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Article Excerpt
Critics of President George W. Bush's faith-based initiative (1) often claimed that it was not a serious public policy effort, but rather a political ploy aimed at pleasing the Republican white evangelical "base" and poaching African-American and Hispanic pastors and voters from the Democratic Party. However, even casual observers should have known better. If the initiative was just about politics, why did some thirty-six states, led by both Democrats and Republicans, create their own initiatives, maintaining them even when state leadership changed from one party to the other? (2) Why did the Pew Charitable Trusts invest in an eight-year project, the Roundtable on Religion and Social Welfare Policy, to track the initiative's goals, outcomes, and legal reforms? If the initiative was mere low politics, why did it spark so many books, journal and law review articles, and dissertations? (3)
Any doubts that the Bush initiative was a serious policy should have been finally dispelled on July 1, 2008, when Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama proclaimed that he would expand and improve the initiative; (4) or when, during the transition period, he mandated a serious review of the initiative and its administrative apparatus; or when, soon after becoming President, he announced the formation of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, his version of the Bush faith-based office, and appointed Joshua DuBois to head the new office. (5) Expanding and improving, reviewing and evaluating, new leadership and a renamed effort: There must have been a great deal of substance to the Bush faith-based initiative for Obama to take these actions.
But what was that substance? What did the Bush initiative aim to achieve and what is its legacy?
I. REENGINEERING GOVERNMENT
When evaluating the initiative, the focus should not be on whether, or how much, federal money flowed to faith-based organizations during the Bush Administration. The key question should concern what resulted from the spending. Unfortunately, outcome evidence is scarce, as it is uniformly in social services. It is even difficult to measure the effect of the initiative on the proportion of providers that are faith-based. (6) Extensive government collaboration with religiously affiliated social-service organizations was already decades old at the start of the initiative, and statistics on the subject, both older and more recent, are unreliable. Faith-based applicants and grantees are not required to identify themselves as such and, in any case, most federal social service funds go to state and local agencies before being awarded to private groups. Those agencies need not report back to the federal government in detail. In addition, while much of the Bush initiative focused on the rules of government collaboration with faith-based organizations--rules which can serve either to encourage or discourage faith-based participation (7)--an evaluation centered on changes to these rules is too narrow.
After all the key legislative step in creating a level playing field for faith-based providers came--as part of what this Essay will call the first version of the faith-based initiative--during the Clinton Administration: the addition of Charitable Choice provisions to four federal programs. (8) Even before that, at various times the federal government had carefully crafted its funding rules so that faith-based organizations could be full participants. A notable example is a 1990 child care law that uses vouchers or certificates to enable families to choose faith-based child care programs. (9) Also notable are longstanding policies of U.S. overseas development, which are designed to accommodate the many religious organizations that have been key government partners in that work. (10)
It is more illuminating to regard the Bush faith-based initiative as a determined and sweeping reframing of the relationship between government and civil society. As President Bush put it at the start of his Administration, there was to be a "new attitude" on the part of the federal government "to honor and not restrict faith-based and community initiatives, to accept rather than dismiss such programs, and to empower rather than ignore them." (11) This amounted, he said, to "a new role" for the government: It would be the "supporter, enabler, catalyst and collaborator" of these organizations. (12)
This campaign to reframe the relationship between government and civil society in the area of human services came in three forms: stressing the importance of civil society institutions in responding to social needs, modifying, as noted above, the rules governing government collaboration with the religious organizations that are such an important part of civil society, and giving greater prominence to the role of religious organizations in serving the common good.
A. Highlighting the Vital Social-Service Role of Civil Society Institutions
Recall Tocqueville (13) or the encouragement given to nonprofits by U.S. regulations and tax law, (14) and it is obvious that charities, broadly understood, have always had a central place in the American response to social need and community development. Yet, through the twentieth century, with one big boost from the Great Depression and the New Deal response and another from President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and War on Poverty, the emphasis shifted more and more to government, and especially the federal government, at the expense of civil society. (15) And although the expanding social services after the mid-1960s were typically delivered by private charities, including religiously affiliated groups, government had the upper hand: These private organizations were carrying out government plans. (16)
The Bush Administration took steps to change this relationship. President Bush pressed for changes in government practice, notably at the Department of Homeland Security, to coordinate more closely federal efforts with private action, for example, in disaster preparedness and response. (17) He spoke often about how extensively troubled families, poor communities, and places devastated by disaster depend on the freely...
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