John DiIulio, head of the White House Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, resigned his post late last week. Critics have chargedthat the departure comes after the Bush Administration focused itsfaith-based efforts too narrowly on evangelical Christian churches,while leaving black churches -- whose programs DiIulio has stronglyendorsed -- out in the cold. Reverend Eugene Rivers, a prominent blackminister who had previously endorsed Bush's faith based initiative,lashed out at the Bush Administration, charging, "The message inProfessor DiIulio's departure is that the black and the poor in theinner cities can go to hell. It sends a signal that the faith-basedoffice will just be a financial watering hole for the right-wing whiteevangelists."
This American Prospect article ("Bad Faith," July 30, 2001) proves Rivers is not the only leader to charge the Bush Administration with making empty promises to black churches.
Bishop Harold Ray is hopping mad. "There is open conflictbetween what's being said and what's being done," he fumes. Ray, an AfricanAmerican, is talking about President Bush's program to give churches tax dollarsto run social services--specifically, the fact that Bush has just rescinded acampaign pledge that would have increased charitable giving by some $15 billion(much of it to religious organizations like the Redemptive Life Fellowship thatRay runs in West Palm Beach) by allowing a charitable deduction for taxpayers whodon't itemize their deductions. The move comes on the heels of another brokenpromise: In January, Bush pledged to create a $700-million "federal CompassionCapital Fund" to help launch "faith-based" programs in the inner city. This fund,he said, would help churches pursue their "focused and noble mission" of stampingout teen pregnancy, drug addiction, illiteracy, and homelessness. Yet somehowthat noble mission fell by the wayside when Bush drew up his budget: It includednot a cent for the Compassion Capital Fund.
It may not be surprising to learn that Harold Ray, as a black clergyman, isupset over the president's actions. Only Ray isn't your typical black minister.Two weeks before this outburst, he points out, The Wall Street Journal described him as "the president's strongest ally in the faith-based effort." That the president's strongest ally is suddenly disillusioned with the faith-based plan is a good indication of just how dismal its prospects are and just how broad the disaffection is among black clergy. For Bush, who publicly courted black ministers, it is a stinging rebuke. But it shouldn't be a surprising one. Since the high-profile rollout of his plan in January, many black ministers have quietly come to believe that Bush has abandoned them. And with his faith-based program in jeopardy of dying in Congress, they in turn are now poised to abandon him.
From its inception, Bush's faith-based program met with greateropposition than the administration had expected. Liberals have opposed theprivatization of social services and the threat to the church-state divide.Conservatives were concerned about expanding government's reach into religion andfeared that churches would become dependent on federal handouts. In February,Bush was dealt his greatest blow when Pat Robertson, head of the ChristianCoalition, publicly opposed the plan. Despite these setbacks, Bush did appear towin over one important constituency: black ministers. This was no small featgiven the dismal support he received from black voters in the presidentialelection.
Bush had begun making overtures toward the black clergy well before he tookoffice. In December he hosted a meeting of religious leaders at the First BaptistChurch in Austin, Texas, to sketch out his faith-based plan. Although Jewish,Catholic, and Islamic leaders were in attendance, the largest group representedwas African-American clergy, whose presence sent an unmistakable message. Thoseparticipating included Harold Ray and leaders of black mega-churches like theReverend Floyd Flake, the Reverend Kirbyjon Caldwell, and Bishop Charles Blake,as well as the Reverend Eugene Rivers, a onetime Gore supporter who quicklybecame one of Bush's most vociferous backers. The meeting produced the desiredeffect. Bush acknowledged that he had "a lot of work to do" with black ministers.In return he drew glowing headlines that highlighted his desire to reach out toblack religious leaders.
But such coverage vastly overstated the facts. Despite the headlines, Bushexcluded officials from the Congress of National Black Churches, which representsthe eight major African-American denominations and includes 65,000 churches and20 million members. Instead he handpicked a few politically sympathetic blackministers and featured them prominently in his public campaign. This distinctionwas largely missed, to the outrage of mainstream black ministers. "In terms ofhow many folks the ministers in attendance represented, it's the comparisonbetween tens of thousands versus tens of millions," says Dr. Robert Franklin,president of the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta. It was leftto Bishop John Hurst Adams, founder of the church congress, to write a letter toThe Washington Post pointing out that "to have a 'national' meeting and not to include such representation is an affront to the black church, its leadership and all African Americans."
Bush continued to talk up his faith-based plan, most visibly in a nationallytelevised address to the U.S. Congress on February 27, and he continued to stressits appeal to urban ministries. The initiative still had critics on both the leftand the right, but Bush began to make headway with mainstream black clergy. Aspresented, his plan pitched programs tailored to inner-city churches. One thatparticularly resonated with black ministers was an initiative geared towardchildren of incarcerated parents. Such specificity impressed members of the blackclergy because it showed that Bush (or his handlers) grasped the type of problemstheir churches regularly faced. "It's significant that he chose that program,because it's a tough-to-reach, hard-to-serve population," says Franklin. "Notmany average congregations have programs for that population."
Bush's $700-million Compassion Capital Fund and his promise to allownon-itemizers to deduct charitable contributions began to engage someAfrican-American church leaders. Blacks give more per capita to their churchesthan whites; and because they are poorer on average than whites, most AfricanAmericans currently take the standard deduction. Allowing a tax break on top ofthat for charitable contributions would benefit blacks--and black churches.
