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Faith initiative may be revised

“WE’RE POSTPONING,” said Don Eberly, deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. “We’re not ready to send our own bill up.” Eberly acknowledged that the proposal “may need to be corrected in some areas,” particularly the interplay between religious programs and government funding.

CHORUS OF DOUBTS
The White House expected church-state separation groups to object to the program. But it didn’t expect a chorus of doubts from religious conservatives such as Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Richard Land, Michael Horowitz and even Marvin Olasky, one of the program’s early architects. They worry that churches would be corrupted by government regulations or that objectionable sects would be rewarded.
President Bush, in an interview Friday, expressed confidence in the program, a cornerstone of his “compassionate conservatism” that once seemed to be an innocuous program meant to boost charitable works.
Some people “are worried that once government gets in their lives, government will force a change in their religion,” he said. “There are some who worry about, once government gets involved, government will force religion on people. And I am mindful of those concerns, and our policy will understand that. We’ll fashion a policy—that we have already fashioned—that will, I believe, answer those critics.”


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What Bush calls his faith-based initiative is a much broader program that includes noncontroversial provisions that will likely be implemented quickly and quietly. A proposal to expand the charitable tax deduction to those who don’t itemize has almost no opposition; Independent Sector, an association of nonprofits, said that could mean a $14 billion, or 11 percent, annual increase in charitable giving.
The administration’s budget blueprint also contains a provision to let states use surplus welfare funds to promote a new tax credit for charitable donations—also without controversy.

‘MAY GOD BLESS YOU’
Bush’s proposed “Compassion Capital Fund” for public-private partnerships was part of his address to Congress. Another key element of the program is Bush’s installation of adviser Stephen Goldsmith atop the AmeriCorps national service program to expand those efforts and recruit more religious volunteers.
Also, Bush officials can achieve much of the office’s mission—reducing regulations that hamstring religious charities—without approval from Congress.
“Federal agencies are already in the process of becoming more responsive,” Eberly said. “That is the muscle on the bone, the major policy initiative.”
The White House office sets the tone. The message tape for after-hours calls provides the business hours and then says, “May God bless you, and have a nice day.”
The major argument is about a law passed in 1996 as part of welfare reform and signed by President Bill Clinton. Bush isn’t proposing changing what is known as the charitable choice provision—which lets religious charities compete for government welfare dollars—but merely wants to expand its reach to other programs.


Instead of limiting charitable choice to a few programs in the Department of Health and Human Services, Bush would expand the provision to allow religious charities to compete for more than 100 programs in the departments of labor (job training, for example), justice (community policing), education (after-school programs) and housing and urban development.
It is this proposal that faces serious obstacles. “My sense is that it’s not dead but that they are going to have to think very carefully about the way forward,” said Bill Galston, a University of Maryland professor and former policy adviser to Clinton.
Marshall Wittmann, a former Christian Coalition official now with the Hudson Institute, concurred. “It has the president’s blessing, so it’s not going to collapse,” he said. “But the program may be trimmed back significantly.”
In the latest setback to the effort, Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), who had been a backer of the initiative, said the administration should delay the program until it can figure out how to avoid violating civil rights. Eberly and others argue that much of the conservative opposition is “friendly criticism” that, with some minor changes in the proposal, could be silenced.’

PUBLIC FEUD
But instead of wooing conservatives, the White House has been feuding with them. John J. DiIulio Jr., the Bush official in charge of the program, last week lashed out at “predominantly white, exurban evangelical” leaders for their lack of interest in urban problems, saying their objections “would rankle less if they were backed by real human and financial help.”
As president of the Southern Baptists’ Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, Land is one of the nation’s leading religious conservatives. He retorted: “It would rankle less if he wasn’t so ignorant about us and didn’t try to stereotype us.”
Much of the controversy is over the requirement that programs segregate their religious and service messages; if such groups require religious conversion, they wouldn’t be eligible.
Olasky, a Bush adviser who helped formulate “compassionate conservatism,” complained that under Bush’s guidelines, some of the expressly religious programs that the president has pointedly named in campaign appearances as deserving of government support, especially the anti-addiction program “Teen Challenge,” would not be eligible for a government grant.
“If the federal government puts out the welcome mat for some religious groups and tells others to ‘opt out,’ it is preferring one religious belief over another,” Olasky said. “This is exactly the type of religious discrimination that the First Amendment is designed to prevent.”
But any move to please the likes of Olasky would likely produce more outcry on the left. There, the criticism focuses on the concerns that awarding grants to religious groups will violate the separation of church and state, and that tax money will be used to finance programs allowed to discriminate on the basis of religion in hiring practices. Even Lieberman has joined that argument.
Liberal critics feel strengthened. “This is a program that seems to be developing more and more problems the more you think about it,” said Barry Lynn of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Rep. Robert C. “Bobby” Scott (D-Va.) said the proposal “creates new holes in our civil rights laws and would allow religious bigotry in hiring to be practiced with the use of federal funds.”
Supporters are concerned about the opposition. “They could very well lock up all the Democrats in the Senate with this so-called hiring discrimination argument,” said Nathan Diament, who directs public policy for the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations, which supports the plan.
A number of conservative activists are proposing alternatives in an attempt to avoid church-state collisions. Robert Sirico of the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty in Grand Rapids, Mich., proposed, for example, a tax deduction or credit as an incentive for doctors, nurses, lawyers and other professionals who volunteer work time to helping the poor.
Along similar lines, Robert Woodson, who has been active with community-based service programs around the nation, said a change in the law authorizing or requiring private insurance providers to pay for qualified social services given by church agencies would be a way to channel cash to many programs in poor areas.
The most promising alternative, many involved in the debate say, is the notion of vouchers, which allow government funds to be used for a religious purpose but make sure the individual recipient, not the government, would be choosing the religious option. An addict, for example, could redeem a treatment voucher at a church program or a government program.
The idea still is opposed by some such as Lynn, who calls it “a transfer of money to a religious mission,” but provokes far less anger than the direct-grant idea.
“It is a way out and one that seems to be win-win,” Eberly said. “If this becomes problematic, vouchers is certainly an option we’d consider.”
Bush, in the interview, embraced the idea of “social vouchers” as one way to fund religious programs without as many of the church-state complications inherent in government grants.
“There’s a lot of concern about proselytization and that we should not use taxpayers’ money to fund groups that proselytize,” Bush said. “My attitude is, you fund an individual.”

© 2001 The Washington Post Company