Where Is the Faith-Based Revolution Headed?

Fourth Quarter 2002

An Interview with Stanley W. Carlson-Thies

Public Justice Report: You were one of the key figures in developing what is now called the faith-based initiative in social policy. How did your involvement come about? How did you envision it? What were the circumstances that sparked your thinking and engagement?

Carlson-Thies: The short answer is: Providence. I don't mean that lightly, and I don't want to claim a particular divine blessing. What I mean is that, for all my long-term interest in the topic, and all the specific things I've worked on that relate to it, the opportunities I've been given have gone far beyond anything I ever planned. I didn't grow up thinking I'd serve in the White House!

This is a clear case of standing on the shoulders of others, including people like Abraham Kuyper and Pope Leo XIII who, late in the 19th century, pushed forward an idea of Christian political pluralism. By the way, a Dutch newspaper just this year published a lengthy article on "Abraham Kuyper in the White House," discussing how Christian pluralist ideas were being developed in the United States by the Center for Public Justice and how these ideas helped shape President Bush's faith-based initiative through my work with the administration.

Through my work at the Center in the 1990s, I got in touch with a taskforce in Texas that was investigating how to improve partnerships within the state, even before Charitable Choice became federal law. Once it was adopted, Don Willett, who was a key part of Governor Bush's policy shop, invited Carl Esbeck and me to consult with key state agencies about how to implement the new rules. Carl is a long-time friend of the Center and is the law professor who originally designed the Charitable Choice concept.

My intensive working relationship with Texas officials led to an invitation to be part of a team advising the Bush presidential campaign on civil society issues as a distinct element of domestic policy. And when Bush became president, the transition team sought out people who had been working on faith-based policy and faith-based action. I was able then to help design the first steps of the President's faith initiative and was recruited to be part of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives (OFBCI) when it opened on Feb. 20, 2001.

PJR: Where do things stand right now in Congress, the states, and the courts, with regard to the changing relationship between government welfare policies and non-government organizations that serve those in need?

Carlson-Thies: We're now in a paradoxical situation. The path-breaking change in the area of government partnerships with faith-based social-service organizations took place with the adoption of Charitable Choice as part of the 1996 federal welfare reform law. It set out new rules for how government could fund services for welfare families. A little later, before the end of the Clinton administration, Congress included the same Charitable Choice principles in some additional laws. The rules now also apply to the basic funding for Community Action Agencies and to federal drug treatment money.

After President Bush was inaugurated and introduced his initiative to welcome faith-based and community-based groups as partners with government, what grabbed the headlines was the move in the House of Representatives to expand Charitable Choice to additional federal social service programs. But for some reason, with George W. Bush instead of Bill Clinton in the White House, many members of Congress, win) had voted many times for Charitable Choice, all of a sudden thought it was the worst idea they'd ever seen.

Here's the paradox. Under Bill Clinton, Congress adopted Charitable Choice, but state and local governments were slow to put the principles into practice. Under George W. Bush, Congress is balking at Charitable Choice, but state and local governments are catching up by increasingly changing their practices to comply with Charitable Choice!

Time courts—notably the U. S. Supreme Court in its recent Zelman decision supporting the Cleveland school voucher program—are continuing to shift from strict separationism to neutrality in order to include rather than exclude explicitly faith-based institutions when the government provides benefits or funding to nongovernmental groups.

PJR: What did you learn about executive action and administration while serving in the Bush White House? Why did you resign?

Carlson-Thies: I learned that the typical White House salary won't make anyone rich, and that you can listen to a large number of audio books if you drive daily from Annapolis to the White House! Beyond that, several things stick out in my memory.

People in political office are charged with doing and stopping things. Action is not optional. You can't decide to drop a project because you have a better idea of what you'd like to do. You can't start something just because you are convinced it is a good thing to do. That's a very different situation than working in an outside group like the Center for Public Justice where much time has to be spent on creative efforts simply to get the attention of office holders!

