Both McCain and Obama Favor Expanding Faith-Based Initiatives

September 29, 2008

Some version of President Bush's faith-based initiative -- which sought to expand opportunities for faith-based groups to partner with governments in the delivery of social services -- is likely to continue no matter who wins the 2008 presidential election. On July 1, 2008, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama announced his support for partnerships "between the White House and grassroots groups, both faith-based and secular" and unveiled his plans for an expanded program if he is elected president. Republican presidential candidate John McCain also has expressed his support for faith-based partnerships and has stated he "would continue along the model of" the current initiative should he be elected president. But how might they do that? The Pew Forum turned to two experts for answers.

In the following excerpt, ellipses are omitted to improve readability. Read the full transcript at pewforum.org.

Interviewer:
Stephanie C. Boddie, Senior Research Fellow in Religion & Social Welfare, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life

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Q&A With John DiIulio Jr. About Obama's Plans
"Sen. Obama wants to foster interfaith, ecumenical, religious-secular and public-private partnerships with faith-based and other nonprofit organizations that constitutionally, compassionately and cost-effectively supply social services to the needy and the neglected."

John J. DiIulio Jr., Frederic Fox Leadership Professor of Politics, Religion and Civil Society, University of Pennsylvania was the first director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives (2001) and is the author of Godly Republic: A Centrist Blueprint for America's Faith-Based Future (2007). He works with numerous faith-based organizations that supply social services to the poor in Philadelphia and other cities.

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In July 2008, Sen. Obama announced his plan to establish a new, "reinvigorated" President's Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. "The new name will reflect a new commitment," Obama said. "This Council will not just be another name on the White House organization chart -- it will be a critical part of my administration." What exactly is his administration likely to do to foster government partnerships with faith-based organizations?

Obama's proposed Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships is well-named. Sen. Obama wants to foster interfaith, ecumenical, religious-secular and public-private partnerships with faith-based and other nonprofit organizations that constitutionally, compassionately and cost-effectively supply social services to the needy and the neglected. He is dedicated to assisting sacred places that serve civic purposes, but he has a broader vision of religion and public life in 21st century America. It is a principled and pluralistic vision that extends to lending diverse religious leaders and faith communities a real ear in the White House.

That, I believe, is what Obama meant in July when he stated that the council would be a "moral center" of his administration, and not only regarding government support for faith-based and neighborhood partnerships that dispense social services. Religious groups are the largest segment of the nation's trillion-dollar tax-exempt sector, but how diverse religious leaders understand issues from international aid to immigration reform, from environmental protection to health care, does not register so routinely in the corridors of government.

As Sen. Obama explained in his 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope, he certainly does not believe that religion instantly begets bipartisanship or always serves as a civic tonic at home or abroad. Still, his overarching conviction is that religion should have a respected role in the public square, including in the White House, and that faith-based organizations that are willing to work in tandem with each other, with secular nonprofits and with government in order to achieve the common good should be embraced as partners by all concerned.

This conviction, and hence his plan for the council, flows from his own faith life as a committed Christian in the Protestant tradition, from his years spent teaching constitutional law and wrestling thoughtfully with First Amendment church-state issues and from his own experiences working with model community-serving religious organizations like Catholic Charities.

Most impressive to me, the council plan reflects a balanced, pragmatic understanding regarding how much civic good can yet be accomplished by having government at all levels help volunteer-driven religious nonprofits that selflessly supply myriad social services to all, including their own needy neighbors: food pantries, drug and alcohol prevention programs, job counseling and placement centers, homeless shelters, mentoring programs for children and teenagers, health screening programs, anti-violence programs and scores more.

As Sen. Obama made plain in July, the council would follow three principles: First, if you get a federal grant, you cannot proselytize. Second, you can only use federal dollars on secular programs. And third, they will ensure that taxpayer dollars go only to those programs that actually work. That lines up rather well with my own views and the speech I gave back in March 2001 to the National Association of Evangelicals. So I say, Amen.

