Bill Berkowitz
June 5, 2006

Jim Towey's brave new faith-based world

The head of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives moves on after successfully promoting and expanding the president's religion-based patronage system

"President Bush's faith-based and community initiative is deeply rooted in America's heartland. It's established, and will continue to bear fruit for years to come, and I thank God for President Bush's leadership on an initiative that has faced a steady head wind since Day One." -- Jim Towey

Unlike the sudden resignation of CIA Director Porter Goss on Friday, May 5 – which caught the media by surprise -- the long anticipated replacement of White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan with columnist and the Fox News Channel's Tony Snow, or the recent replacement of Treasury Secretary John Snow with Goldman Sachs chief executive Henry Paulson, when Jim Towey announced his decision to move on, the media barely blinked an eye.

On April 18, 2006 Towey, who served for more than four years as Deputy Assistant to the President and Director of the White House Office of Community and Faith-Based Initiatives, announced that as of July 1, he would become president of Saint Vincent College, a small Catholic school in Latrobe, Pennsylvania.

In announcing his resignation, Towey told reporters that he expected the faith-based program to continue in the future regardless of who may be in the White House: "I think you'll be talking about this for generations. Because we will never help our poor if we don't give them reasons to change, and government can't love and government cannot bond and connect with our poor. They will never have the trust of the poor like a rabbi or a preacher or some of these grass-roots groups that may have no particular faith at all."

That there was a general lack of media interest in Towey's departure may say more about the media than his record.

Towey has unquestionably left his mark: It would not be an understatement to give him credit for helping set the president's then-floundering faith-based initiative back on track.

With Towey at the helm, the president's faith-based initiative has become part of the political landscape: faith-based offices spread to several more Cabinet-level departments; more government money was handed out to faith-based groups -- a generous portion going to minority-run churches; rules and regulations required of faith-based organizations were relaxed; "Targeted Workshop on Faith-Based and Community Initiatives" were organized to bring new faith-based groups on board; more states got involved in developing their own faith-based offices; and executive orders became the main vehicle through which the faith-based initiative has spread itself across the political landscape.

In helping to put all this into motion, Towey may have also taken some significant chunks out of the wall of separation between church and state.

‘Filled with gratitude...'

Unlike his predecessor John DiIulio, and former Towey aide, David Kuo, who were highly critical of the White House's handling of the initiative following their departures, Towey, in a recent conversation with Marvin Olasky, the editor in chief of World magazine, said that he was "filled with gratitude" for having served in the administration.

He also pointed out that he was "saddened by the stranglehold that certain entrenched interests have." Towey "mentioned specifically the National Head Start Association: ‘Groups that get Head Start money will keep it until they go out of business," Olasky reported. "He also mentioned drug treatment block grants that continue to be given whether ‘anyone recovers in the programs or not' and after-school programs. He spoke of ‘really dynamic programs on the local level' developed by local Catholic Charities, but said, ‘I've been disheartened to see how partisan the national organization has been.'"

According to Olasky, Towey pointed out that faith-based organizations were still only getting a very small piece of the pie: Congress has "earmarked hundreds of millions, and faith-based groups only get a tiny percentage," Towey said.

In an interview with Ian Wilhelm of The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Towey said that he expects the faith-based initiative to continue providing federal grants to religious organizations for the provision of social services. Towey told the newspaper that "The wall between church and state is still standing, faith-based groups have been welcomed into the public square, and the poor have benefited from having access to their effective programs." According to Towey, the process has been institutionalized "and will continue to bear fruit for years and years to come."

"I don't believe a successor president can come in and say, let's set the clock back on civil rights and begin discriminating again against faith-based charities," he added.

According to The Chronicle of Philanthropy, "Towey is widely credited with pushing the U.S. Housing and Urban Development Department and other federal agencies to allow more religious groups to tap social-service funds. A survey released by the administration last month [found that] seven federal agencies in the 2005 fiscal year awarded religious groups 2,760 grants --22 percent more than in 2004. Those grants were worth more than $2.1-billion."

In addition, "Towey has pushed state and local authorities to do more to get religious charities involved in providing government-financed social service. So far, 32 governors and 115 mayors have either established offices or appointed a liaison to work with churches and other sectarian organizations, according to the White House."

"His work on behalf of the poor and the sick has improved lives. ... He is a man of great integrity, and I thank him for his service," President Bush said.

"Jim has been very effective administratively," said John Bridgeland, the former director of the White House's USA Freedom Corps who is now a consultant to nonprofit groups. Towey made a "quiet transformation of government."

Waging war against church-state separation

Barry Lynn, the executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State had a different view: "Jim Towey has waged an unrelenting war against church-state separation," the Rev. Lynn said in an AU press release.

