Reaching out to evangelical voters, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is announcing plans to expand President Bush’s program steering federal social service dollars to religious groups and—in a move sure to cause controversy—support some ability to hire and fire based on faith.
Obama wooing evangelicals? To some extent. But don’t forget that Obama became a Christian in an African-American church, and black churches tend to be more involved with providing social services in their neighborhoods than your average white evangelical church in the suburbs. How could Obama not keep the faith-based initiative without breaking faith with the black church?
African-American churches, by and large, also have fewer problems with the notion of accepting government money than white churches.
This graf in the AP story, though, made me go “huh”:
Like Bush, Obama was arguing that religious organizations can and should play a bigger role in serving the poor and meeting other social needs. But while Bush argued that the strength of religious charities lies primarily in shared religious identity between workers and recipients, Obama was to tout the benefits of their “bottom-up” approach.
I don’t recall ever reading that Bush was making a connection between the faith of the service provider and the faith of the recipient. Remember that Don Eberly of East Hempfield was a deputy director in the Bush Office of Faith-based and Community Initiatives early on, so we talked about the whole concept — and his emphasis always was on the grass-roots effectiveness of faith-based charities. Just like Obama.
