Entries for December 2008

By Dan Gilgoff, God & Country

With the Obama transition team staging a robust religious outreach campaign as part of its policy planning and agency review, one of the biggest questions emerging—and one over which there appears to be significant disagreement in Democratic ranks—is how Obama will turn President Bush's controversial Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives into his own White House Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.

One major issue is exactly how Obama will alter the Bush-era exemption from complying with federal nondiscrimination hiring laws applied to faith-based groups receiving federal funds. That exemption allows Baptist groups to hire only Baptists, Catholic groups to hire just Catholics, etc. Some religious groups say they need that kind of discretion to fulfill their missions, even though they're not allowed to use federal dollars to underwrite religious worship, instruction, or proselytization.

The AP has a story asking if Rick Warren will invoke Jesus's name at the invocation he delivers at Barack Obama's inauguration next month, and the story speculates on the fallout regardless of Warren's decision.

The long and short of it: If Warren leaves Jesus out, evangelicals will be let down. If Warren mentions Jesus, Jews, and Muslims, secular Americans will be put off.

My guess is that Obama has more to gain politically should Warren invoke Jesus' name than he has to lose should Warren decline to.

By Dan Gilgoff, God & Country

Earlier this week, I started a tally of prominent social conservatives praising socially liberal President-elect Barack Obama. The starting number was seven.

The interview I posted yesterday with Southern Baptist Convention public policy chief Richard Land included praise for Obama's selection of Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inauguration:

It was a sign that [Obama] is not going to let the minority marginalize the majorities. The marginal position is support for same-sex marriage. To marginalize Rick Warren's position is absurd, and the president-elect is smart enough to know that.

I've got a story up on usnews.com about the Obama transition team's extensive meetings with faith groups as it draws up its policy agenda and hashes out how its office of faith-based initiatives will work. Here's the top:

In the eight weeks since Barack Obama was elected president, Religion Action Center of Reform Judaism Director David Saperstein or members of his Washington, D.C.-based staff have attended roughly a dozen meetings with Obama's transition team, on topics ranging from domestic poverty and the plight of White House faith-based initiatives to foreign policy challenges like bringing peace to the Middle East.

By Dan Gilgoff, God & Country

For my story today on the Obama transition team reaching out actively to religious groups as it crafts a policy agenda and prepares to set up its own version of the Bush White House's Office of Faith Based and Community Initiatives, I wanted to know if conservative religious groups were receiving the same red-carpet treatment as their faith-based counterparts on the left. So, I called Richard Land, president of the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation's largest evangelical denomination. Here's our interview. Excerpts:

Some traditionally liberal religious groups have attended a dozen meetings so far with the Obama transition team. Have you or others at the Southern Baptist Convention been invited to those meetings?
I did receive a phone call from Mr. [Joshua] Dubois [the Obama transition team's director of religious affairs] and he wanted to thank me for my letter to the president-elect. I sent him an open letter that's on our website. The gist was that I hoped that he understood that there are tens of millions of Americans that didn't vote for him that are nevertheless delighted that an African-American has been elected president; that despite our racist past, this election says something kind and noble about America; that we were going to pray for him and for his safety and wisdom; that we are going to support him where we could, and that when we aren't able to do that, we're going to use our constitutional right to push for alternative policies.

By Dan Gilgoff, God & Country

The Mormon Times reports that Focus on the Family has pulled an interview with conservative radio and TV personality Glenn Beck from one of its websites because supporters of the evangelical group complained that it appeared to endorse Mormonism, Beck's religious tradition.

Reading the interview—occasioned by Beck's new book, The Christmas Sweater—I'm surprised that Focus didn't see this controversy coming. In its introduction to the interview, Focus notes that "Beck spent several years addicted to drugs and alcohol, coming to the verge of suicide, before turning his life over to God at the age of 35."

Over at Street Prophets, Pastordan admits that the Democrats may have had a religion problem that the 2004 election results woke them up to. But he can't stand the Democratic faith consultants who parrot the Republican line that Democratic leaders are somehow antireligious: 

While there may be some validity to the charges that Democrats needed to "get" religion in the 2000s, the people who push that line of thinking tend to be political moderates with an interest in selling the party advice on religious outreach. They tend to do that in ways that impute bad intentions to Democratic party leaders,* and in ways that reinforce Republican narratives about the party. To my mind, that's bad for progressive ideas, and it's bad faith argument, if you'll excuse the expression. I'd like to hear Dan address that point in his next post. 

First off, it appears that on the part of some Democratic leaders, there were some bad intentions. When then presidential candidate Howard Dean's faith outreach director, Mara Vanderslice, introduced herself to Dean's top advisers in the 2004 race, one adviser looked at her point blank and said, "How the hell did you get hired?"