"He played a key role in using the ‘faith-based' initiative for improper partisan purposes, and he did little or nothing to see that Americans get the social-service help they need from their government. That's a sad legacy to leave.

"Towey was the Bush administration's point man in trying to roll back civil rights laws barring religious discrimination in hiring in government-funded programs," Lynn continued. "I am pleased that he failed to push that terrible idea through Congress."

During his press conference, Towey also took a swipe at critics of the program, twice calling them "secular extremists," a comment that irritated Holly Holllman of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty.

Hollman told the Associated Baptist Press that she thought that type of "rhetoric is unnecessary." "On several occasions, the BJC voiced its concerns to him and sought ways to work together more constructively," Hollman said.

"Unfortunately, Towey never seemed to recognize that people of faith criticized the initiative precisely because of their faith. The initiative diminishes the role of religion by threatening the independence of houses of worship, funding religious discrimination and blurring the line between church and state that protects religious freedom."

Where's the beef?

One issue that Towey failed to adequately address during his tenure was whether the faith-based initiative was achieving "results," and how those results could be quantified.

Over the years, both President Bush and Towey have cruised about the country making their case for the faith-based initiative by telling and retelling inspiring tales of individual redemption. The administration has yet to produce significant documentation showing that these stories are anything other than delightful anecdotes.

"The studies I've seen show that religious groups perform about the same as secular charities, though evaluating any social-service effort is very difficult," The Chronicle of Philanthropy's Ian Wilhelm said in an e-mail to Media Transparency. "Towey himself complains that secular charities have not successfully documented their results, but religious charities are hard pressed to do the same."

Sheila Suess Kennedy was the principal investigator for, and co-editor of "Charitable Choice: First Results From Three States" (pdf), an in-depth evaluation of the Charitable Choice provisions of the 1996 welfare bill. Compiled from data gathered before Bush became president and launched his faith-based initiative, the study, published in 2003 by Indiana University's Center for Urban Policy and the Environment, was "the only study of which we are aware that actually attempted to measure results empirically," Kennedy told Media Transparency in a recent e-mail.

"There have been and continue to be many ‘case studies,' but what we did --on an admittedly small scale -- was compare results obtained in Indiana by faith-based and secular job-training and placement providers participating in the state's contracting regime. In a nutshell, our findings were that this group of FBOs [Faith-Based Organizations], at least, did not perform as well, even when controlling for size of agency, age and experience, etc," said Kennedy, the co-author with Wolfgang Bielefeld of the upcoming book "Charitable Choice at Work: Faith-Based Partnerships in the States," an in-depth evaluation of Charitable Choice and the Faith-Based Initiative.

"Clients placed by secular and FB [Faith-Based] providers had a statistically equivalent likelihood of being placed in a job, at roughly equivalent pay rates, but clients of secular agencies were more likely to get full-time, rather than part-time, employment, and more likely to receive benefits such as health insurance."

‘The initiative is constitutional' says Towey

During his departure press conference Towey mentioned the word results, but he was referring more to the program's very existence, not its specific accomplishments: "I'll leave this office, after proudly serving here for four years, deeply grateful for the results and accomplishments that we've achieved," he said. "The court has upheld repeatedly the initiative is constitutional."

"It is true, no court has said the initiative taken as a whole is unconstitutional," Chip Lupu, who teaches at George Washington University Law School, told ABP. "But [Towey] knows that, in the cases in the lower courts that are initiative-related, there are five or six -- and they've lost almost every one." Lupu also noted that there are similar lawsuits pending in other federal courts.

While Towey claims that the faith-based initiative is set in stone, his resignation may trigger another round of debate about its efficacy. In addition to the Rev. Barry Lynn raising objections to the faith-based initiative, the Acton Institute's Father Robert Sirico recently suggested that "the departure of Jim Towey ... is a good occasion to reflect on how the Bush administration program has impacted American religious and political culture."

In addition to the possibility of further reflection about the faith-based initiative, the Madison, WI-based Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF - website), has initiated a number of legal actions against the faith-based initiative. In recent weeks, the organization filed two broad-based challenges to the initiative; one targets the Veteran's Administration for mixing religion and medical care, and the other goes after the federal prison system, where a number of faith-based projects are currently underway and more are being proposed.

The president's faith-based initiative "has been going on long enough so that it has unfortunately created legal precedent," Annie Laurie Gaylor, the co-president of FFRF, told me in a recent e-mail. "But we have won nearly every faith-based challenge we have taken, and FFRF has taken more than any other group. When the courts are actually looking at what the money is going for, they are finding it unconstitutional. But it has been extraordinarily hard to get at the source. You win one lawsuit in one state, but you know the same thing is probably going on in 49 other states," Gaylor pointed out.

In the end, "Perhaps Jim Towey's legacy is best expressed by his infamous Freudian slip to ‘level the praying field,' a comment he made in late 2003," Gaylor said.