Two other contrasts also impressed me. One is how immediately practical everything has to be. For example, over a period of several weeks, I helped to fine-tune some legal language to safeguard faith-based groups in a proposed bill. This involved many meetings, many phone calls, many, many e-mails, and just when we had the perfect language, someone higher up decided that we needed a different approach. So instead of being able to use all those finely crafted lines of legal text, we were only able to insert two words and a comma in the bill.

Second, the need to be practical has a negative side: paying attention to data and arguments in a purely utilitarian way. Decisions have to be made; opponents have to be parried; friends have to be encouraged. Even though I was in a policy position and not an administrator or liaison to Congress, there was little time to think about foundational issues.

A large part of my time in OFBCI was devoted to helping establish five Centers for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives that were the counterparts to the White House OFBCI in major federal departments (Housing and Urban Development, Health and Human Services, Justice, Education, and Labor). I worked closely with those Centers to help them carry out their first major task-auditing their social programs to determine what barriers existed to the full participation of faith-based and community-based organizations. I helped draft the resulting report released a year ago, "Unlevel Playing Field," which you might call the federal government's dirty linen, hung out in public for all to see.

By the time I left OFBCI in May of this year, I was confident that a new shape was being given to the administration of federal social service spending. But the tone of the initiative had shifted a bit. There had been months of determined onslaught against Charitable Choice from many in Congress and a constant drumbeat from much of the press that the whole intent of the President's initiative is to promote discrimination in hiring by religious groups. In response, the White House toned down the crucial message that originally had been very clear: it is wrong to invite faith-based groups to partner more closely with government unless the government is willing to more fully protect the religious autonomy of those groups.

I don't think the administration cares any less about religious liberty, but the effect of downplaying this foundational matter is to make it seem that the key aim is to persuade more faith-based groups to partner with government, rather than to persuade the government to become more hospitable to the faith-based groups that want to safeguard their faith basis. Once I was convinced that I could raise the religious liberty concern more effectively from outside than from inside OFBCI, it was time to go. As I told the President when I had my departure photo taken with him, I had decided that I could best contribute to the faith-based movement from a different place.

PJR: How do you look to the future on these issues? What are the challenges that the Center for Public Justice and other organizations should take up now and in the near future?

Carlson-Thies: I'm an optimistic pessimist on these issues. I'm optimistic because of the administration's deep commitment to a significant change in how the federal government relates to service groups that take their faith seriously, and because of all the signs of change in the policies and practices of state and local governments. I'm optimistic, too, because what we see in the United States is part of what is going on in many places around the world.

But I'm a pessimist because real change to protect religious liberty involves hard decisions and it is not clear that the public or the decision makers want to make some of the hard decisions. A clear case in point is protecting the liberty of religious organizations that take faith into account in their employment policies. Too many citizens and journalists persist in thinking that this is a matter of rank discrimination even though they will readily admit that it would be intolerable to ask a Democratic Senator to hire Republican staffers or to force Planned Parenthood to employ a right-to-life spokeswoman.

But, despite some pessimism, I am convinced that this is a prime time to make advances in promoting religious liberty where government intersects with social services and education. We do have a strong religious liberty tradition, and as our society becomes even more multi-faith, I think it will become more and more obvious that government should honor all convictions and not push religious views and institutions out to the margins of society and into private corners.

If I am right, then one thing that defenders of religious liberty must do is to work even harder to help shape the details of policy and law. It isn't enough to make a loud noise in the public arena demanding fairness for people of faith. We need to be sure we are raising up civil servants, lawyers, policy experts, judges, and others who can work out in specific detail what genuine pluralism entails for employment policy or a charter school law. I think one of our biggest challenges today is to deepen our faith commitment and let it flower into specific ways of achieving public pluralism. Maybe that's one of the Christian community's key contributions to the common good these days.

Dr. Carlson-Thies is Acting Director of the Civitas Program in Faith and Public Affairs and a Fellow of the Center for Public Justice.