Religion News Service (RNS) published an article today that basically asks the question: what is the White House Office of Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnerships doing? From their story:
WASHINGTON (RNS) Six months after advisers turned in 164 pages of recommendations to the White House’s faith-based office, thorny church-state questions remain unanswered and some critics say the office has been used to push the president’s health care reform.
Much of the work done by the White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships has been low profile, and successors to the blue-ribbon advisory panel that ended its work in March haven’t been named.
Outsiders say whatever progress has been made has been done too quietly and that the White House has dragged its feet on a promise to change Bush-era rules that allow federal grant recipients to hire and fire based on religion.
Joshua DuBois, special assistant to the president and the office's director, is quoted in the article as saying "the administration has started or finished implementing at least half of the advisory council’s 64 recommendations."
Critics have questioned why the office was involved in connecting faith leaders on a September conference call with the president about health care reform. Obama told clergy they could be “validators” for the reform, according to Politico.
“If that office is doing this, what are they not doing they should be doing?” asked the Rev. Welton Gaddy, president of the Interfaith Alliance.
Added former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson in a Washington Post column: “Obama has mainly employed his faith-based office to defend federal initiatives, particularly health care reform.”
Some council members, however, said there was nothing inappropriate about the White House trying to reach a broader audience through religious leaders.
“When there are issues at the federal level and information that need to get out to a network, we’ve got a great relational network,” said the Rev. Peg Chemberlin, president of the National Council of Churches and a former advisory council member.
I was on the call in question and participated in another such call with White House staff this week on poverty. Such outreach efforts are completely appropriate. Often these type of outreach efforts provide an opportunity for dialog between local and national church leaders and White House policy makers. The White House may sometimes ask for support but they don't issue talking points and real debate takes place.
President Bush used his version of this office to award financial grants to clergy who supported his political agenda and only met with religious leaders who supported his platform. He refused to meet with bishops from the United Methodist Church, for example, who opposed his invasion of Iraq.
President Obama, on the other hand, reached out to a range of faith leaders to sit on his faith council. Some of the people chosen had been openly hostile to the president's campaign in 2008 and continue to have serious objections to his views on stem-cell research and abortion, for example. President Obama has made it clear that he will not use faith as a partisan political weapon. That to me is a mark of character.
The slow pace of Washington is frustrating and perhaps there is some legitimacy to the criticism that the White House hasn't moved fast enough on the recommendations made by the council. I'm not on the inside enough to know.
But I do know this: the faith community is an important constituency in American life, just like the business community or the labor community. It is also very diverse. The White House Office of Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnerships does an excellent job of making sure that diverse faith leaders have access to the president through his staff (though some high profile leaders have more direct access). The White House Office of Public Engagement is also a valuable partner in this work.
Because the faith community intersects with the government on so many levels it is important to have an office such as this where ideas can be debated and efforts to fight homelessness or hunger, as examples, can be coordinated in true partnership.
Some of the criticism of the office may be valid, as I noted, but some of it appears more partisan in tone or (and this is appropriate) coming from advocates trying to push their own policy agendas.
