Bush’s Charity Aide: In His Own Words
February 8, 2001 | Read Time: 2 minutes
John J. DiIulio Jr., President Bush’s new White House adviser on faith-based and community initiatives, is a
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political-science scholar who has written widely about the role of religious organizations in dealing with social problems. Following are excerpts of his writings and statements:
This is not just about money. In fact, the comparative advantage of faith-based organizations is that, at the end of the day, while they need some basic support — public, private, philanthropic, corporate — what they do is no less than some form of moral jujitsu.
Unlike almost any social-service provider, they intervene in the lives of these children. They do not perform the type of deficit assessment that says, “You’re an education problem, and you have a father that’s incarcerated and you have a mother who is on crack or on welfare, and eventually after we address all of these various needs, we will be able to consider you a whole person and expect something from you.”
They perform a moral jujitsu where they say, “Right now, put all of that hurt and pain and dysfunction on God, and we have something for you, we have something better for you.”
— Remarks at a 1999 conference held by the Manhattan Institute and Empower America
Opening competition for federal funds to all, including tiny local faith-based organizations, could usher in a new era of results-driven public administration. Scores of federal social-welfare programs could be cured or killed, improved or immobilized, refunded or forgotten. Public servants at all levels of government could be rewarded according to whether they and their proxies actually achieved positive results (safer, healthier, better housed kids, clean and sober former addicts, ex-welfare moms with steady jobs), not whether they pushed relevant papers, obeyed perverse regulations, or supervised bigger staffs.
— From a column he wrote in The Weekly Standard, August 23, 1999
Citizens who for whatever reasons are nervous about religion or enhanced church-state partnerships should focus on the consistent finding that faith-based outreach efforts benefit poor unchurched neighborhood children most of all.
If these churches are so willing to support and reach out to “the least of these,” surely they deserve the human and financial support of the rest of us — corporations, foundations, other Christian churches, and where appropriate, government agencies.
— From “Supporting Black Churches,” an article in What’s God Got to Do With the American Experiment?, a book of essays Mr. DiIulio edited with E.J. Dionne Jr.
