Current is grateful for P&R Publishing’s permission to serialize Marvin Olasky’s memoir, Pivot Points: Adventures on the Road to Christian Contentment.
Chapter 14: Washington Disappointment
Despite his worries, Chuck Colson attends the late January 2001 White House meeting that formally announces President Bush’s faith-based initiative. He and others gather at the northwest corner of the White House grounds to receive badges, go through security, and be escorted to a dark-paneled, leather-chaired room.
Staffers make sure a nun from New York, an imam from a Detroit mosque, and a long-bearded rabbi literally have seats at the table—a politically astute move to signal that “faith-based” is not synonymous with evangelical. Colson sits off-table. I stand at the back, where I belong. Then Bush, without any ruffles and flourishes, slips in.
He sums up his goal—“change lives by changing hearts”—and promises to “stand up for what I believe.” Divisions are apparent even at this meeting of Bush supporters. One supporter of decentralized approaches asks Bush whether he will favor “people in stainless steel buildings with PhD degrees” over volunteers from churches. Bush reassures him that his administration will view person-to-person compassion as “the core of America.”
In February I travel with my youngest son to Washington. We visit John DiIulio in his freshly carpeted, high-ceilinged office next to the White House. As my ten-year-old spins on a revolving office chair, John says he wants to keep the grant-making power in Washington but make it scientific, with grants going to the most effective programs.
Although I’m not a social scientist, I see problems: Who will decide the definition of effectiveness? How long will a person have to be sober to no longer be an addict? Do we really want government officials deciding among various religious programs or decreeing how much and what kind of religion is acceptable?
For instance, can a budgeting class use Psalm 37 when talking about debt (“The wicked borrows but does not pay back, but the righteous is generous and gives”)? Is that over-the-line? DiIulio says religion-based programs, to be eligible for federal grants, must be devoid of religious teaching or evangelism.
I’m not the only skeptic. In March DiIulio and I take our differences to the National Association of Evangelicals conference in Dallas. John tries to reassure the audience that the faith-based initiative is not headed the wrong way, but his wonkish vocabulary is deeply out of step: “We’re taking a deliberative approach and focusing first on conducting our audits, studying competing ideas, weighing competing perspectives, and looking forward to . . . improving government-by-proxy programs through performance-based grant-making.”
What does that mean at ground level? It means programs like Teen Challenge and others that are the exemplars of compassionate conservatism won’t qualify for DiIulio’s direct grants because they urge “each beneficiary to accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.” DiIulio says an “indivisibly conversion-centered ‘treatment modality’” takes the following form: “Your problem is X. To cure X, believe Y.” A government grant can’t go to a program based in a religious belief.
But what if an effective program says, “To cure X, believe J[esus]”? Should it be excluded? If so—and thinking back to 1995’s battle between Teen Challenge and the Texas Commission on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse—it looks like Bush is now on TCADA’s side.
Month after month in 2001, legislators discuss bills promoting aspects of Bush’s faith-based initiative. The Senate version pushed by Iowa Senator (and Finance Committee head) Chuck Grassley includes a five-hundred-dollar tax credit provision. Experts say it could cost the US Treasury $6 billion—but they also predict it will boost charitable giving to benefit the poor by $15 billion.
The House version, though, has no tax credits. I’m hopeful the final bill will include a compromise—say a two-hundred fifty-dollar credit, not much but a start. That is not to be. The final version omits the credits entirely. Five years later, David Kuo’s book Tempting Faith gives the definitive story.
Kuo, DiIulio’s top deputy, writes that both “Republican and Democratic jaws hit the floor” when the White House directly “told Grassley to get rid of the charity tax credits.” Bush’s goal is a balanced budget, and accomplishing that means choosing between two sets of supplicants. Group one comprises heirs to the Mars candy, Gallo wine, and Campbell soup empires. They want repeal of the estate tax. Kuo describes the second group as “a motley crew of poor ministers, tiny charities, and small advocacy groups.” They favor tax credits.
Given the way money talks, the desires of Mars, Gallo, and Campbell leave the Bush administration willing to break the tax credit campaign promise. In May 2001, evangelical support for Bush’s faith-based initiative tanks. That month Bush tells ministry leaders, “We will work tirelessly to make sure that bureaucracies don’t stifle the very reason you exist in the first place, and the power of your ministries, which is faith.” Many don’t believe him.
I learn about that reaction by surveying leaders of several hundred gospel missions devoted to the poor and the homeless. Only 4 percent are positive about federal grant-making. Only a few more favor vouchers. Nine out of ten worry that if they get money directly from the government, the government will tell them what they can and can’t do. Typical comment: “Any vouchers or direct government grants would NOT be acceptable to our ministry as these would undoubtedly lead to government controls and restrictions on the Christian nature of our ministry.”
As long as the focus is on grants, compromise seems impossible. Secularists don’t want any money going to support “proselytizing.” Ministries worry about government capture. Bush lobbies House members directly and pleads, “I want you to overlook some of the details and get it done.” The “get it done” plea becomes a mantra. John DiIulio later recalls a senior staffer saying, “Get a faith bill, any faith bill.” Legislative dealmaking is full of twists and turns, but by August 2001 the final result is clear: no bill.
John DiIulio that month announces his resignation, citing health concerns. September 11 signals the end of compassionate conservatism as a Bush priority. That morning John DiIulio and David Kuo have their last White House breakfast together. Kuo in Tempting Faith describes the scene: “We heard voices from the stairwell yelling, ‘Get out! Get out! Everyone get out.’ . . . [The two of us] were like Laurel and Hardy. John is short and very
large. I am very tall and relatively skinny. . . . John and I looked at each other and ran. . . . John was still toting the garment bag he had carried in to breakfast.”
The White House is not hit, but on 9/11 George W. Bush moves from being a domestic-policy-oriented president to a war president. War and compassion don’t go together well. War is hell. War is also expensive. Bush, viewing the war on terror as his presidency’s defining issue, maintains Democratic support for it by accepting budget-busting increases in conventional domestic spending. Kuo stays on throughout 2002 and receives clear orders from a senior leader to “forget about the f——g CARE Act.” Tax credits, rest in peace.
By the end of 2001, compassionate conservatism is a political punchline. Bush speechwriter David Frum accurately describes it as “less like a philosophy than a marketing slogan.” As its champion, I’m as out of style in Washington as the leisure suits I wore as a poor graduate student. It’s not quite a pivot, because even before my DC time I’m skeptical of what transpires there, but it’s an educational exclamation point: as Psalm 146 says, “Put not your trust in princes.”
