Patron Feint

is an editor at The Washington Monthly. In early March, the White House gathered more than 1,000 religious leaders for a conference in the cavernous ballroom of the Washington Hilton. Many of the attendees were supplicants, hoping to score a piece of the president's vaunted faith-based and community initiative. The room teemed with imams, rabbis, and a hefty representation from the GOP's evangelical base. As the crowd munched sandwiches and waited for George W. Bush to arrive, massive projection screens played agitprop touting the White House's largesse. A video featured people discussing how help from faith-based charities had changed their lives. "I've learned that God comes first," one woman testified. A gospel choir from St. Thomas More Church in Washington, D.C., primed the crowd, singing, "He has done ... marvelous things."The event was a classic Bush set piece, with giant compassion in action banners framing the stage and a host of minority faces in the audience--an opportunity to blare the achievements of his faith-based initiative. While Bush has gone long stretches of his presidency without mentioning the program, he always returns to it. It is one of his few domestic policy achievements--and the signature program of the "compassionate conservatism" that formed the political bedrock of his 2000 campaign. The White House office he created in the second week of his presidency was designed to help larger numbers of religiously affiliated organizations compete for federal money. As he delivered his pitch to the room, Bush jumped straight into a long list of accomplishments: lower crime rates, reduced drug use, plummeting welfare caseloads and teenage pregnancies. All these achievements, the president strongly implied, could be traced directly to faith-based initiatives. "Results" was, in fact, Bush's principal theme, mentioned no fewer than 16 times throughout the half-hour speech. "[We] ought to allow religious organizations to compete for funding on an equal basis, not for the sake of faith, but for the sake of results," he intoned. Whether faith-based programs are as effective--or more effective--than secular ones remains a question hotly contested by social science. But, as Bush continued, it became clear that the "results" to which he referred had little to do with the efficacy of faith-based programs and everything to do with how much money the federal government disburses to them. The Bush administration has always been quite open about this fact. A few years ago, when I asked the deputy director of the Department of Agriculture's faith-based office how it gauged the effectiveness of faith-based grantees, she replied simply, "That's not our concern." Instead, her priority was "getting more churches and community groups through the door to get access to funding." It's that attitude that feeds liberal fears about a faith-based pork project. And it's true that right-wing Christian groups, including those operated by Pat Robertson and Franklin Graham, have received federal grants--payments that many liberals view as evidence of Bush's creeping theocracy. Kevin Phillips, in his new book, American Theocracy, sees the faith-based initiative as definitive proof of the White House's alliance with Christian reconstructionists. Bill Moyers decries those "who turn faith-based initiatives into a slush fund." The real story, however, is not how immense the faith-based initiative is, but how small. The federal government distributed approximately $2 billion in grants to faith-based organizations in fiscal year 2005, a number that seems large but is not actually much different than the funding that groups like Catholic Charities and Habitat for Humanity received before Bush took office. Even Barry Lynn of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a staunch critic of the faith-based initiative, told The Washington Post, "If you were able to compare today's funding with the 1999 dollars that went to groups like Catholic Charities, United Jewish Communities, and Lutheran Social Services, you'd find that most of this money is still going to the same groups." (While recent media reports have highlighted the fact that nearly $160 million has gone to groups that ideologically support Bush over the last three years, that is less than 3 percent of the total amount.) It is increasingly clear that only a handful of people in the administration view the program as anything other than a political tool to attract support from black religious leaders and to mollify the party's evangelical base. And now, even the program's most enthusiastic supporter on the Hill has pronounced it a sham. Indiana Representative Mark Souder was already displeased when he opened a hearing last summer to take stock of the faith-based initiative. As the chairman of the Government Reform Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy, and Human Resources, Souder is responsible for oversight of the program. An Anabaptist from the Midwest, Souder has been a supporter of the faith-based initiative from the start, and he has repeatedly carried the White House's water on the issue. But Souder has become increasingly disillusioned with the White House's faith-based efforts. As a true believer in faith-based social services, Souder didn't care if the White House program rewarded supporters of the president or pried black preachers from the Democrats. He actually wanted it to help the poor and vulnerable. So, at the hearing, when the White House refused to allow Jim Towey, the director of the faith-based initiative, to testify or provide any documents--citing executive privilege, no less--Souder could hardly restrain himself. He ticked off for his audience the ways in which White House officials had kneecapped the initiative. They opposed providing funds for technical support, they allowed tax provisions encouraging charitable giving to be pulled from Bush's first tax cut package, and, when Souder tried to introduce the tax provisions as a separate measure, "the White House specifically asked me to hold back on my bill." What's worse, the program has failed miserably in its fundamental goal--helping the poor. "We argued that we were going to increase the pool of money for the poor," Souder said. "In fact, all we have done is fight over a relatively frozen pool." "This has gone political," Souder charged, reaching his full boil. "Quite frankly, part of the reason it went political is because we can't sell it unless we can show some Republicans a political advantage to it, because it's not our base." That's a serious charge--that congressional Republicans are unwilling to increase funds for social services because the recipients of those funds might be organizations in urban, Democratic districts. But Souder's claim is backed by some enormously credible witnesses. David Kuo, who served as deputy director for the faith-based office from 2001 to 2003, told the hearing that Republicans praised the faith-based initiative for its political benefits: "Republicans will be seen as fighting for [religion], and Democrats will be seen as fighting against it." Kuo's former colleague, John DiIulio, the program's first director, told Esquire writer Ron Suskind much the same thing, noting that, in the White House, "What you've got is everything, and I mean everything, being run by the political arm." DiIulio, a social scientist whose favorite saying is "the plural of anecdote is not data" would have had trouble sitting through the end of Bush's remarks at the March conference. The only evidence Bush offered for the effectiveness of faith-based social service was Matt Enriquez, a conference attendee who kicked his drug addiction with the help of the evangelical group Teen Challenge. The organization is a Bush favorite; he has used it as his prime example of the power of faith since the 2000 campaign. But it is also controversial--its leadership has admitted that it will not hire non-Christians, and Teen Challenge's widely touted 86 percent rehabilitation rate crumbles under examination. (Teen Challenge doesn't count those clients who dropped out of the program, and it relies on self-reported measures of progress.) Still, it's not hard to see why Bush likes Teen Challenge so much. It's the ultimate model of overcoming a problem by religious rebirth, which is how Bush reportedly overcame his problems with alcohol. And it's the solution he's asking Americans to embrace for dealing with poverty: We don't need more funds, we just need religious-based groups providing the services. That's not the plan his supporters signed onto, though. If Bush paid attention, he would find they're losing faith.

By amy sullivan