Regular html version with links

Phil Wilayto
March 10, 2001

Milwaukee Genesis

Where George W. Bush's "Faith-Based" initiative really comes from

Just nine days after being sworn in as president, George W. Bush announced the establishment of a new White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, which opened for business on February 20, 2001. The stated goal of the new office is to help religious groups receive government funds and contracts to deliver social services, especially to the very poor.

"Real change happens street by street, heart by heart, one soul, one conscience at a time," Bush earnestly explained the following day, speaking outside a religious-based community program in Washington, D.C. He described a legislative proposal that includes a variety of tax credits and deductions for those contributing to religious charities. The legislation would also create a fund that would match private dollars with federal money to provide technical assistance to faith-based and community charities.

Joining Bush at the photo op was Sen. Joseph Lieberman, the recent vice presidential candidate of the Democratic Party, ho said he and Bush were of "like minds" concerning the goals of the new initiative. Lieberman's erstwhile running mate, Al Gore, had also called for a more active role for religious groups in delivering federally funded social services, and House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt (D-MO) also indicated interest in Bush's proposals.

While most criticism of Bush's initiative has focused on threats to the constitutional separation of church and state, the problems with this program go far beyond that, and include the increasing privatization of government services, deregulation of the delivery of social services, weakening of public sector unions and the development of a layer of hand-picked "leaders" in poor communities answerable not to the people they serve, but to the government and conservative foundations that provide their funding.

John Ashcroft's "Charitable Choice" Provision Opened the Door

For many years, churches and church organizations have received government contracts to provide services like food, foster care and drug programs. Most of these contracts were channeled through separate non-profit agencies which were supposed to refrain from trying to proselytize their "clients." The door to the direct funding of religious groups was opened wide with the passage of the 1996 welfare reform act, which contained a section called "Charitable Choice," giving religious groups the right to present their religious beliefs along with their services. The New York Times reported that "Charitable Choice... granted religious groups that contract with the government the right to maintain their religious identities, symbols and philosophies and to choose only staff who agree with their religious beliefs." In other words, providers were free to discriminate against job applicants who didn't share their views.

Former Missouri senator John Ashcroft, the pro-Confederacy conservative religious zealot who is now the nation's top law enforcement officer, drafted the Charitable Choice provision. Like so many in the Charitable Choice business, Ashcroft has close ties to the conservative philanthropies that sponsor most Republican ideologues. In November of 1999 he was brought to Milwaukee, home of the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the nation's number one funder of conservative advocacy and action organizations, to be the main speaker at a conference they had sponsored on government funding of faith-based groups.

To head up his new Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, Bush chose University of Pennsylvania political science professor John J. DiIulio, Jr., charitably described in the New York Times as "a widely published expert on juvenile crime." DiIulio is a fellow at both the conservative Manhattan Institute and the Brookings Institution. According to MediaTransparency.org's grants database, between January of 1988 and August of 1996 DiIulio received five grants totaling $277,000 from the conservative John M. Olin and Bradley foundations, plus a share of another $400,000 grant.

DiIulio, who describes himself as a "New Democrat," had been a strong advocate of increased prison construction in the early 1990s. His efforts are credited with influencing the 1994 crime bill, which provided millions of dollars for prison construction. His 1996 book "Body Count," about the nation's fight against crime, was co-written with William J. Bennett, the former education secretary and drug czar and co-founder of Empower America. Bennett, who wears more hats than Bartholomew Cubbins, has received more than a million dollars from the Bradley, Olin and Scaife foundations since 1990. On a recent appearance on Meet The Press, Bennett was alternately described as a "Republican Activist" and the head of "Empower America," a tax-exempt charity.

In his book DiIulio predicted that children and teenagers - "Superpredators" - would soon carry out a new and brutal crime wave. His dire warning of course never materialized, but both Democrats and Republicans seized on DiIulio's predictions to justify their own wave of brutal legislation, including the trying of children as adults, harsh new sentences for juvenile offenders and the massive expansion of juvenile prisons, all of which contributed to the doubling of the nation's prison population.