[R]ather than just episodic presidential visits to faith-based programs, White House photo-op meetings with supportive religious leaders, one-shot "training conferences" in selected cities or generic information on federal agency websites, the council is to work closely, consistently and for real with state and local governments, with larger religious nonprofits and with colleges and universities, to establish well-staffed, community-anchored "train the trainers" centers that can provide tailored information, timely technical assistance and significant capacity-building support to all, including politically unconnected grassroots religious leaders and groups that wish to apply for federal social service grants or contracts.

The Obama administration will likely sustain funding for President Bush's worthy HIV/AIDS initiative, but it will also foster fresh domestic faith-based partnerships without forgetting the funding and without over-promising. For example, I doubt that you will hear the council carp about faith-based organizations being marginalized in carrying out federally funded preschool programs while federal funding for programs like Head Start shrinks, as it did after 2001, by almost a billion dollars. I doubt that you'll hear a call for a greater role for faith-based groups in delivering health care to needy kids while per capita federal funding for low-income children's health insurance programs is cut as it was in 2007. I doubt that you'll hear a "million mentors a year" pledge that gets progressively scaled back and ends up supporting only a grand total of barely a tenth that number over five years.

Instead, among the first fully funded Obama faith-based initiatives will be a $500 million per year program to provide summer learning for one million low-income children. The money for this initiative is to come from cost-saving changes in how federal properties are managed, cuts in federal travel budgets and tweaks to the federal procurement processes. Other possible initiatives might focus on prisoners, ex-prisoners and their families, on welfare-to-work programs and on crime prevention.

Sen. Obama has said that in order to receive federal funds under his program, faith-based organizations "must comply with federal anti-discrimination laws" and "cannot discriminate with respect to hiring for government-funded social service programs." Some regard this as taking the "faith" out of faith-based and community initiatives. How do you respond to such criticisms?

We await, and I would welcome, a more forthright, no-qualifiers statement on this subject from the campaign, but I read Sen. Obama's words to date on religious hiring rights to support the constitutional, statutory and administrative status quo, and to support first-order principles of federalism and states' rights against, on the one side, those who would roll back well-settled religious hiring rights, and, on the other side, against those who would radically expand religious hiring rights into a carte blanche to use tax dollars strictly for same-religion hires.

Let's be clear. Section 702 of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 exempts religious nonprofits from the prohibition against discrimination in employment on the basis of religion. Functioning in their capacities as houses of worship supported by private funds or donors, this exemption is absolute. But Section 702 also protects their right, "pervasively sectarian" or not, to take religion into account in hiring even in their various social service provision operations that are funded with tax dollars. As a federal court ruled in 2006, it is no prima facie violation of the Establishment Clause to take tax dollars without secularizing personnel ranks.

However, under no circumstances is it constitutional or consistent with any federal statute for any other religious nonprofit organization to use tax dollars to hire and pay only co-religionists who profess and practice its particular beliefs and tenets unto tax-paid work that is or amounts to proselytizing, worship (not social) services or religious instruction. All tax-funded work must be and be deemed purely secular in nature.

The so-called Charitable Choice provision that President Clinton approved as Section 104 of the 1996 federal welfare reform law underlined that well-settled limitation: "No [public] funds provided directly to institutions or organizations to provide services or administer programs ... shall be [used] for sectarian worship, instruction, or proselytization." At the same time, however, the provision expanded religious nonprofits' rights to use religious properties for tax-supported social service delivery purposes without having to remove religious icons, change internal governance or otherwise secularize their organizations.

Without having to file forms required from all other nonprofits, religious nonprofits can own tax-exempt property, receive tax-deductible donations and be eligible for many different government grants and contracts -- federal, state and local. Even without any public funding, few faith-based organizations that serve the urban poor discriminate on religious grounds against beneficiaries, volunteers and paid staff in their social services programs. Of necessity, they take in whoever is in need and accept help from anybody willing to help. The original justification for faith-based initiatives, from the first Charitable Choice provision through the first year of the Bush office that I directed, was to empower these urban religious groups to serve their own needy neighbors.

In 2001, some religious conservatives who I had watched applaud Clinton-era Charitable Choice laws suddenly proclaimed that these laws were weak tea brewed to suit the tastes of secular liberal Democrats. Their push to insert a sweeping, same-religion hiring "beliefs and tenets" provision into the Bush faith bill proved disastrous, forcing then White House Domestic Policy Council Chief John M. Bridgeland to give much-publicized assurances that the bill would be brought back into line with the Constitution. President Bush himself talked up religious pluralism, nondiscrimination and so on. In July 2001, the provision was stripped from the bill, but the damage was done.

