~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The President's Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships on March 9th reported some 60 recommendations to the administration covering a wide range of ways to improve how the government works with, supports, and learns from faith-based and secular organizations. The recommendations show a deep appreciation for the contribution of faith-based organizations to the common good, and broad acceptance of the church-state rules developed over the past fifteen years.
Final Report. The Council's final report can be found
here. The Advisory
Council serves under the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood
Partnerships. It is a new entity
created by the Obama administration to provide input from religious and secular
leaders on partnerships and other policy matters. Its recommendations were presented to high administration
officials. No process was
announced for formal acceptance or rejection of individual recommendations or
for tracking the administration's decisions.
The Advisory Council made recommendations on
a range of specific issues:
strengthening fatherhood and families, addressing domestic poverty and
the economic recovery, global poverty and development assistance, environmental
care and climate change, and interreligious cooperation at home and
abroad. (The important issue of
abortion, on which the administration says it is working for a new consensus,
is being discussed through a different consultative process.)
Church-State Rules.
Faith-based organizations (and also
secular groups and citizens in general) will be especially interested in the
recommendations made by the Reform of the Office task force and accepted by the
Advisory Council as a whole. These
concern how the federal government works with faith-based organizations. The Advisory Council recommended some
refinements and clarifications that strengthen the positive partnership
approach that began to take shape during the Clinton administration. This approach is grounded in the
Supreme Court's shift from a "no aid to religion" doctrine to a neutrality or
equal treatment concept to guide the government's relationship with faith-based
and secular service organizations.
The Advisory Council's strong attitude of respect for faith-based
organizations as organizations characterized and motivated by religion is also
significant.
Notable in the recommendations:
- For clarity, the government
should specify that "direct" federal funds cannot be used for "explicitly" religious
activities, and offer a wide set of examples. The current term is "inherently" religious activities and
guidance has been inconsistent.
("Direct" funds like grants and contracts are awarded to organizations
to provide services; "indirect" funds like vouchers are awarded to
beneficiaries, who then choose a service provider.) Some argue that these rules are too restrictive and that
religion, when integral to a service, should not be required to
be sidelined, even when the funding is "direct." Neither the Bush nor Clinton administrations regarded that
view as constitutional.
- Faith-based organizations
that receive federal funds do retain their religious character and can maintain
marks of their religious identity.
They can continue to offer, on a voluntary basis and separate from the
government-funded services, religious instruction and worship.
- Beneficiaries should
receive written notice of their religious-freedom rights, including the right
not to participate in or be present at privately funded religious activities.
- The federal government
should extend to all of its programs the Charitable Choice right (now limited
to welfare services and some other programs) that a beneficiary who objects to
services from a faith-based provider can request an alternative provider,
including a secular alternative.
- Faith-based organizations
should be mindful of the religious sensitivities of the people they serve, but
the government ought not to require that federally funded services be offered
only in rooms stripped of all religious symbols.
- The federal government
should assemble a menu of best practices of how houses of worship can maintain
the appropriate separation between their own affairs and the monitoring and
rules that come with government social-service funding. But it should not require every church
to establish a separate 501(c)(3) organization to provide services funded by
government.
- The government should improve its monitoring of
grantees, including paying greater attention to the church-state rules.
- Potential applicants and the public should have easier
access to information about grant rules and grant awards.
- The administration should take steps to quash the
erroneous impression that officials in the White House faith-based office and
in the department faith-based centers make funding decisions.
- Federal agencies should recruit widely to ensure that
the peer review committees that evaluate grant applications have diverse
memberships.
Religious Hiring.
Off-limits for the Advisory Council
was the vital topic of hiring on a religious basis by faith-based providers who
get government funds. Many
opponents of the practice wrongly assume that the Bush administration created
this freedom and that the Obama administration can just as easily remove
it. Rather, the Bush
administration clarified the freedom, pointing out that congressional and court
guidelines provide that in many federal programs faith-based organizations can
participate while retaining their religious hiring freedom. In other federal programs and in some
state and local jurisdictions all grantees and contractors are required not to
hire according to religion. For
more information on the topic, see the resources on the
IRFA website. For many faith-based
organizations, the freedom to consider whether potential employees are faithful
in beliefs and behavior is critical; if the price of participation in a
government program is abandonment of this practice, they will have to decline
the partnership with government instead.
Micro-Management.
Unfortunately, the Advisory Council
recommended broad application of micro-managing rules that the Bush
administration developed for the specific instance of a faith-based
organization that had persistently violated the regulations concerning
inherently religious activities when direct federal funds are involved (the
"Safeguards Required" document).
The principles of the document are those that the Bush administration
and the courts have adopted, but because of the violations, the document has a
paternalistic tone of mistrust. It would be unfortunate to treat all
faith-based organizations with the same lack of trust.
