By David Gushee
Last week the White House Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships issued its report to the president, culminating a year of efforts in rethinking the relationship between faith groups and the federal government. Their report is a major contribution to our national life.
President George W. Bush established the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in the early days of his presidency. Its primary goal was to create a friendlier federal-government relationship to the thousands of faith-based community organizations addressing deeply entrenched social problems, especially in some of our nation’s most impoverished communities. Cynics suggested that its real goal was to build political relationships with valuable religious constituencies. Other critics were concerned that the entire initiative furthered a trend toward the weakening of federal social services and the romanticizing of privatization.
In my view, the idea that the federal government should make it easier for grassroots social-service organizations to receive federal dollars to do their common-good-advancing work is a good one — at least from the government side. For decades both federal and state governments have subcontracted at least part of their social-service work to religious groups. But the working understanding of church-state boundary lines in relation to the receipt of these dollars for years was either sufficiently strict or sufficiently unclear that many religious non-profits stayed away from these funding possibilities altogether.
President Bush’s initiative softened the understanding of church-state boundary lines in this area and promised enhanced access to funding. Critics, including some who worked in the Bush faith-based office, suggested that the actual funding made available to these faith-based groups fell far short of the promises made. And fighting over the church-state issues was incessant throughout Bush’s term. The question of hiring rights for religious non-profits receiving government funds became (and remains) a flashpoint.
When President Obama took office, he could have chosen simply to eliminate the office altogether. Instead he renamed it, staffed it with new leaders, established a 25-person advisory council, and set that group to work on making recommendations to him in a large number of areas. These include economic recovery and domestic poverty, environment, fatherhood and healthy families, global poverty and development, inter-religious cooperation, and reform of the faith-based office itself. It was this report that was completed last week.
The membership of the advisory council in its first year inevitably reflects the transition in power from the Christian-Right-friendly Bush to Obama’s very different presidency. The council includes nationally known progressive religious leaders such as Sojourners President Jim Wallis, National Council of Churches President Peg Chemberlin and National Baptist Convention president William Shaw. Church-state expert Melissa Rogers, another Baptist all of us can be proud of, also serves. Other Baptists include the courageous former SBC president Frank Page and Otis Moss Jr. Other recognizable evangelical leaders include Noel Castellanos, president of the Christian Community Development Association, Florida mega-pastor Joel Hunter and World Vision head Rich Stearns. I would describe this group as racially and religiously diverse, clustering in the center and center-left of the ideological spectrum, and somewhat heavily represented by Baptists and moderate-to-progressive evangelicals.
Many of the recommendations of the council are highly technical and really should be read in their entirety by interested citizens and people of faith. In my view, some of the most important elements embedded in or suggested by the report are listed below, summarized as I understand them:
- Both government and faith-based organizations seek to advance the common good, and the society as a whole is best served with a range of healthy partnerships between and among these entities.
- Government’s relationships with these kinds of organizations are only sometimes financial; often these are non-financial partnerships toward shared goals. Such partnerships are valuable and raise fewer church-state questions. It is appropriate to build such partnerships.
- Our society is now multi-faith, and if government is going to relate to faith-based groups it must relate to multi-faith, interfaith and even secularist groups rather than solely the traditional Christian and Jewish groups. Anybody effectively addressing human needs gets a place at the table.
- Faith/neighborhood groups are often the single best point of access for many people for the discovery and delivery of a wide range of government services.
- The delivery of government social services through faith-based and neighborhood groups can and should continue, but the government must be more careful and clear in its church-state guidance to these groups. The goal of any funding of these kinds of groups must always and only be the effective delivery of social services.
- Our country (not to mention the world as a whole) remains afflicted by deep social problems and great misery on the part of our poorest citizens. We need effective public efforts, private efforts and private/public partnerships to ameliorate this suffering and address its root causes.