How do you get a single item to both shrink and grow at the same time? Ask Barack Obama, who did exactly that when he suggested that the Bush initiatives didn’t go far enough. The expansion comes in his commitment to investing more dollars in faith-based institutions addressing big social and environmental issues.

“The challenges we face today — from saving our planet to ending poverty — are simply too big for government to solve alone,” Mr. Obama said outside a community center here. “We need an all-hands-on-deck approach.”

But it should be precisely the kind of expansion that liberals love, because it comes with the caveat that the “Federal dollars that go directly to churches, temples and mosques can only be used on secular programs.” In fact, Obama would go so far as to revoke the right of those institutions receiving federal money to use religion as a factor in deciding who they hire for such programs. And that is the shrinkage. It would have been nice of him to mention that, when he accused the current administration of not going far enough, when he meant that they went BOTH too far and not far enough.
Either way, his desire to simultaneously expand and contract the federal faith-based initiative is, contrary to Michele McGinty’s post yesterday, a novel and potentially significant thing. Perhaps that is why it bothers her and anyone else who wants a candidate who remains an orthodox liberal.

They really may be so hostile to religion that the very idea that religious institutions will grow, simply makes them nuts, even if those institutions are doing work which those same people champion on a daily basis. Talk about being a prisoner of dogma!
Of course the response by religiously conservative leaders is no bargain either. Responding to Obama’s plan to disallow consideration of religion in hiring for federally funded programs, National Association of Evangelicals’, Richard Cizik commented:

“For those of who us who believe in protecting the integrity of our religious institutions, this is a fundamental right. He’s rolling back the Bush protections. That’s extremely disappointing.”

And don’t miss Richard Land, head of the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, who said:

“If you can’t hire people within your faith community, then you’ve lost the distinctive that is the reason why faith-based programs exist in the first place.”

I think that Mr. Cizik may be confusing integrity with exclusivity. Would a Christian program to end poverty lose its integrity if a non-Christian worked on it? Would it somehow be less effective, or even less Christian? I sure hope not. And I’m certain that it wouldn’t be less Jewish if it were a Jewish program. In fact, it might make it “more Jewish,” but that’s not the kind of language I use, so I won’t go there.
And what about Mr. Land’s assertion that faith-based programs exist so they can hire only people of that faith? Don’t they exist to serve those in need? Don’t they exist because they turned professed values and heart-felt prayers into reality? If I were Land, I would worry more about how faith-based programs serve with distinction, and not what makes them distinctive.
So, while I would like a bit more meat on the bones of this plan, it seems to me that Obama is arguing for more religious involvement in the common good, which strikes me as a great thing – even if it simultaneously disquiets those who are hostile to religion on the one hand and those who think that theirs must be unique on the other. Actually, that’s one of the best things about it.