A Lack of Faith

And on the eighth day, the Lord said, “Let there be 501(c)(3) forms and tax deductions and another religious reason for violent polemics.” In an age when the line between God and government has blurred, the federal injection of old-time religion into charity seems to have been a doubtful dogma after all. Over the past week, David Kuo, a former White House staffer, has published a book and traveled the talk show circuit to reveal that the Bush administration has been using “faith-based initiatives” for anything but the Lord’s work.

In 2001, President Bush created the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives (OFBCI), thereby putting the compassion into “compassionate conservatism.” The problem, at least according to the Office’s online brochure, is that religious charities are restricted by “complicated rules” that are “inherently unfair.” The solution is hundreds of millions of dollars taken out of existing foundations and sent to Christian, and almost exclusively Christian, charities.

Take, for example, Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere (CARE), the celebrated humanitarian foundation that aims to combat poverty and stem the catastrophic tide of the African AIDS epidemic. According to a recent Boston Globe article, CARE lost a $50 million contract for combating AIDS, as government opted to grant $200 million to faith-based programs, which will advocate the divinely inspired “abstinence-only” method of disease control, after heavy public pressure from evangelical Christians.

This isn’t the only example of the religious right’s impact on faith-based initiatives; in 2004, conservative Christian psychologist James Dobson put pressure on United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, to sack global health director Anne Peterson over her marginal support of condom usage, according to a Boston Globe investigative report last month. Dobson, known for heartily endorsing the corporal punishment of children and for once declaring, “homosexuality…will destroy the Earth,” is only one of several evangelicals who have forced the government’s hand on aid and welfare questions.

Executive Order 13199 asserted that the OFBCI it created would “value the bedrock principles of pluralism, nondiscrimination, evenhandedness, and neutrality,” an essential safeguard against the sort of theocratic repression the government condemns in the Middle East. Except that didn’t work out, either: David Kuo cites one OFBCI grant analyst who admitted, “When I saw one of those non-Christian groups on the set I was reviewing, I just stopped looking at them and gave them a zero. A lot of us did.”

Excellent work for a body that “shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” The First Amendment is first for a reason.

It’s not as if Kuo is godless, either. He was an Ashcroft aide and has an evangelical blog, and represents the kind of voter the Bush White House relies on as its base. But Kuo notes that Bush political operatives Ken Mehlman and Karl Rove called the evangelicals “ridiculous” and “nuts” in strategy meetings—an excellent way to alienate that base before next election.

Speaking of elections, it wouldn’t be a party without some opportunistic vote grabbing, and Kuo chimes in here, too. Many of the OFBCI’s 2004 conferences and public events were held in districts where Republican candidates were mired in close races, and these were planned and scheduled not by the Office’s director, but by Bush’s political strategists and Mehlman.

The push toward faith in charity has been the fiasco of fiascos, the one Presidential scandal that could disaffect every demographic. Benjamin Franklin wrote, “Communiter Bona profundere Deum,” or, “to pour forth benefits for the common good is divine.” Maybe we should have left it at that.

James M. Larkin ’10, a Crimson editorial comper, lives in Matthews Hall.