How Strategic Mistakes Derailed the Bush Faith-Based Plan

By Peter Frumkin

The events of September 11 eclipsed President Bush’s plan to funnel more government money to religious charities, and in recent weeks the White House has decided against fighting to get Congress to approve its entire plan. In the short run, at least, the President will try to persuade Congress to pass a few noncontroversial measures, such as tax incentives to encourage people and corporations to give more.

But the president’s faith-based plan was in trouble even before the national zeitgeist shifted to terrorism, homeland security, and war. It narrowly passed in the House last summer, and faced renewed opposition in the Senate this fall.

What undermined the plan, more than anything else, were several strategic missteps by the administration in its effort to sell it to policy makers and the public.

When the White House initially made its case, it focused on the claim that faith-based organizations faced a number of obstacles in gaining access to government money and contracts.

Among those obstacles, it said, were administrative rules restricting religious activity, poor access to information on government-grant opportunities, and burdensome administrative requirements. When the White House tried to make broader, less-technical arguments for increased aid to drug-treatment, after-school, meal-assistance, and other programs run by organizations animated by faith, it fell back on familiar claims that faith-based organizations are both more effective and more compassionate than secular ones.

But the administration never fully supported either of those claims.

The White House should have been more upfront about the fact that no large-scale evaluation has ever convincingly demonstrated that a faith component makes service delivery more effective.

The administration also erred by insisting that religious groups were in some way more compassionate and caring than social-service workers in secular organizations.

Emphasizing this claim was off-putting to many in Congress, and it inflamed liberals who do not share conservatives’ doubts about government’s ability to deliver critical human services through secular groups.

The Bush administration could have prevailed last year in the debate over the role of faith in providing social services if, early in its campaign, it had replaced the rhetoric of faith and compassion with arguments geared toward generating public support and passing legislation. That should have meant making its case with language that recognized the profound ideological divisions over civil liberties and equality that were exposed in the last presidential election.

A key starting point for such an argument should have been that allowing government to support faith-based social-service groups, in addition to secular ones, is important to the values of pluralism and inclusiveness.

Those values should have been linked to a related point: that people whose efforts are inspired by faith deserve an equal opportunity to put their models of helping into practice, rather than remain shut out of many government-supported efforts aimed at aiding the most disadvantaged people.

By emphasizing the values of inclusiveness and pluralism, the White House could have made it very hard for Democrats to argue that the faith-based plan was grounded in intolerance and exclusion — an assertion that Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, Democrat of South Dakota, made in explaining his reluctance to move forward on the president’s plan.

It is intolerant and divisive in itself to deny congregations and other faith-driven nonprofit groups the chance to try their ideas, and the administration should have articulated that. Instead, the White House made other, less-persuasive arguments, and it fought to allow faith groups to discriminate on religious grounds in their hiring practices, which some viewed as a form of bigotry.

By overselling the effectiveness of faith-based programs and claiming higher motives and more compassion for those with religious affiliations, the Bush administration has now been forced by the recent security threats to postpone indefinitely a key item in its agenda.

It is still possible that the faith plan will re-emerge in a year or two. But it may take a lot longer for events and politics to be aligned in such a way that it will once again be feasible to talk about faith and helping in ways that everyone is able to accept.

In the end, when the time was really ripe, we just never heard the right arguments for an expanded role for religion in the delivery of social services.

Peter Frumkin is a senior fellow of the New America Foundation.