Faith Based Initiative.

A ticket to religious, political battles

I had one of those birthdays a few years back that ends in a "0," and my favorite graduate student gave me a coffee cup I still use to this day. Painted on the front of the cup is a grinning cat. And as the coffee pours in, this hulking feline disappears, leaving only a rather threatening and bright red grin on the front of the steaming cup.

The representation, of course, is that of Lewis Carroll's classic Cheshire Cat.

The cup reminds me this morning of last year's campaign for the presidency of the United States. Readers will remember that a candidate named Bush, the one who lost the popular election to another fellow named Gore, sometimes spoke of himself as a "compassionate conservative."

By a set of curious chances this fellow got himself elected, and once there, seems eager to turn himself into the most determined right winger in the history of the office. Like the cup, all that seems to remain of that furry and compassionate pet we saw during the campaign is a very aggressive smirk.

Twenty years ago another conservative assumed the presidency, a former actor named Ronald Reagan. He, too, spoke of ways in which his policies might help the poor - and images of "rising tides lifting all boats" became the order of the day.

But when it came time to submit a budget, Reagan's team proposed deep cuts in federal funding for both nonprofit organizations and federal programs providing cash and other support for the poor. Reagan's rising tide threatened to drown many folks huddled on leaky rowboats along the shores of the sea of prosperity. Among his crueler cuts was 40 percent of the housing budget, which gave rise to a crisis of homelessness that remains a national disgrace in this land of plenty.

Conservative reformers always insist that they really do have the concern of the least among us at heart, and that the iron hand of their reforms are accompanied by some sort of velvet touch, at least for the "deserving" among the less than fortunate. For Bush, the velvet touch is to be provided by "faith based" approaches, said to be delivered both cheaply and compassionately by a variety of religious institutions.

Early in his term, Bush created a new Office of Faith Based and Community Initiatives, aiming therein to embody whatever he planned to retain of the compassionate approach to those in need. This office has thus far had as its major product the creation of a set of bitter disputes between and among "religious leaders," those new princes of the nonprofit sector.

Not only did Bush's apparent allies on the right, the "fundamentalist reverends" Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, begin to damn the new initiative with very faint praise, but Bush's own surprise point man in the office, John Dilulio, made it clear that his heart did not belong with the right-wing on this issue. He sided with the set of African American crime-fighting ministers of the night, like Boston's Eugene Rivers. Dilulio, an academic who achieved notoriety for warning about the dangers of youthful "super-predators" in the 1990s, had chosen the ghetto faith basers as his cause by the millennium's turn, and was recently introduced to a conference as "a man of God, appointed and anointed to lead this faith-based initiative."

Rivers rushed to the defense of the new office, and was quoted in The Atlanta Constitution to the effect that it would not be "an illogical inference" to conclude that racism is why conservative religious leaders have been so lukewarm about Bush's initiative. "There is a racial dimension that must be looked at," Rivers was quoted as having said. The conservative religious right does not "accept the viability of the black ministry to support the poor." And, he reportedly added, "We reject the assumption that we can't manage the money."

Not to be left out of a good fight, fundamental Protestant leaders began to mix things up with those of Catholic persuasion. The Los Angeles Times reported dissatisfaction within the Protestant community concerning the amount of time Bush was spending with Catholic leaders. Richard Cizik, vice president for government affairs for the National Association of Evangelicals, has been quoted saying: "It's probably hurt him with the religious right because they've felt ignored. This could come back to bite him."

I've just returned from Northern Ireland, where it's been widely accepted over the past 400 years that a major purpose of religion is to take a few bites off the folks who attend church across the street from one's own house of worship. Over there, faith-based initiatives have often taken to the streets, sometimes armed to the teeth with rifles and pipe bombs.

There's not much of a distinction made in those corners between church and state, either. Most of the formal political parties emerge from the juncture of culture, national identity politics, and religious instruction.

There's some possibility that a not dissimilar fate awaits the Bush's faith-based program, caught as it is within the race- and class-based tensions of our times, and the ever-present interest of those in command in Washington, D.C., to reduce expenditures directed toward the poor.

As Scott Cummings, a leading scholar of urban community process and a professor of public policy at Saint Louis University observed, "Funds could be diverted or reallocated into this initiative as a way of dismantling more traditional programs implemented through HUD, Education, or HHS. Once the funds have been reallocated, the entire enterprise could be left to languish in the midst of internal political controversy and partisan conflict, thereby rendering the entire initiative DOA."

Assuming we can leave the guns and bombs aside, our faith-based leaders have plenty to learn from their Northern Irish colleagues as to how to prolong misunderstanding and political stalemate. Nonprofit managers will be tempted to look on with some bemusement as the men of cloth, some of whom had not previously been in the arena, begin to grapple with the complexities of getting federal funds. And, as usual, the needy will suffer the most from all this name-calling and posturing.

But, hey, who ever said this compassionate conservatism stuff was going to be easy?

Jon Van Til is professor of Urban Studies at the Camden, N.J. campus, of Rutgers University and is the author of the books "Critical Issues in American Philanthropy," "Mapping The Third Sector," and "Growing Civil Society: From Nonprofit Sector to Third Space."