When George W. Bush was president, one of his top priorities was making it easier for religious organizations to access federal funding for social service programs, or so he claimed.
But Rebecca Sager, a professor of sociology at Loyola Marymount University, says the rise of government support for faith-based initiatives wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
“Groups like yours have harnessed a power that no government bureaucracy can match,” Bush told a convention of faith-based groups in 2008. “So when I came to Washington, my goal was to ensure that government made you a full partner in our efforts to serve those in need.”
According to Sager, politicians were the real beneficiaries of Bush’s program, and its greatest impact was to blur the line between church and state.
“What I found is that instead of a commitment to helping these faith-based groups do new and improved social services, what they did instead was really more about helping politicians that were supporting the initiatives,” Sager said. “They were paying lip service to these groups, but not giving them the funds and resources to do the kind of social services they wanted to do.”
Sager conducted hundreds of interviews and reviewed thousands of pages of government documents during the research for her recent book, “Faith, Politics, and Power: The Politics of Faith-Based Initiatives.” What she uncovered was an effort during the Bush Administration to score political points often at the expense of the very organizations supposedly being offered greater government funding.
“The vast majority of faith-based offices (set up in each state) had no budget besides basic operating expenses. Less than half of them were led by full-time appointees,” Sager said. “That’s a real symbolic way of saying we support faith-based groups, and trying to get political advantage, without having to put any money behind actually supporting those groups.”
While religious organizations had always been eligible for federal grants to conduct certain activities, the Bush Administration’s drive to streamline that process leaves a lot of questions unanswered.
“States are doing a lot of legislative and bureaucratic activity that is blurry. It’s not very well defined where the line is any more,” Sager said. “What you really kind of end up with is 50 different types of church and state relationships. There’s really no one uniform standard of what that looks like.”
Others have raised criticisms of the program, including John DiIulio, the former director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, and David Kuo, a former deputy director in the same office. But Sager’s book may be the most in-depth look at the subject yet.
She’ll be speaking at a symposium on the subject of faith-based initiatives sponsored by the Brookings Institute in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 18.