Associated Baptist Press - 12/3/2008

Associated Baptist Press
December 3, 2008 · (08-118)

David Wilkinson, Executive Director
Robert Marus, Acting Managing Editor/Washington Bureau Chief
Bob Allen, Senior Writer

In this issue
Bush administration leaves major mark on faith-based funding, experts say (849 words)
Study says churches with WMU stronger supporters of SBC (550 words)
Opinion: A doomed, reactionary church? (737 words)

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Bush administration leaves major mark on faith-based funding, experts say
By Robert Marus

WASHINGTON (ABP) -- President Bush's administration and a host of court rulings have indelibly altered the way that the federal government relates to religious charities, according to an analysis by experts on the subject.

"The heart -- the core -- of the faith-based and community initiative is a commitment to equal treatment of faith-based social-welfare providers," said George Washington University professor Bob Tuttle at a Dec. 2 briefing in Washington. "Now, eight years into this, it doesn't seem like such a radical proposition."

Tuttle and George Washington Law colleague Chip Lupu spoke to reporters at the release of their annual "State of the Law Report" for the Roundtable on Religion and Social Welfare Policy. The non-partisan educational organization -- a cooperative effort between the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and the Rockefeller Institute of Government -- has been tracking Bush's effort to expand government funding for religious charities.

While the report has annually tracked changes in the legal status of government-religious partnerships, this year's report analyzed the cumulative changes in the status of such partnerships since Bush took office.

Tuttle said Bush's effort to boost government funding of religious groups has been largely successful. The success owes, he added, mainly to significant changes over the last 10-12 years in how the federal courts view direct government funding for ostensibly secular social services provided by churches and other deeply religious organizations.

"Because of the way that constitutional law developed in the 1970s and 1980s ... religious organizations were frequently -- not always, but frequently -- excluded from government aid programs," Tuttle said. "But in the 1990s, that began to change."

A series of decisions began to lower the high wall that the courts had placed between church and state in regard to direct government funding for social services. Before the late 1990s, religious groups wishing to qualify for grants from most federal social-service programs had to incorporate separately from the churches that supported them and operate much as secular social-service agencies would.

The courts gradually altered that equation, and the welfare-reform legislation of the late 1990s further expanded government funding of churches.

However, Tuttle noted, "When the Supreme Court says something's permitted, there's a big gap between that permission and something actually happening. And I think when you look at the accomplishments of the faith-based initiative, you have to look at this gap."

Tuttle and Lupu's analysis found that, while the courts removed legal barriers to federal funding for religious groups, Bush and his lieutenants also removed many administrative and even cultural barriers that had existed within the executive-branch agencies that administer social-service programs.

"Measured against that standard, the initiative has been, I think, a success that really doesn't have a parallel in administrative law," Tuttle said.

Bush has contended that one of the essential aspects of the faith-based initiative is that religious groups should be able to compete for social-services funding on the same basis as secular agencies without having to alter their religious character.

Part of that character, Lupu noted, is the unique ability of churches to discriminate on the basis of religion in hiring decisions.

"The Bush administration has fought to preserve this aspect of religious character -- the right of faith-based grantees to hire only those of their own faith," he said. "The administration has fought this with every tool at their disposal."

Lupu said the administration has done that through a combination of legislation, administrative decree and what he termed a "very aggressive interpretation" of a law guaranteeing strong protections for religious expression in federal settings.

Federal grant programs for social services are administered by multiple federal agencies and authorized by multiple pieces of legislation. Some include explicit provisions preventing grantees from religious and other kinds of employment discrimination. Some include explicit exceptions to those rules for religious grantees. And many programs are simply silent on the subject of employment discrimination.

The employment-discrimination provisions have been among the most controversial aspects of Bush's faith-based effort. Lupu noted that the incoming Obama administration could choose to reverse some of the Bush interpretations of such provisions in a couple of ways. One is re-interpretation of existing statutes; another is executive orders explicitly reversing Bush policies.

Many supporters of strong church-state separation hope he will do so. But Obama has vowed to continue with at least some of Bush's initiative.

"The fact that Obama said that he was going forward with some version of this on his own and his own life experience as a community organizer suggest that he is quite serious about this," Lupu said.

While an Obama administration would "be sensitive to church-state issues in some ways that a Bush administration might not," he noted, Obama would likely proceed cautiously on any major alterations of Bush's policy with regard to employment discrimination or other provisions of the faith-based initiative.

One reason, he added, is because the employment-discrimination issue is still not a settled one in federal case law.

"I think they're going to make some of those moves slowly, because it's going to take several years for [the legal consensus involving them] to ripen," Lupu said.

Robert Marus is Acting Managing Editor and Washington Bureau Chief of Associated Baptist Press.

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Study says churches with WMU stronger supporters of SBC
By Bob Allen

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (ABP) -- Southern Baptist churches that have Woman's Missionary Union organizations support the denomination's missions programs at significantly higher levels than congregations without WMU, according to an analysis of reported church giving.

Tensions over several issues surfaced in recent years between some Southern Baptist Convention leaders and leaders of the independently governed auxiliary group, founded in 1888 to promote SBC missions. They included WMU's refusal to submit to direct oversight by the denomination and the group's decision to remain part of the Baptist World Alliance women's department after the SBC severed ties with the global Baptist group in 2004.

Despite those differences, a new breakdown of giving patterns suggests missions education by WMU continues to play an important role in inspiring local churches to give more money to SBC home and foreign missions.

A review of annual statistics collected by LifeWay Christian Resources found that churches that have age-level WMU organizations like Girls in Action and Women on Mission support the SBC's unified budget and two annual special missions offerings at higher per-capita levels than those without ongoing missions education.

