I
n
the coming year, faith-based organizations will be taking in money
hand over fist. In 2003 alone, the Administration handed out $1.17
billion in grants to religious organizations and, if the president
has his way, individual states will soon be handing over hundreds
of millions of dollars to faith-based organizations.
A
report entitled “The Expanding Administrative Presidency: George
W. Bush and the Faith- Based Initiative” (www.religion andsocialpolicy.org)
issued this past summer by the Rockefeller Institute of Government
in Albany, New York, pointed out that religious organizations have
now become involved in a wide range of “government-encouraged
activities…from building strip malls for economic improvement
to promoting child car seats.” The report also noted that Bush’s
faith-based programs “mark a major shift in the constitutional
separation of church and state.”
Four
years ago, an impressive array of pastors, preachers, rabbis and
community leaders shared the White House platform with President
Bush as he announced the establishment of The White House Office
of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives (www.faithbased- communityinitiatives.org).
Months passed and Congress debated some of the thorny issues surrounding
Bush’s faith-based proposal—including fudging the lines
relating to the separation of church and state, and the propensity
of religious organizations to discriminate in their hiring practices
against those of other religions, or sexual orientation. The president
moved forward, installing faith-based branch offices in a number
of federal agencies. By June 2004, he had added the Department of
Commerce, the Small Business Administration, and the Department
of Veterans Affairs to seven other agencies that had already been
involved with faith- based projects.
Despite
the Administration’s inability to pass a comprehensive faith-based
package through Congress, “Few if any presidents in recent
history have reached as deeply into or as broadly across the government
to implement a presidential initiative administratively,” Rocke-
feller Institute director Richard Nathan said.
During
the 2000 presidential campaign Bush spoke of the ability of faith-based
organizations to transform lives. Armed with a great deal of faith,
but little data, the Bush “told audiences that religious organizations
succeed where others fail ‘because they change hearts, they
convince a person to turn their life over to Christ.’ Whenever
‘my administration sees a responsibility to help people,’
he promised, ‘we will look first to faith-based organizations
that have shown their ability to save and change lives’”
(Amy Sullivan, October 2004
Washington Monthly
).
“Ability
to save and change lives”? Perhaps the most startling revelation
to come out of U.S. District Court Judge John Shabaz’s early
January ruling that federal funding of a prison mentoring program
in Arizona—run by MentorKids USA—violated the First Amendment
prohibition against the promotion of religion, was the lack of monitoring
of faith-based grants by the Department of Health and Human Services,
the federal agency that gave the grant to the group.
The
case against MentorKids USA was so clear-cut that the DHHS had already
withdrawn funding from the program before Judge Shabaz rendered
his ruling. In fact, the Department, “asked Shabaz to dismiss
the suit by the Freedom From Religion Foundation contending it was
moot” because the grant had been withdrawn, the
Capital
Times
of Madison, Wisconsin reported. But by the time the
grant had been cut off, the MentorKids program already had received
$175,000 of the $225,000 three-year grant it had been promised in
2003.
Annie
Laurie Gaylor, from the Freedom From Religion Foundation, said that
a DHSS spokesperson told her, “It was up to watchdog groups…to
monitor the activities of groups getting federal funding.”
That, Gaylor pointed out, essentially means that “the government
has no guidelines in place or desire to monitor these groups.”
In
2002, the Texas Freedom Network Educational Fund looked closely
at Texas’s faith-based initiative, established in 1996 when
Texas, under the leadership of then-Governor George W. Bush, “launched
an aggressive campaign to facilitate the delivery of social services
by faith-based providers.”
“The
Texas Faith-Based Initiative at Five Years: Warning Signs as President
Bush Expands Texas- Style Program to National Level,” a report
covering the first five years of the initiative, found that:
-
Loosening
regulations over faith-based providers has not served the faith
community at large, but has instead provided a refuge for facilities
with a history of regulatory violations, a theological objection
to state oversight, and a higher rate of abuse and neglect -
Loosening regulations
over faith-based providers has endangered people in need and lowered
standards of client health, safety, and quality of care in Texas -
Faith-based
deregulation has allowed physical diseases to go medically untreated -
Regulatory changes
have resulted in preferential treatment of faith-based providers
in government contracting opportunities -
Taxpayer funds
have been co-mingled with church funds and spent on overtly religious
activities -
Clients have
been ordered by the courts to attend unlicensed faith-based providers
After
four years and more than one billion dollars given to faith- based
organizations, are they serving the needs of the poor better than
secular organizations or government-run agencies? Certainly, with
an Administration obsessed with “results” there must be
studies proving the efficacy of its faith- based theories. But there
aren’t; according to Amy Sullivan, few if any such studies
exist. In her
Washington Monthly s
tory entitled “Faith
Without Works”: “After four years, the president’s
faith-based policies have proven to be neither compassionate nor
conservative” (www.washingtonmonthly.com), Sullivan points
out that the Administration has failed to systematically track
and “monitor the effectiveness” of programs run by faith-
based organizations.
