere" about it at all - that these programs, and others like them, are now welcomed as partners by the government.

As you know, that was not always the case. When the President launched his Faith-Based and Community Initiative in 2001, faith-based organizations faced many and varied obstacles to working with federal agencies. Good faith concerns about entanglement between government and religion led to a situation in which the religious identity of faith-based organizations trying to partner with government often had to be hidden or compromised. In some instances, these organizations were totally excluded from federal programs. Where they were allowed to take part, they were often required to change their religious character or to restrict their religious activities in ways not required by the Constitution.

Of course, religiously affiliated providers were not always excluded, and signs of religion were not always discouraged. But there was a chilling effect, and a lot of confusion. Many organizations doubted that they were eligible to be government partners; and government officials feared that they might be wrongly accused of supporting religion if they were to give a grant or a contract to a faith-based organization.

The President recognized that this meant a lost opportunity to work with some of the best available partners in many communities - the groups who were already established and doing exactly the kind of good work we were trying to support. So he called for a reexamination of why it was that faith-based organizations faced hurdles when they tried to work with federal agencies, and of how we might lower or eliminate those hurdles in a way consistent with the Constitution.

The Department of Justice has played, and will continue to play, a major role in that reexamination. In doing so, we built upon the principles behind Congress's Charitable Choice laws and the Supreme Court's First Amendment jurisprudence: that government must respect the essential character of faith-based providers; that no one needing help may be turned away because of his or her religion and that no one may be forced into religious practices; and that directly-awarded government funds must be spent on social services, not on religion.

Building upon these principles, we helped enact equal treatment regulations in nearly every federal department that offers grants to nonprofit organizations.

We provided guidance on how and when government may enlist faith-based organizations, and what faith-based organizations may do with government funds.

We clarified the statutory rights of faith-based organizations to consider their faith in making hiring decisions, and we made sure these groups knew about their rights.

And we argued strenuously in the courts, including in the Supreme Court, on behalf of these programs and the equal treatment principles that underlie them.

Thanks in part to these efforts, today, as never before, the law guarantees evenhandedness. The watchword in this area is now "neutrality." That means a body of laws and regulations that provide for the equal treatment of faith-based and other community organizations in the awarding of government grants and in participation in government programs.

It means greater freedom for faith-based organizations to be faithful to what they are. Faith-based groups, like other community organizations, can promote common values, provide a sense of community, associate freely, and serve society in accordance with their beliefs. And they can do so free from government interference.

The point is not to elevate faith-based organizations above others or to give them any preferences in the process, simply because of their faith. But neither is it to disregard or disadvantage them simply because of their faith.

Our nation is large and diverse, and our federal government does not by any means have all the answers to every challenge that we face. Sometimes, we must rely on communities, private groups and the American people to provide their own solutions.

Faith-based and community organizations always have had - and always will have - a vital role to play in coming up with those solutions. From the Salvation Army to United Jewish Communities, from Big Brothers Big Sisters to Boys and Girls Clubs of America, our nation has been blessed throughout its history with the guidance and involvement of community organizations, some that were based on principles of faith and some that were not.

Thanks to the President's Initiative, government can now profit from this guidance and involvement as never before.

If a non-profit organization has a good program for fighting gang violence, the Department of Justice should be able to fund it. It should not, and now does not, matter in the slightest if that group has a Catholic priest on its board of directors.

If someone has developed an innovative program to help teach life skills to prison inmates, to help them become productive members of society once they've served their time, it should not, and now does not, matter in the slightest if the person teaching that class wears a Jewish yarmulke or a Muslim kufi.

What should, and now does, matter a great deal is that a program is effective, and that all groups, including faith-based groups, have an equal opportunity to compete.

We as a nation cannot afford - even if some would want to do such a thing - to turn away help, just because it is offered by someone who is motivated by religious faith. We as a government do not have the right to turn away from competing for grants those who fail to meet a religious litmus test.

Work remains to be done, but I am proud of what we have achieved so far. I believe we have gotten closer to the intent of the First Amendment and to the design of the American experiment, in which religious faith is honored but not required; in which religious motivations for service, like humanitarian motivations, are respected; and in which excellent local organizations, both faith-based and secular alike, can be partners with the government.

The reforms we have accomplished are vital for religious freedom, both for organizations that participate and for people who need help, and they have moved us toward our overall goal of better services. We have tried to clear the air, to clarify for faith-based organizations, and also for government officials, what the guidelines are, and where the line is between inappropriate government support for religion and inappropriate discrimination against religion.

This greater clarity has encouraged many faith-based organizations to lend their expertise and services to the government by becoming our partners. And by making it clear to government officials that their mandate is to seek the best providers, these reforms have contributed to the overall goal of ensuring the most effective help for all our citizens.

I thank you for your hard work in advancing the noble goals of the President's Faith-Based and Community Initiative; and for your help in creating the level playing field required by our laws and fundamental principles of fairness.