As Mike Gerson, President Bush's former chief speech writer, has written, since 2001 the religious hiring issue has needlessly and sadly became fodder in wider culture-war politics. And, while friendly to federalism norms on other issues, many who favor unfettered, tax-funded religious hiring rights want to have national law preempt state constitutions and state and local laws that ban discrimination in hiring on religious grounds.

By contrast, assuming that the Obama campaign does speak more plainly about protecting the status quo on religious hiring rights, the council seems poised to keep the faith in faith-based while keeping faith with both the Constitution and public majorities.

As surveys suggest, roughly two-thirds to three-quarters of the public, including majorities in both parties, do not support government partnering with faith-based groups at all if the groups are allowed to hire and pay with public money only people who profess or practice the grantee's particular religion.

Personally, I am a pro-life, born-again Catholic, and I do not shrink from being called a religious conservative or orthodox believer myself. The New Testament tells me that Jesus Christ was pretty eclectic in choosing his disciples. He commanded them to manifest, in deed more than in word, a preferential love for the poor. Or, as my catechism teaches, there is a moral obligation to eliminate or reduce "sinful inequalities" by all means at our disposal, both public and private. Faith without such works is dead; and, for all the attempts to confuse or exploit the issue, the religious hiring rights status quo prevents no organization that really and truly wants to do the Lord's work, with or without government aid, from doing it.

If he is elected, recent polls suggest that Sen. Obama will likely work with a Democratic majority in the U.S. House of Representatives and an increasingly Democratic U.S. Senate. From your perspective, how open are Democrats to advancing faith-based and community initiatives?

There are more Democrats in Congress today who are friendly to the approach than was true in 1996 or in 2001, and it makes a big difference that there will be more Democrats in Congress period in 2010, plus, per the latest polls at least, a faith-friendly Democrat in the Oval Office and a reliable Democratic centrist on the issue, Sen. Joe Biden, in the vice president's quarters.

There are still maybe several dozen House Democrats who would rather roll back Charitable Choice than implement or expand it, and most will still be there in 2010. But in both the House and in the Senate, the center or center-left bipartisan congressional coalition in support of the Obama council and related efforts is likely to be fairly robust.

I have great faith in the possibility of federal support for faith-based initiatives, and that faith would be hardly less strong if I thought a McCain-Palin administration would entrust its kindred initiative to someone like my friend, former Indianapolis Mayor Steve Goldsmith.

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Q&A With Stephen Goldsmith About McCain's Plans
"Sen. McCain will make safeguarding religious liberty a priority and will protect the right of faith-based organizations to participate fully in public programs without renouncing their beliefs, removing religious objects or symbols, or becoming subject to government-imposed hiring practices."

Stephen Goldsmith is the Daniel Paul Professor of Government at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. He is the author of Putting Faith in Neighborhoods: Making Cities Work Through Grassroots Citizenship (2002). Goldsmith was the mayor of Indianapolis for two terms (1992-1999), where he was very active through his "Front Porch Alliance," a faith-based initiative. He is also the chair of the Corporation for National and Community Service.

After Sen. Barack Obama announced his plan for a faith-based and community initiative in July, the McCain campaign issued a statement saying Sen. McCain "supports faith-based initiatives, and recognizes their important role in our communities." McCain told The New York Times that he thinks "faith-based organizations have been one of the more successful parts of the Bush administration and I would continue it." What exactly is his administration likely to do to foster government partnerships with faith-based organizations?

Let me start with two disclaimers. First, the answers to these questions are based in large part on statements by Sen. McCain as well as from my personal observations about how a McCain administration might approach faith initiatives. Second, I never have, and still do not, view these issues as partisan ones. The goal here is to understand how faith-based organizations can better fulfill their missions to help those who are struggling, not how they can further political goals.

Sen. McCain would: 1) Extend the focus of the current initiative to include additional critical priorities; 2) Increase the ability of beneficiaries of services to choose their service providers; 3) Seek to engage and facilitate strategic partnerships with social entrepreneurs and leaders at the local level; and 4) Safeguard religious liberty.