Bush has also created a national advisory board for his faith-based initiative, to be headed by former prosecutor and Indianapolis mayor Stephen Goldsmith. Goldsmith has been closely associated with the Indianapolis-based Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank that played a leading role in the development of Wisconsin's welfare reform program called W-2. Hudson, whose so-called experts are pervasive in the mass media, has received at least $9 million from the conservative philanthropies since 1987.

During his tenure as mayor, Goldsmith, according to the New York Times, "privatized everything from golf course construction to sewage treatment and showed an interest in revitalizing long-neglected inner-city neighborhoods." That "revitalization" (read "gentrification") actually resulted in the widespread dispersal of the city's Black community and its subsequent loss of any real political power.

Goldsmith will also oversee tens of thousands of Americorps volunteers, whom Bush wants re-directed, as part of the faith-based funding initiative, to work on issues like literacy and after-school care. Don't be surprised if those same volunteers are asked to now bring a bible to work, as last year Goldsmith "suggested that a homeless shelter receiving federal funds should not be prevented from asking recipients to pray once a day."

What's Wrong with Charitable Choice?

The government funding of "faith-based" social services has actually long been a goal of neo-conservative strategists, who see privatization and deregulation as the way to assert laissez-faire capitalism, free of any restraints on profit making.

But faith-based organizations cannot replace the massive government welfare programs that provide some measure of protection against the savage vicissitudes of captialism.

By promoting the idea that private groups best carry out social service, faith-based funding undermines the principle that government has any obligation to "promote the general welfare." It replaces the concept of entitlement - of the right to government services - with the pre-industrial notion of religious charity, leaving the government free to concentrate on its "proper" functions of protecting corporate interests at home and abroad -- in other words, the repressive functions of the police and the military. Forgotten in all this is the fact that government social programs sprang up precisely because private charity had failed miserably at providing a rudimentary social safety net.

And the mere fact that a group is religious is no guarantee it has the interests of poor people at heart. In recent years numerous such organizations have been accused of fraud, mistreatment of clients and the misuse of tax dollars.

An attractive aspect of "faith-based" initiatives for conservatives is its concomitant affect of weakening public sector unions by transferring the delivery of social services from government agencies to sectarian institutions. The result is the large-scale destruction of good-paying jobs, since the largely non-union religious employers are notorious for their low wages and scant benefits. Many workers who stand to lose in this transition are women and people of color.

Under "Charitable Choice" religious groups can also claim exemption from government licensing and performance standards, and faith-based daycare centers have already claimed exemption from health and safety laws. A wide range of groups also claim the right to refuse to hire lesbians and gays or others who may disagree with their views.

Finally, it will be the conservative Bush administration deciding which faith-based groups receive contracts, thus building up a layer of "leaders" beholden to it for their livelihood - a patronage system promoting the spread of socially conservative (Republican) values to captive audiences in poor communities.

For example: Before the presidential primary in New Hampshire, George W. Bush had indicated a willingness to work with the Nation of Islam (NOI), which operates one of the largest and most successful rehabilitation programs for prisoners. Later - a week before the important New York primary - Bush sharply reversed himself, condemning the NOI as a "hate" organization. While it was never an organization that advocated the suppression of another racial group, the fact is that in recent years the Nation of Islam has shown an increasing willingness to work with all races, including whites, to address issues of poverty and racism. It seemed clear that Bush was excluding a particular religious group for purely political reasons

There are also indications that accepting this new funding comes with some political strings.

A few years ago the Bradley Foundation funded a conference in Milwaukee on the issue of faith-based funding. One of the keys speakers Robert Woodson, president of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise. Woodson, an African American who is generally presented as a community leader, is almost entirely funded by Bradley. Based in Washington, D.C., Woodson had recently travelled to Hartford, Conn. at the request of that city's chief of police to denounce local activists protesting the police shooting of a Black teenager under suspicious circumstances.

"You don't want to get involved in those kinds of protests," Woodson warned the mostly Black ministers in the audience. "That's not what you want to be doing!"

Who will stop this dangerous initiative? Not the Democrats. They couldn't even stop the outright theft of the presidential election by the Republican-controlled Supreme Court. Whatever the eventual outcome of Bush's plan to smash the wall between church and state, the signs do not bode well for the usual victims of neo-conservative policies: women, children, and people of color.