Faith-Based Initiatives and the Bush Administration
FAITH-BASED INITIATIVES AND THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION: ...
FAITH-BASED INITIATIVES AND THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION:
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.
By Jo Renee Formicola, Mary C. Segers, and Paul Weber. Rowman & Littlefield. 214 pp. $68, $23.95 paper
As a matter of both substance and institutional allocation of power, the Bush administration’s faith-based initiative is sprawling. It raises profound issues of welfare policy and church-state relations. All three branches of the federal government play significant parts in the enterprise, as do the states. And the initiative tackles the politically charged task of distributing funds among faith-based entities, with African American churches and white Protestant evangelical groups in particular standing to gain.
In Faith-Based Initiatives and the Bush Administration: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, Jo Renee Formicola, Mary C. Segers, and Paul Weber, political scientists all, appraise this tangle of substantive and institutional concerns. The “Good” portion of their book neatly summarizes the initiative’s conservative intellectual underpinnings; the “Bad” chapter discusses the potential legal constraints; and the “Ugly” segment recounts the considerable political strife spawned by this effort, both within the executive branch and between Congress and the White House. The book’s conclusion raises a multitude of questions but offers few answers.
Far more than most presidential policies, the faith-based initiative is shaped by constitutional doctrines. Three decades ago, judges probably would have invalidated major elements of the initiative. First Amendment rulings then barred government from funding “pervasively sectarian” institutions. But by the time George W. Bush took office in 2001, those sweeping restrictions had disappeared (though others remained). The following year, the Supreme Court ruled that government could, through tax-funded vouchers, purchase services with explicitly religious content—a result sharply inconsistent with the jurisprudential trend of the early 1970s.
Formicola, Segers, and Weber are least illuminating with respect to the deep conflict, within both the Supreme Court and the political culture, between neutralist and separationist visions of church-state relations. Neutralist approaches require government to treat religious and secular organizations evenhandedly. Separationist approaches, which hold religion to be constitutionally distinctive, would disable government from aiding an individual’s religious experience. Neutralists and separationists agree that the Bush initiative poses dangers, including religious coercion on the part of service providers as well as sectarian favoritism on the part of government. At bottom, what divides these camps is whether James Madison was right when he asserted that government’s use of religion as an “engine of civil policy” is an “unhallowed perversion of the means of salvation.” Neutralist proponents of government-backed, faith-intensive programs—whether designed to encourage sexual abstinence among teens, rehabilitate felons, or solve problems of substance abuse—reject Madison’s sentiment.
This book can bring the reader up to speed on the faith-based initiative’s intellectual and political history. But with Congress stalemated over one issue—religious discrimination in employment by faith-based groups—the initiative’s future will play out on several different fronts: the states, many of which have been reluctant to implement it; the executive branch, which has been extremely active in making new policy over the past year; the lower courts, where the initiative has already experienced significant defeats and victories; and the Supreme Court, whose decision in Locke v. Davey this year has recognized the states’ power to separate religion and government further than the Constitution requires. Until the election of 2004 determines whether the initiative’s cheerleader in chief remains in office, these are the places to measure the effort’s vital signs.