“The
policy of funding the work of faith-based organizations has, in
the face of slashed social service budgets, devolved into a
small pork-barrel program that offers token grants to…religious
constituencies…while making almost no effort to monitor their
effectiveness….”
“Results,
results, results,” was Bush’s oft-repeated mantra going
as far back as the 2000 campaign. So where do we stand in terms
of measuring “results?” According to Sullivan, “It
turns out that the Bush administration forgot to require evaluation
of organizations that receive government grants.” An August
2004 study released by the Pew-funded Roundtable on Religion and
Social Welfare Policy found that “while more elaborate scientific
studies are underway, the White House has relied on largely anecdotal
evidence to support the view that faith-based approaches produce
better long-term results.”
Sullivan
concludes, “There is no evidence that faith-based organizations
work better than their secular counterparts; and, in some cases,
they are actually less effective.”
In
one study funded by the Ford Foundation, investigators found that
faith-based job training programs placed only 31 percent of
their clients in full-time employment while the number for
secular organizations was 53 percent. A Texas-based drug program,
often spoken highly of by Bush, Teen Challenge, saw its much ballyhooed
86 percent rehabilitation rate fall apart under examination—the
number doesn’t include those who dropped out of Teen Challenge
and relies on a disturbingly small sample of those graduates
who self-reported whether they had remained sober, significantly
tilting the results.
In
August 2003, Mark Kleinman of
Slate
, the online magazine,
took a close look at Charles Colson’s Prison Fellowship program
called the InnerChange Freedom Initiative, a Bible-centered prison
program. Examining a University of Pennsylvania study that claimed
high success rates for the InnerChange program, Kleinman found that
the InnerChange participants actually did somewhat worse than the
control group and were slightly more apt to be re-arrested and re-imprisoned.
The
Penn study employed “selection bias” or “creaming,”
Kleinman pointed out, allowing InnerChange to ignore participants
that dropped out or were kicked out of the program, or who, for
some other reasons, never finished the program.
Bush
Looks to the States
I
n
his second term Bush is “setting its sights on money
doled out by the states,” for social services, the Associated
Press recently reported. “The goal is to persuade states to
funnel more of the federal money for social service programs that
they administer to ‘faith-based organizations.’”
To
encourage states to participate, the White House has hosted a series
of conferences. Jim Towey, the director of the White House Office
of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives who was also recently appointed
assistant to the president, has met with state leaders, and the
president “has personally lobbied governors,” the AP reported.
“The White House office also is providing states with technical
assistance in setting up their own faith-based offices.” Thus
far some 21 governors—both Democrat and Republican—have
set up their own faith-based offices.
The
White House isn’t alone in tutoring faith-based groups about
how to apply for government grants. The Community & Faith- Based
Grants Institute, an organization run by the Tucson, Arizona-based
Faith-Based Institute (www.faithbasedinstitute.com) is offering
a “video seminar on Faith Based Initiative grant writing [which]
picks up where the free grant writing seminars by the government
leave off.”
The
Institute has lined up an impressive array of former administration
insiders and veterans of various U.S. charities as seminar instructors,
including: Dave Donald- son, the founder and CEO of We Care America
(www.wecare america.org), “an organization that identifies
faith-based models and works to strengthen and multiply them to
help those in need. Donaldson works closely with the White House
Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives to educate and engage
the Christian community on the Faith-Based Initiative”; Michael
McCarthy, the manager of The Center for Capacity Development (www.centerforcapacity.org),
“a fee-for-service division of The WorkPlace, Inc., Southwestern
Connecticut’s Regional Workforce Development Board”; Amy
Sher- man, a Senior Fellow, Hudson Institute’s Welfare
Policy Center and the founder and former executive director of Charlottesville
Abundant Life Ministries, “a holistic, cross-cultural, whole-family,
church-based outreach in an urban neighborhood of approximately
380 lower-income, single-parent families”; and Dr. Stanley
Carlson- Thies, the Director of the Civitas Program in Faith in
Public Affairs, The Center for Public Justice (www.cpjustice. org) and
former OFBCI staff member.
Jim
Towey sees a bright future for faith-based organizations to shoulder
a larger part of the load in providing for people in need. “We’re
on the sunrise side of the mountain,” he proclaimed.
As
poverty deepens at home, the president’s faith-based initiative,
built on faith, fabrications, and fantasy, is now heading toward
a state near you.
Bill Berkowitz
is a freelance writer covering conservative movements.
