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
struggles over the rules governing public funding of social service
providers that are, in one sense or another, religious.

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

For a sense of how the effort to handle it has played out on the ground
since welfare reform, I know of no better case study than a book with
the unfortunate title of Pracademics and Community Change: A True Story of Nonprofit Development and Social Entrepreneurship during Welfare Reform,
by Odell Cleveland and Robert Wineburg. The two authors, a black
reverend and a Jewish academic, together created the Welfare Reform
Liaison Project, a highly successful community action agency associated
with a megachurch in Greensboro, NC. Between Cleveland’s religious
commitment and business acumen on the one hand, and Wineburg’s long
experience in community organizing and grantsmanship on the other, the
Project has developed into a poster child for church-connected FBOs in
our time.

What the book makes clear, however, is how much of a minefield the
faith-based national playground has been–and of how little help the
ideological struggles. Nothing, perhaps, has been less helpful than the
persistent claims that faith-based providers do a better job than
secular ones. And that’s not just because there’s no evidence to back them
up. It’s because the claims have only served to create ill-will in the
interlaced social service system of government agencies, secular
non-profit umbrella groups (such as the United Way,) and community-based
organizations both secular and religious.

Under the circumstances, it’s understandable that the Obama
Administration should have sought to dial back the controversies, both
by creating a wide-spectrum Advisory Council and by burying in the
Justice Department the contentious issue of whether FBOs can be
permitted to discriminate religiously in hiring for jobs supported by
public funds. Yet as Cleveland and Wineburg’s experience shows, just
because you might wish controversies over principle to go away doesn’t
mean that, sooner or later, you don’t have to deal with them.