Is Obama Bringing Too Much Religion into the White House?

By Liliana Segura, AlterNet. Posted March 5, 2009.

According to Sharlet, "The Family is dedicated to this idea that Christianity has gotten it all wrong for 2,000 years by focusing on the poor, the suffering and the weak. … The Family says that instead, what Christians should do is minister to the up-and-out -- as opposed to the down-and-out -- to those that are already powerful. Because if they can win those people for Christ, they win the whole deal."

This would seem to conflict with the brand of Christianity Obama has adopted, which he described at the National Prayer Breakfast as being motivated by his work as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago. "It was on those streets, in those neighborhoods, that I first heard God's spirit beckon me," Obama told his audience. "It was there that I felt called to a higher purpose -- His purpose."

Indeed, Obama's executive order focuses largely on the work done by churches and religious institutions in under-resourced communities. "The goal of this office will not be to favor one religious group over another -- or even religious groups over secular groups," he told the audience. "It will simply be to work on behalf of those organizations that want to work on behalf of our communities and to do so without blurring the line that our founders wisely drew between church and state."

However well-intentioned it sounded, the American Civil Liberties Union was quick to voice its alarm over the president's order, pointing out that the mission of the religious advisory council will also be "to advise the president and the White House faith-based office on how to distribute federal dollars, and also advise on a range of other issues, such as AIDS and women's reproductive health care" -- areas where religious views present nothing if not a conflict of interest.

"Although former President George W. Bush gave prominence to his faith-based initiative and informally consulted with individual religious leaders, even he never formed a government advisory committee made up primarily of clergy," read a Feb. 5 ACLU press release. Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office, described Obama as "heading into uncharted and dangerous waters."

"There is no historical precedent for presidential meddling in religion -- or religious leaders meddling in federal policy -- through a formal government advisory committee made up mostly of the president's chosen religious leaders," she said.

The Wrong Debate?

Many people who celebrate Obama's overhaul of Bush's faith-based initiatives are doing so based on his promise that his administration will cut off funding for groups that discriminate based on background or sexual orientation. But as Americans United for Separation of Church and State points out,the order he signed "leaves the entire architecture of the Bush Faith-Based Initiative intact -- every rule, every regulation, every executive order." Groups that apply for aid will be vetted by the Department of Justice on a case-by-case basis. Along with the promised expansion of groups eligible for aid, this will make such a promise difficult to enforce.

Given how rapidly the notion of "faith-based initiatives" has evolved, some ask whether we shouldn't be scrapping them altogether instead of trying to expand and improve on them. In a New York Times op-ed last week, Susan Jacoby, author of Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, called it "truly dismaying" that "amid all the discussion about President Obama’s version of faith-based community initiatives, there has been such a widespread reluctance to question the basic assumption that government can spend money on religiously based enterprises without violating the First Amendment. ... This shows how easy it is to institutionalize a bad idea based on unexamined assumptions about service to a greater good."

"We are moving blindly ahead with faith-based federal spending as if it were not a radical break with our past," Jacoby warned. "If faith-based initiatives, first institutionalized by the executive fiat of a conservative Republican president, become even more entrenched under a liberal Democratic administration, there will be no going back."

See more stories tagged with: religion, barack obama, the family, jeff sharlet, susan jacoby, rick warren, faith based initiatives, us news and world report, white house office of pub

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