Faith-Based Initiatives: ThirdWay Conceived, Orchestrated, and Supported

[AtomicKitten]

The Faith-Based Initiative Re-Ups
by Dennis R. Hoover (from 2005)

The faith-based initiative is back. Or so it seems to President Bush, who at a March 1 White House Faith-based and Community Initiatives Leadership Conference announced ambitious plans for advancing the initiative in his second term.

What really caught journalists’ attention, however, was some praise for it from another politician—Sen. Hilary Rodham Clinton. “There is no contradiction between support for faith-based initiatives and upholding our constitutional principles,” Clinton declared in keynoting an awards ceremony at a faith-based agency in Boston on the eve of Bush’s second inauguration, according to a report by Michael Jonas in the Boston Globe. “I’ve always been a praying person,” she added.

This high-profile (re)emergence of seeming bipartisanship underscores a confusion that has plagued coverage of the faith-based initiative since the beginning of the Bush administration: Is the initiative a creature of the right wing, a sop to socially conservative evangelicals? Or is it a manifestation of “third way” politics—an item on Bush’s (short) list of centrist achievements with which a savvy 2008 Democratic presidential hopeful might want to be associated?

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The answer proposed by some Democrats (and warmly contested by others) is to tack to the center on hot-button issues involving religion. As Rev. Eugene Rivers, a prominent African-American Democrat and long-time backer of the faith-based initiative, explained to the Boston Herald’s Howard Manly January 4, “Liberals, especially those high-minded liberals, really don’t understand the faith factor. This move by Sen. Clinton should be particularly important to Democrats given the significance of the values issue in the recent election.”

For Hilary Clinton the strategy is a family favorite. It was her husband, after all, who signed into law the first legislative version of the faith-based initiative—the “charitable choice” provision introduced into the 1996 welfare reform bill by then-senator John Ashcroft of Missouri.

“Sen. Clinton Goes Right; Like Former President Bill Clinton Before Her, She’s Paving a ‘Third Way’ Between Liberalism and Conservatism,” ran the headline on Jerry Zremski’s A1 story in the March 20 Buffalo News. Zremski took Sen. Clinton’s rhetorical embrace of the faith-based initiative as one of several signs of a serious effort to shed her image as a left-liberal icon.

more at http://www.trincoll.edu/depts/csrpl/RINVol8No1/FaithBasedInitiativeReups.htm