{"id":136,"date":"2010-12-15T18:31:48","date_gmt":"2010-12-15T18:31:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/12\/faith-based-in-the-air-and-on-the-ground.html"},"modified":"2010-12-15T18:31:48","modified_gmt":"2010-12-15T18:31:48","slug":"faith-based-in-the-air-and-on-the-ground","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/12\/faith-based-in-the-air-and-on-the-ground.html","title":{"rendered":"Faith-based, in the air and on the ground"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over at WaPo’s On Faith, Melissa Rogers, the key player on the first
\nAdvisory Council of the White House Office of Faith-based and
\nNeighborhood Partnerships, offers<\/a>
\nan appreciative but not uncritical assessment of the Obama continuation
\nof the Bush faith-based initiative–essential reading for anyone
\ninterested in the thing. Rogers bears witness to the ongoing ideological
\nstruggles over the rules governing public funding of social service
\nproviders that are, in one sense or another, religious.<\/p>\n

Some will say that this has been a can of worms that should never have
\nbeen opened. What needs to be recognized, however, is that the can that
\nwas opened–a little by the Charitable Choice provisions of the 1996
\nwelfare reform act and all the way by George Bush–had far less to do
\nwith programs than with principles. Faith-based organizations (FBOs)
\nwere an integral part of the web of social service provision long before
\n1996. But through an undemonstrated but viscerally felt belief that
\nFBOs are more effective than secular providers, the federal initiatives
\nforced a confrontation with underlying principles of church and state
\nthat a highly messy system was ill-equipped to handle.<\/p>\n

For a sense of how the effort to handle it has played out on the ground
\nsince welfare reform, I know of no better case study than a book with
\nthe unfortunate title of Pracademics and Community Change: A True Story of Nonprofit Development and Social Entrepreneurship during Welfare Reform<\/i><\/a>,
\nby Odell Cleveland and Robert Wineburg. The two authors, a black
\nreverend and a Jewish academic, together created the Welfare Reform
\nLiaison Project, a highly successful community action agency associated
\nwith a megachurch in Greensboro, NC. Between Cleveland’s religious
\ncommitment and business acumen on the one hand, and Wineburg’s long
\nexperience in community organizing and grantsmanship on the other, the
\nProject has developed into a poster child for church-connected FBOs in
\nour time.<\/p>\n

What the book makes clear, however, is how much of a minefield the
\nfaith-based national playground has been–and of how little help the
\nideological struggles. Nothing, perhaps, has been less helpful than the
\npersistent claims that faith-based providers do a better job than
\nsecular ones. And that’s not just because there’s no evidence to back them
\nup. It’s because the claims have only served to create ill-will in the
\ninterlaced social service system of government agencies, secular
\nnon-profit umbrella groups (such as the United Way,) and community-based
\norganizations both secular and religious. <\/p>\n

Under the circumstances, it’s understandable that the Obama
\nAdministration should have sought to dial back the controversies, both
\nby creating a wide-spectrum Advisory Council and by burying in the
\nJustice Department the contentious issue of whether FBOs can be
\npermitted to discriminate religiously in hiring for jobs supported by
\npublic funds. Yet as Cleveland and Wineburg’s experience shows, just
\nbecause you might wish controversies over principle to go away doesn’t
\nmean that, sooner or later, you don’t have to deal with them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over at WaPo’s On Faith, Melissa Rogers, the key player on the first Advisory Council of the White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships, offers an appreciative but not uncritical assessment of the Obama continuation of the Bush faith-based initiative–essential reading for anyone interested in the thing. Rogers bears witness to the ongoing ideological…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nFaith-based, in the air and on the ground - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/12\/faith-based-in-the-air-and-on-the-ground.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Faith-based, in the air and on the ground - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Over at WaPo’s On Faith, Melissa Rogers, the key player on the first Advisory Council of the White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships, offers an appreciative but not uncritical assessment of the Obama continuation of the Bush faith-based initiative–essential reading for anyone interested in the thing. 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=136"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}