Taking this president on faith
From an op-ed by columnist Kathleen Parker:
A comparison of how the media have treated the two presidents and their faith-based programs during the first six months of their administrations (2001 and 2009) is the subject of a new study by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.
The findings suggest a very different standard applied to each president.
...
Michael Cromartie, vice president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center (and director of the Evangelicals in Civic Life program) ... [says,] "Sure, there's always a lot going on in Washington with any new administration. But can you imagine the outcry if Bush had hired a 27-year-old Pentecostal preacher to run the faith-based office and surrounded him with a 25-member advisory board made up of people largely sympathetic to his policy agenda?"
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One may argue, as Bush critics have, that the previous administration similarly tried to advance policy through its faith-based office. What one may not argue is that Obama has been treated to the same scrutiny as his predecessor.Read it here.
If there is one, is it likely that the next Republican president will reduce the size of the faith-based initiative?
Frankly for me Republican or Democrat, I find the Office of Faith based anything problematic in a pluralistic, secular government framework.
Pam Alger
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August 19, 2009 6:52 PM
I agree with Pam. The Government shouldn't be funding religious groups of whatever stripe.
Gerry Hough
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August 19, 2009 7:26 PM
I tend to agree in part with the article's view on why Obama gets a pass and why Bush didn't. I also concur with Pam's comment. Nonetheless, this is sort of like talking about Obama's successor maintaining Obama's healthcare reforms. It's old news, it's standard practice and nobody cares enough to talk about it in general anymore.
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August 19, 2009 7:44 PM
Having worked with both the White House Office and the HHS version, I have a slightly different perspective...
For those of us doing HIV prevention work in vulnerable communities, faith leaders are often our best allies. For a variety of socioeconomic reasons, minority communities are, and always have been, particularly vulnerable to HIV/AIDS--and they are also typically very suspicious of public health initiatives, since they have good reasons to be leery of the government. If you want to build relationships in those communities, you have to work with people who are trusted--which often means working with religious leaders.
For the first decades of the epidemic, religious communities were often silent about HIV, because it was perceived as a disease of "the other" (i.e., white, gay men) or because it was transmitted by sex and drug use. Faith communities often seemed to think that simply condemning pre- or extra-marital sex and drug use would be sufficient to keep their flocks safe.
It wasn't,of course. In 2005, I worked with a national group of clergy wives to develop an HIV prevention training curriculum for their churches. They had intended to do something on heart disease--but, in their conversations about the project, came to recognize that they were burying more parishioners from AIDS than from heart disease.
Now there are coordinated efforts on the part of govt. and local faith leaders to put an end to that.
I, too, am generally skeptical of collusions between church and state. But I have seen some amazing things happen in communities as a result of this partnership. Lives have been saved. People living with HIV/AIDS have gotten treatment.
When, at the urging of public health officials (through the Federal Faith Offices), an African American pastor gets up in front of his congregation and takes an HIV test, his parishioners get a powerful message about their need to do the same. That, I would contend, is where government and faith come together to do what is best for the American public. I would urge people not to be too quick to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The partnership will always bear watching, but sometimes you have to subsume the hard, bright line of ideology to the need to protect people's lives.
Paige Baker
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August 24, 2009 11:47 AM