Much has been accomplished in recent years to fully engage faith-based and small community-based organizations (FBCOs) in the delivery of social services to benefit neighbors and communities across the country. Regulatory changes have reduced barriers and expanded the opportunity for government to partner with faith-based organizations. Eleven federal government agencies and the Corporation for National and Community Service created centers within their organizations designed to more fully engage FBCOs. A number of innovative programs are returning positive results. I would anticipate Sen. McCain building out such programs to continue with this momentum.

One example of this is the Mentoring Children of Prisoners program, which today has more than 100,000 children matched with a caring adult mentor. Sen. McCain will build upon the success of this mentoring project to tackle the high-school dropout rate and improve academic achievement. Graduation rates from urban public high schools are hovering at 50 percent, with devastating ramifications for those youths, their families and communities. Nearly half of all dropouts, and two-thirds of minority-student dropouts, are concentrated in 12 percent of America's high schools, which are concentrated mostly in large cities. Recruiting and equipping volunteers and tutors to work with youths to improve educational achievement and high-school graduation rates will be a priority in a McCain administration.

Another area of attention will be to promote a culture of life through adoption. The McCain administration will develop better and less cumbersome ways to involve faith organizations in both adoptions and in efforts to decrease teen pregnancy. FBCOs would help infants, children, special needs children and orphans find adoptive families and would improve outcomes for children in foster care.

Sen. McCain will also extend and expand government partnerships with faith-based institutions serving in Africa to prevent, treat and eradicate malaria. Malaria is a fully preventable and treatable disease and yet it kills more than 1 million people in Africa every year, mostly children under five and pregnant women. Bed nets that families can sleep under to avoid the deadly bite of a mosquito and miracle artemisinin-based combination therapy drugs are two powerful tools that help prevent and treat malaria.

Choice is another key theme for Sen. McCain. He will identify opportunities to implement social service models that allow beneficiaries to choose their service provider to include those that have fully integrated their faith tradition into their services. The Access to Recovery (ATR) program competitively awards grants to states and tribal authorities to operate voucher systems that allow individuals to select a provider for substance abuse treatment and supportive services, including transportation, child care and mentoring. The outcomes of this program have been promising, with more than 200,000 people participating and more than 27,000 FBCO partners engaged in service delivery, many of which were partnering for the first time with government. In Connecticut, 40 percent of the organizations redeeming vouchers were new providers, and in Louisiana, 70 percent were partnering with government for the first time. Studies in several states, including California, Texas, Florida, Missouri and Connecticut, indicate ATR's distinctive model is achieving better outcomes than traditional recovery models.

Sen. McCain will make safeguarding religious liberty a priority and will protect the right of faith-based organizations to participate fully in public programs without renouncing their beliefs, removing religious objects or symbols, or becoming subject to government-imposed hiring practices.

McCain's campaign has said that he "believes that it is important for faith-based groups to be able to hire people who share their faith." Some have said that allowing religious organizations to hire on the basis of faith opens the door to church-state entanglements and amounts to discrimination on religious grounds. How do you respond to such criticisms?

Protecting religious hiring rights is a central component to any meaningful and effective partnership between public government entities and faith-based organizations. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 provides an exemption for religious organizations, and it states that it is not illegal discrimination for faith-based organizations to take religion into account when selecting employees, whether that employee is a chaplain, social worker or receptionist. It does not permit faith-based organizations to discriminate on the bases of race, color, sex or national origin. Yet even with this exemption, there are federal programs such as Head Start and the Workforce Investment Act Fund that forbid religious staffing. Limiting the number of effective partners at the local level in this way serves only to reduce the public value of government investment and compromises the expressed interest and value of government partnerships with faith-based organizations. Sen. McCain will defend religion-based hiring by faith-based organizations and will remove the hiring restrictions that exist in some federal programs.

If he is elected, recent polls suggest that Sen. McCain will work with a Democratic majority in the U.S. House of Representatives and an increasingly Democratic U.S. Senate. What advice would you give him for forging a bipartisan approach to faith-based policies?