"It was a growing point of excitement," Franklin allows. To conservatives likeRay, it was "new money for new social programs" that churches--which heretoforehad to compete with public-sector organizations for government funding--wouldreceive simply for running worthy programs. And for Democratic ministers who hadgone out on a limb and supported Bush's plan early on, it was confirmation thatthey had correctly discerned the president's good intentions. "When first toutedand talked about, it appeared as though there'd be a large sum of money that wasgoing to be directed to faith-based groups that were successful at doing thingsthe public sector had not," says the Reverend Willie Gable, pastor of the Progressive Baptist Church in New Orleans. On March 19 Bush further bolsteredthis growing goodwill by finally summoning leaders of the Congress of NationalBlack Churches to the White House for a meeting. It was, says Franklin, "a secondopportunity to make a first impression."
But Bush didn't fare much better the second time around. Many clergywho attended were put off by the meeting's lack of depth and the public-relationsblitz that followed. "It was a relationship-building meeting and that's all itwas," complains another attendee, who was angered by the second round ofBush-courts-black-ministers headlines that popped up the next day. "What can youaccomplish in a 40-minute meeting?" Furthermore, Bush declined to address whatfor many black clergy was the most troubling aspect of his proposal. Title VII,the provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that generally bans discriminationin employment, allows bona fide religious organizations to give preference tomembers of their own denomination in hiring. "There remains great confusion inthe minds of many black church leaders over whether this provision would permitchurches to discriminate," says Sullivan Robinson, executive director of theCongress of National Black Churches. "It's particularly troubling to those whowere active in the civil rights struggle. It's a short step from discriminatingby religion to discriminating by race." Adds another attendee: "The fear is thatthe [Title VII] exception will erase everything that anybody who ever fought forcivil rights won." Nevertheless, Bush raised hopes among many black ministers,who saw the belated meeting as a sign that he now understood the importance ofinclusiveness. "They may have gone in with a different intention," Robinsonmuses, "but they found they really needed some institutional backing."
Ministers were particularly disappointed, however, when the next Republicanfaith-based gathering, a workshop in late April run by Bishop Ray and OklahomaRepresentative J.C. Watts, Jr., turned out to be little more than a politicalrally. "There again, they were back to the December-style of handpicking thosealready sympathetic to the president's and the Republican leadership's vision ofa faith-based initiative," says one participant, who came expecting to receiveskills training. "It was a rather galling and premature request for arubber-stamp endorsement." What's more, it was scheduled on the same day as aboard meeting of the Congress of National Black Churches. Meanwhile, blackministers encouraged by the initial White House meeting were growing increasinglyfrustrated that no follow-up dialogue had ensued.
Then, in late May, the Bush administration dropped its bomb: It abandoned thecharitable-giving deduction in favor of greater income-tax reductions that werepart of the president's general tax package. This was soon followed by theelimination of the Compassion Capital Fund. The move dealt a blow to allsupporters of faith-based organizations, but particularly to staunch advocateslike Ray, who was not notified ahead of time. Like other Bush boosters, Ray sayshe was led to believe that the new administration would direct new money toreligious organizations in exchange for their providing stepped-up socialservices. He now faces an unpleasant reality. "The problem is that a lot of thepresident's initiative was clearly going to be tied to the $14 billion or $15billion the charitable deduction would have raised," says Ray. "That was the 'newmoney.' I'd like to know how many government programs are being passed alongwithout the money that was promised to accompany them."
Others aren't waiting for an answer. "It's already dead," says the ReverendCalvin Pressley, executive director of the United Methodist City Society in NewYork City, who has worked with government-funded faith-based programs since the1960s and supports the concept. "In the abstract, it sounds wonderful--Mom, applepie, and faith-based initiatives for churches." But what keeps Pressley fromsupporting Bush's plan is the sense that it's merely an attempt by Republicans torealign the black vote, a conviction that's reinforced by Bush's lofty promisescoupled with his failure to provide funding. "Can churches do better than thegovernment with less money? No, they cannot. Can they do better with the samemoney? Absolutely. But one thing conspicuously absent has been any new money andnew programs." This is a common refrain from ministers across the politicalspectrum from ministers, many of whom predict that Bush's bait-and-switch tacticswith the black clergy will cost him dearly.
Bush's failure to galvanize African-American support is all the moredramatic because he inherited a general sympathy in the black church toward thebroad outlines of his plan. Though initially skeptical of the charitable-choiceclause of the 1996 welfare-reform legislation upon which Bush's faith-basedprogram is modeled, many black ministers were surprised by the positiveexperience they encountered, especially with the Department of Housing and UrbanDevelopment. "There was a slowly evolving perception by many African-Americanclergy that the federal government was interested in changing the culture ofhostility toward working with the faith-based organizations," Franklin says."There had been a developing relationship and, I think, a high degree of trust onthe part of black clergy in President Clinton's and Al Gore's stewardship of theprogram." What's more, black churches were a natural target of support for Bush'splan: Around 70 percent offer some type of social-outreach program. They werealso amenable to the kind of accountability measures that Bush often advocatesbut didn't include in his faith-based proposal. In my interviews with more than adozen black ministers and philanthropic-organization leaders, the one commontheme expressed--in addition to outrage over funding cuts--was the desire tobring business management and accounting discipline to faith-based organizations,which frequently lack such expertise.
On June 27, Bush once again summoned religious leaders to the White House,in a desperate bid to prop up flagging support for legislation he'd originallyhoped the House of Representatives would pass that very day. But this presidentmiscalculated badly by promising the moon to a largely hostileconstituency--black churchgoers--and then provoking their anger by breaking hispromises. Earlier in June, still angling for black support, Bush had declaredthat of all the programs he planned to introduce, his faith-based initiative is"the one that more than anything else will, I believe, distinguish mypresidency." At least among black voters, there's a strong suspicion that he'sexactly right.