Thank you very much.

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06/25/2008

Christian Newswire
Christian Newswire
06/25/2008

On the Origins of the President's Faith-Based and Community Initiatives:

During my first campaign for the White House, I was troubled to see so many of our citizens' greatest needs going unmet. Across our country, the hungry, homeless, sick, and suffering begged for deliverance - and too many heard only silence in reply.

The tragedy was that there were good men and women across America who had the desire to help - but not the resources. And because many of them belonged to faith-based organizations, they were often barred from receiving support from the federal government.

So I set about to change this with a new approach called "compassionate conservatism." This approach was compassionate, because it was rooted in a timeless truth: that we ought to love our neighbors as we'd like to be loved ourselves. And this approach was conservative, because it recognized the limits of government: that bureaucracies can put money in people's hands, but they cannot put hope in people's hearts.

On Government Support for Faith-Based and Community Groups:

Putting hope in people's hearts is the mission of our Nation's faith-based and community groups. Groups like yours know that you are only as good as your results. It does not matter if there is a crescent on your group's wall, a rabbi on your group's board, or Christ in your group's name. If your organization puts medicine in people's hands, food in people's mouths, or a roof over people's heads, then you are succeeding - and the government should support your work.

We have helped level the playing field for faith-based groups and other charities - especially small organizations that had struggled to compete for funds in the past. We have educated religious groups about their civil rights. We have made the federal grant-application process more accessible and transparent. We have trained thousands of federal employees to ensure that the government does not discriminate against faith-based organizations. And we have ensured that these groups do not have to give up their religious character to receive taxpayer money.

On the Philosophy Behind the Faith-Based and Community Initiative:

We followed a principle rooted both in our Constitution and the best traditions of our Nation: Government should never fund the teaching of faith, but it should support the good works of the faithful.

On the Impressive Results Faith-Based and Community Groups Have Delivered While Revolutionizing the Way Our Government Confronts Some of Today's Biggest Challenges:

Faith-based and community groups like yours have revolutionized the way our government shelters the homeless. According to the most recent data, this program has helped reduce the number of chronically homeless by nearly 12 percent - getting more than 20,000 Americans off the streets.

Faith-based and community groups like yours have revolutionized the way our government helps Americans break the chains of addiction. So far, Access to Recovery has helped approximately 200,000 addicts along the path toward clean lives - many through faith-based organizations.

Faith-based and community groups have revolutionized the way our government helps the children of prisoners. Through our Mentoring Children of Prisoners program, we have joined with faith-based and community groups to match nearly 90,000 children of prisoners with adults who offer love, guidance, and a positive example.

Faith-based and community groups like yours have also revolutionized the way our government gives prisoners across America a second chance. Nationwide, 44 percent of prisoners are rearrested within one year of their release. Yet among the prisoners you work with through this program, that number is almost three times lower - just 15 percent.

Faith-based and community groups like yours have revolutionized the way our government alleviates suffering and disease around the world - especially on the continent of Africa. Your organizations are vital to our efforts to defeat malaria - a disease which kills one African child every 30 seconds.

On the Important Role Faith-Based Groups Have Played in the Success of the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief:

Your organizations are also vital to our Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. When we launched this program in 2003, about 50,000 people in Sub-Saharan Africa were receiving anti-retroviral treatment for HIV/AIDS. Today, we are releasing the newest PEPFAR results - and they show that we now support treatment for nearly 1.7 million. One of the beautiful things about this initiative is that we are also saving babies. To date, PEPFAR has allowed nearly 200,000 African babies to be born HIV-free.

These new numbers show that our Emergency Plan is a huge success. Much of the credit goes to our partners who carry out PEPFAR's work - nearly a quarter of them faith-based groups.

On Continuing the Progress Made by the Armies of Compassion:

I am grateful to all of you who serve in our armies of compassion - both here in America, and around the world. Because of you, our Nation has made great strides toward fulfilling the noble goals that gave rise to the Faith-Based and Community Initiative. And because of you, I am confident that the progress we have made over the last eight years will continue.

I am confident because this movement is bigger than politics or party. Today, 35 governors - 19 Democrats and 16 Republicans - have established their own faith-based and community initiatives. And more than 70 mayors of both parties have similar programs at the municipal level.

I am confident because this initiative has built a powerful grassroots network. Over the past eight years, we have trained nearly 100,000 social entrepreneurs. Last year alone, we provided more than 19,000 competitive grants to community and faith-based organizations. With this support, we have laid the foundation for an effort that will continue transforming lives long after my time in office.

I am confident because this initiative has tapped into the compassionate spirit of America. Over the past seven years, more of our fellow citizens have discovered that the pursuit of happiness leads to the path of service. Americans have volunteered in record numbers. And of the 60 million people who now give their time to others, more than one-third do so through faith-based groups.

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