Obama and Faith-Based Initiatives

When the Democratic candidate for president starts talking about expanding the faith-based initiative programme, you know this isn’t your father’s Democratic party anymore. But, of course, the programme he’s talking about isn’t your father’s faith-based initiative either. So I guess we’ve just entered a whole new generation of political discourse in America.

Before delving into the speech itself, it’s worth taking a moment to point out that one reason Barack Obama’s faith outreach has been so effective is that it is dovetailing perfectly with the rise of a new generation of leaders in the American Church, especially in evangelical circles. The members of this younger generation still care about abortion and marriage, but they also care deeply about the environment, poverty, Aids in Africa and torture. And from their ranks have risen groups like the Matthew 25 Network, which are defending Obama against attacks from the religious right while fighting to expand the faith and values debate in American politics.

It is into that unique point in America’s political history that Obama stepped on Tuesday to deliver an unexpected speech about how and why, as president, he would expand the faith-based initiative programme. To fully appreciate his remarks, one needs to understand the political lightning rod that the faith-based initiative has become in recent years.

The programme was actually created by President Bill Clinton. But when George Bush came to office – as he did with so many other parts of the executive branch – he turned the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives (OFBI) into a partisan, political tool (David Kuo, former OFBI director, wrote a tell-all book detailing abuse after abuse in the programme). And the secular left reacted exactly as the Bush strategists hoped, by using extreme language to condemn the entire programme and the churches associated with it that Republicans immediately quoted in mailers and fundraising appeals to the faith community.

The result was that many Republican voters began to see the faith-based initiative as a symbol of secular disdain for the positive role faith plays in American society, while many Democrats saw it as proof positive that theocracy was the ultimate goal of any faith-based engagement in the public square. Of course, neither understanding was correct, but both narratives served their purpose by scaring a different segment of society into action against the other. But as Obama has done time and again, his speech on Tuesday directly confronted the politics of division and fear that has defined American politics during the Bush years.

Obama began his speech by embracing the positive and vital role faith communities play in American society and in caring for the least of these. He applauded the principles of the faith-based initiatives and the need to expand it while also acknowledging that a good programme had been taken down a bad path by unscrupulous politicians who twisted it from a service programme into a partisan tool. Finally, he made clear that while it was appropriate for government to support faith programmes that were providing support for the least of these in our society, government dollars could never be used to proselytise or discriminate.

His speech was hailed by another of Bush’s former heads of OFBI, John DiIulio, as a “principled, prudent and problem-solving vision” that reminded him of “much that was best in both of then-vice-president Al Gore’s and then-Texas governor George W Bush’s first speeches on the subject in 1999.”

No doubt, some on the left will be upset by Obama’s remarks (and some on the right who will nit-pick them or reject them completely). After all, there will always be those who fear the end of war (even a culture war), either because they fear the unknown that peace may bring or because they know that their power and influence will fade when the enemy is gone.

But even with the dissent, this is a wise political move for Obama, and one that I expect most Americans will applaud, because Obama moved this debate on the OFBI from one about right and left to one about right and wrong. Because of that, we can hope that at the end of the day, the real winners won’t be Democrats or Republicans but the “least of these” among us who will finally get some of the help they so desperately need.

Published in The Guardian, Wed July 2