Interfaith leaders have called for President Bush to close the White House Office of Faith-based and Community Initiatives a week after the resignation of the office's director.
"The so-called faith-based initiative was a bad idea as a campaign promise in 1999 and it's even a worse idea today after we have seen the bureaucratic and political realities growing out of this initiative," said the Rev. C. Welton Gaddy, president of the Interfaith Alliance, speaking to reporters in a Wednesday (April 26, 2006) audio news conference hosted by his Washington-based organization. "The faith-based initiative turns houses of worship who receive its funds into contract employees of the federal government."
Jim Towey, the director of the office since 2002, announced his resignation on April 18. He will leave by June 2 to become president of St. Vincent College, a Catholic school in Latrobe, Pa. Towey told Religion News Service shortly after his announcement that the office will stay open, despite the hopes of its critics. "That's wishful thinking," he said. "The reality is this initiative has taken root in America and will carry on after the president leaves office."
But opponents to the office question the connections it may foster between church and state. They charge that the office has sapped some religious groups' ability to speak out against the government. "If you're bound to the government, it's very, very difficult to have that kind of prophetic voice," said Bishop Jane Holmes Dixon, senior adviser to the Interfaith Alliance board of directors and a retired Episcopal bishop of Washington.
Imam Mahdi Bray, executive director of the Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation, said, "As an African-American, I'm deeply concerned about the fact that the faith-based initiative has been used in a partisan manner often to recruit African-American pastors into the Republican Party."
Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a Washington-based watchdog group, also has urged Bush to close the office with Towey's departure. The Rev. Barry Lynn, its executive director, said Towey "waged an unrelenting war against church-state separation."
- Religion News Service, May 3, 2006