Pentecostal Minister Is Obama’s Choice to Head Religious-Charities Office

President Barack Obama last week was poised to appoint Joshua DuBois, a young Pentecostal minister, to lead a White House effort to help religious groups and charities fight poverty and other social ills.

Mr. DuBois, 26, will head the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, a revamped version of the office started by President George W. Bush.

In addition, Mr. Obama was set to create a council of religious leaders to advise him on antipoverty efforts and other issues.

Mr. DuBois, who holds a master’s degree in public and international affairs from Princeton University, is a minister at the Calvary Praise and Worship Center, a small church in Cambridge, Mass., and served as an aide to Mr. Obama when he was a senator from Illinois.

As part of the Obama presidential campaign, Mr. DuBois led efforts to connect the candidate with evangelical Christians and other religious groups.

“He’s built a lot of good relationships with leaders in the faith community — Christian, Jewish, Muslim — and across political lines. He’s had a lot of conversations with people who were in the Bush White House or who supported the last administration,” said Jim Wallis, the president of Sojourners, a religious organization in Washington.

Mr. Wallis, who serves on Mr. Obama’s religious advisory council, said he expects that Mr. Obama will expand the government’s work to assist religious charities.

He said the office would act in a more bipartisan manner than it did under President Bush and do more to connect religious groups and charities with a broader government plan to curb the number of impoverished and hungry Americans.

“You’re going to see a real poverty agenda coming out of the faith-based office,” he said.

Employment Policies

Also in contrast to the way the office operated under President Bush, Mr. DuBois is unlikely to be the White House official deciding how the federal government should provide grants to churches and other groups, said Robert W. Tuttle, professor of religion and law at the George Washington Law School.

Mr. Bush’s appointees to lead the office primarily were experts in such regulations. Given Mr. DuBois’s relative inexperience in Washington, “I doubt seriously he will be the one reshaping policy on aid” for religious organizations, Mr. Tuttle said.

One policy, in particular, is under scrutiny. Legislation passed under the Bush administration allowed religious organizations that receive federal grants to discriminate in their hiring based on religion.

Many Christian aid organizations support the employment provision, saying they want to have staff members who embrace their spiritual values.

World Vision USA, in Federal Way, Wash., for example, hires only people who accept the Apostles’ Creed and a “statement of faith” based on Christian beliefs. If that practice were to be forbidden, the organization has said, it would consider suing the government.

Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a Washington civil-liberties group, has made a similar legal threat if President Obama continues to allow government grants to support religious organizations that engage in such hiring.

“In an ideal world, there would be no faith-based office,” the Rev Barry W. Lynn, the group’s president, said in a statement. “But if we must have this office, certain steps must be taken to bring it into line with the commands of the Constitution.”

On the campaign trail, Mr. Obama promised to prohibit the hiring practice.

But Mr. Wallis, of Sojourners, said he expects the president will not rewrite the rule, but have a discussion with faith leaders to “clarify” it.

“I don’t expect the administration to do anything big, or new, or radical in changing the status quo,” he said. Given the current economic crisis, “this is not the time to disrupt effective partnerships with faith-based organizations.”