Sen. McCain understands that one of the main existing strengths of the faith-based and community initiatives (FBCI) is its existing bipartisan support. While the directional emphasis of your question points to Congress, it misses the larger story about where bipartisan consensus has already solidified the FBCI as a permanent strategy: the states. Thirty-five governors --19 Democrats and 16 Republicans -- have followed the president's model for implementing an FBCI in their states.

White House FBCI Director Jay Hein impressively made the growth and expansion of the state strategy his signature leadership emphasis during the past two years. Each state has implemented a different model matched with its unique strengths and pointed toward its unique challenges and priorities. Some focus on capacity-building through volunteer recruitment and nonprofit training. Others focus on addressing particular issues, such as reducing youth violence or increasing affordable housing. And still others react to unwelcome challenges such as the series of hurricanes that have pummeled the Gulf Coast over the past several years.

Sen. McCain will continue to grow FBCI strategies with this pragmatic approach in mind. And he will look forward to working with both sides of the aisle, as well as all state and local officials interested in expanding government partnerships with faith-based and community nonprofits.

What are your thoughts on the future of faith-based and community initiatives?

In this election season, it is undeniably clear that the voters want change. Yet both presidential candidates have embraced one of President Bush's central domestic policy legacies as a key plank in their forward-leaning agenda. Why?

A bipolar debate over whether government or the market offers a better prescription for problem-solving is no longer good enough. We obviously need a smart government and a strong economy. Yet we have always relied on something else: a vibrant nonprofit sector relying on and bridging the strengths of the other two sectors.

Giving USA reports that Americans gave $306 billion in private philanthropy in 2007, the highest amount ever reported. Indiana University's Center on Philanthropy reports that much of our nation's philanthropic gifts are small donations. Many of us give our money, as well as our time, to neighbors in need. We now know that 61 million Americans volunteer. A careful analysis of this data shows revealing trends that will be important to the next administration. First, the fastest growing markets for volunteerism are the millennials (born 1982-1994) and baby boomers. It also shows that the leading source of volunteers are faith-based institutions.

These profiles of philanthropy, volunteerism and corporate citizenship are not new inventions. Rather, they are the ingredients that form healthy communities. The challenge for political leaders in the 21st century is to understand and leverage these strengths with smart government policy. You could call this approach "government by network." The FBCI is an ideal vehicle to catalyze this effort.

While I was mayor of Indianapolis, the city implemented outcome-based granting, activity-based budgeting and competition in service delivery that challenged the status quo. We also included entrepreneurs in the process, and they helped transform the delivery of city services and revitalize urban neighborhoods. This opened the door for social entrepreneurs to become our partners, many for the first time. The rewards were significant.

Social entrepreneurs achieve results in education, health care, workforce development, economic mobility and the environment by providing new solutions to age-old problems. YouthBuild is one such group that now operates in Indiana. They engage unemployed young men and women by giving them jobs to build affordable housing. The program also enables them to earn their high-school diploma or GED while learning valuable leadership skills.

Recently, a coalition of social entrepreneurs called America Forward presented a series of policy ideas to the presidential campaigns. Their message: Government must transform its focus from inputs and activities to outcomes and results.

The New York Times columnist David Brooks recently wrote that "the older do-gooders had a certain policy model: government identifies a problem. Really smart people design a program. A cabinet department in a big building administers it." Yet the FBCI reorients the equation to decentralize the approach. It asks bottom-up questions, such as: How can Washington become more flexible to accommodate local officials' agendas? How can we engage new nonprofit partners? How can we change our systems to work less about inputs and more about outcomes?

The America Forward coalition's agenda for the next administration includes a Social Investment Fund Network to leverage federal dollars and invest in ideas that work. This idea converges nicely with the FBCI agenda already in force tapping into America's spirit of innovation.

The future of the FBCI will depend on a proper understanding of the initiative itself; that is, community-centered problem-solving through enhanced government-nonprofit sector partnerships as well as new strategies to leverage the strengths of social entrepreneurs, volunteers and philanthropists interested in meaningful social change.

A McCain administration would act on these impulses in advancement of an agenda that asks all Americans to devote a substantial amount of time in service as a way to involve everyone in solving community challenges. It would also operate particularly in a bipartisan fashion, including adopting many of the good ideas of my good friend, Professor John DiIulio.