The study, conducted jointly by WMU and the SBC North American Mission Board, found that churches with missions-education programs supported by one or both of the organizations gave $43.28 per member to the Cooperative Program. That compared to $23.65 per capita by churches without such programs.

Giving to the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering for foreign missions was $3.29 per capita from churches without missions education, compared to $9.05 from those with missions education. Per-member giving for the Annie Armstrong Easter Offering for home missions was $5.34 for churches with missions education, compared to $1.54 for those without.

Wanda Lee, WMU's executive director, acknowledged to a group of Baptist state convention executive directors and editors that "there have been some rocky times" with recent years' leadership transitions at WMU and the SBC's two mission boards, "but we are learning how to work together for missions."

Lee, meeting with Baptist leaders at a Dec. 2-3 briefing at WMU headquarters in Birmingham, Ala., said that communication between the auxiliary and the SBC agencies has improved in the last year.

"Do we always agree about everything?" she asked. "No, but we seek to have healthy communication." She reported on both recent visits and planned future visits from NAMB President Geoff Hammond and Jerry Rankin, president of the SBC's International Mission Board.

WMU recently appointed a full-time liaison to coordinate communication with the two mission boards. WMU staffer Steve Heartsill said he received 7,000 e-mails from IMB personnel in the past year and a comparable number from NAMB workers.

The briefing was scheduled midway through WMU's Nov. 30-Dec. 7 Week of Prayer for International Missions. The national goal for this year's Lottie Moon Christmas Offering is $170 million.

Over 120 years, WMU has helped raise more than $3 billion for international missions by promoting the Lottie Moon offering and $1.1 billion for home missions through the Annie Armstrong offering.

This year WMU produced nearly 4.2 million Christmas prayer guides in six languages, distributed by state WMU organizations to churches in all 50 states, Puerto Rico and Canada. About 174,000 Week of Prayer posters were sent to churches, and 4.8 million Lottie Moon Christmas Offering envelopes were placed in pews in Southern Baptist churches.

Bob Allen is senior writer for Associated Baptist Press.

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Opinion: A doomed, reactionary church?
By David Gushee

(ABP) -- The act of reflecting this week, in class, on the development of Catholic social ethics resonated in an unexpected way with the situation facing Christians today. It became clearer than ever to me that when Christians become cultural reactionaries, they doom the church to irrelevance.

The Catholic story went like this: After the Reformation, for centuries the Catholic Church postured itself in a defensive crouch. It missed the opportunity to respond to the challenge posed by the Reformation. It resisted creative engagement with modern science. It held onto a feudal-agrarian economic vision long after industrialization and capitalism. It resisted political liberalism and modern democratic movements. It resisted egalitarianism in gender relations. It resisted birth control and legal divorce. It resisted its own loss of political power and cultural hegemony. It resisted the separation of church and state.

In all of these matters, the Catholic Church dug in its heels and just said "no."

But in the late 19th century the tide began to turn. Pope Leo XIII added an authoritative Catholic voice to the chorus of Social Gospelers and others who were concerned about the excesses of unfettered laissez-faire capitalism. He released the first modern Catholic social encyclical, Rerum Novarum, in 1891. This document didn't just say "no." It engaged contemporary culture, especially economic life. It sought to draw on the best of the Catholic tradition in order to speak a relevant and helpful word into the culture of the day. That encyclical, for example, treated such issues as the role of the state in economic life, the need for a living wage for workers, economic life as serving the common good, the need for workers' associations, and the profound problems of communism as an alternative to capitalism.

Ever since that time, Catholic leaders have offered periodic declarations in the style of Leo XIII. Some of these declarations have been better and more relevant than others. But all represent a shift from a merely reactionary posture to an effort to engage society constructively. These documents are significant enough that all who study Christian social thought today must consider them.

Now consider the parallel to conservative Protestantism, especially as one finds it in the South.

Ever since the social revolutions of the 1960s, white conservative Protestants basically have been in a defensive crouch. They have missed the opportunity to respond in creative ways to the challenges posed by the social changes that have occurred since that time. They responded to the Civil Rights Movement with caution or worse, and many have never come to terms with it -- as evidenced by the unsubtle racism that surfaced during this election season. They responded to the modern feminist movement with scorn. They responded to the sexual revolution with scorn. They responded to critiques of American capitalism and foreign policy with scorn. They responded to the growth in American ideological and population diversity with scorn.

This has positioned conservative white Protestantism as a culturally reactionary religion in a rapidly changing culture. It is a religion that just says "no" to everything about American culture as it has developed since the 1960s.

Such a religion appeals to a sizable but rapidly shrinking proportion of the American population. It is most appealing in the small town and rural South and Midwest. It characterizes the rhetoric of most Christian Right groups.

There are moments when all that Christians can do in relation to culture is dig in their heels and say "no." Certainly that was true in Nazi Germany. There could be no accommodating with the absolute evil of that regime, and those who did accommodate have been rightly viewed as a disgrace to the gospel.

Everyone has to make their own judgment about how to read "the signs of the times" in any particular cultural moment. As for me, I think this is a time for Christian engagement rather than reaction; for creative participation rather than angry retreat. I believe that, if conservative white Protestants and their leaders continue in a stance of mere reaction, they will doom themselves and their version of Christianity to irrelevance.

Cultural engagement does not mean the abandonment of Christian Scripture or tradition. It means creative reflection on the contemporary significance of Scripture and tradition to the culture in which we have been placed. It means engagement with real people around us right now, not dreamy retreat to an earlier era that is now gone forever.

David Gushee is distinguished university professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University.