White House Faith Council gives report

Opinion piece from David Gushee of the Associated Baptist Press (pictured).
Thanks to John Pethtel for the suggestion.

Last week the White House Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships issued its report to the president, culminating a year of efforts in rethinking the relationship between faith groups and the federal government. Their report is a major contribution to our national life.

President George W. Bush established the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in the early days of his presidency. Its primary goal was to create a friendlier federal-government relationship to the thousands of faith-based community organizations addressing deeply entrenched social problems, especially in some of our nation’s most impoverished communities. Cynics suggested that its real goal was to build political relationships with valuable religious constituencies. Other critics were concerned that the entire initiative furthered a trend toward the weakening of federal social services and the romanticizing of privatization.

In my view, the idea that the federal government should make it easier for grassroots social-service organizations to receive federal dollars to do their common-good-advancing work is a good one -- at least from the government side. For decades both federal and state governments have subcontracted at least part of their social-service work to religious groups. But the working understanding of church-state boundary lines in relation to the receipt of these dollars for years was either sufficiently strict or sufficiently unclear that many religious non-profits stayed away from these funding possibilities altogether.

For the entire article, click here.

David Gushee is distinguished university professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University.