A Neglected Opportunity for Progress. The
Advisory Council recommended that federal programs make plain whether the funds
they award are "direct" government funds or rather "indirect" government funds,
but unfortunately did not recommend an expansion of "indirect" funding. Yet "indirect" funding eases the
participation of faith-based organizations and expands choices for
beneficiaries.
Most government funding is "direct"--the grants and contracts
are awarded to an organization to provide services. Because the government choses the provider, the money comes
with the requirement that inherently or explicitly religious activities be kept
separate from the government-funded services. However, in a few programs, e.g., child care, Food Stamps,
Medicaid, and Access to Recovery drug treatment, the funding is
"indirect": beneficiaries get a
voucher or other authorization to seek services from the provider of their
choice, and the provider is paid because of that choice. Because of the beneficiaries' choice,
in these programs the services that the government funds can include religious
activities, such as spiritual counseling, religious stories, and prayer.
"Indirect" funding removes the need to patrol whether some
form of religious activity or discussion is part of the government-supported
services. It expands choice: beneficiaries can decide if they will
be best served by a secular service or by one that includes faith elements. Given the Advisory Council's interest
in respecting both faith-based organizations and the convictions and rights of
people seeking help, its minimal attention to vouchers represents a missed
opportunity to recommend how the Obama administration can continue the forward
progress of the faith-based initiative.
Occupational Hazard. As a set of recommendations to the
government about what the government should do, the many pages of the Advisory
Council's final report mainly focus on government programs and government
funding. Further, as an advisory
body to the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, its main areas
of focus (its six task forces) were set by the administration. In addition, the administration has
decided to stress how faith-based and community organizations can be more
closely aligned with the federal government's goals and programs, rather than
see its main aim to be support for the initiatives that those groups develop on
their own. All of this slants the
recommendations toward government funding and government programs. Fortunately, the recommendations also
acknowledge the independent role of faith-based and community-based
organizations, the vital convening role that private organizations play, and
the work that is done and the insight that is possessed by civil society
organizations. Hopefully a future
Advisory Council will stress more how the government can support civil society
organizations.
What's Next?
The term of the first Advisory Council and of its task
forces is now over. New members
will be selected by the administration, new topics will be assigned, new task
forces will be formed. No
announcements have yet been made about any of this. Nor is it clear how the administration will respond to the
current set of recommendations.
Will the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships
periodically report on implementation?
Equally important:
although these recommendations are addressed to the administration, all
of the policies at stake, including the church-state rules that apply to
faith-based organizations, are subject to congressional action. The administration officials present on
March 9th warmly welcomed the Advisory Council's
recommendations. Does Congress
equally understand the vital role that faith-based and community-based
organizations play in our society and overseas?
A Broad Consensus. Melissa
Rogers, church-state expert and chairwoman of the Advisory Council, notes that
the Reform of the Office task force and the Council as a whole did not resolve
every important issue concerning government collaboration with faith-based
organizations. Yet, she points
out, many of the contentious issues were addressed, and important common ground
was found. This is all the more
significant because of the wide-ranging membership of the Council and the task
force: representation from World
Vision and also the Human Rights Campaign, Americans United for Separation of
Church and State and also the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations, the
Interfaith Alliance and also the Institutional Religious Freedom Alliance. This broad basis, she says, should make
the principles adopted "especially durable." That's a hopeful note as a third federal administration
takes up the opportunity to improve our government's interaction with civil
society organizations.
See also:
The Institutional Religious Freedom Alliance letter to the President to maintain the "level playing field" rules of the faith-based initiative (March 1, 2010).
http://irfalliance.org/images/stories/pdf/letter-to-president-2.28.10.pdfPew Forum, "President Obama's Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships" (Aug. 18, 2009).
http://pewforum.org/docs/?DocID=432 Melissa Rogers, "Faith-Based Program Getting Better at Doing Good," AOL News (March 11, 2010).
http://www.aolnews.com/opinion/article/opinion-president-obamas-faith-based-program-is-getting-better-at-doing-good/19395069Melissa Rogers, "Keeping faith with faith-based initiative," Washington Post OnFaith blog, Guest Voices (March 9 2010).
http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/guestvoices/2010/03/keeping_faith_with_faith-based_initiative.htmlJim Wallis, "How Obama's Faith Council Worked: Six Points of Consensus," God's Politics blog (March 11, 2010).
http://blog.sojo.net/2010/03/11/how-obamas-faith-council-worked-six-points-of-consensus/Adelle Banks, "Faith-based panel submits recommendations as some issues remain unsolved," Religion News Service (March 9, 2010).
http://pewforum.org/news/rss.php?NewsID=19801Stanley Carlson-Thies, "Faith-Based Initiative 2.0: The Bush Faith-Based and Community Initiative," Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy (Summer 2009).
http://www.harvard-jlpp.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/Carlson-ThiesFinal.pdf
