When I read the headline “Religious leaders worry that Obama’s faith council is for show” in The Washington Post this morning, I imagined the story might have something to do with how concerned people are that the faith council may not be able to convince Josh DuBois to rein in the activities of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Partnerships, an office with both a title and an agenda tweaked only slightly from the disastrous Bush Administration office of similar name.
Upon reading the full text, however, I discovered that the article’s focus was, instead, on those who think the faith-based partnership isn’t doing enough to entwine our domestic agenda and our country’s religious organizations.
Apparently, “critics” are concerned about the fact that the council hasn’t been allowed to weigh in on issues like religious hiring and abortion. They’d really like the council to be able to tackle those, because they want religious organizations that receive federal funding to be able to turn away job applicants on the basis of their religious beliefs, and because they want to influence the president’s reproductive health agenda with their religious views on abortion.
That’s all well and good, but the article all but skipped over the other half of the “critics,” whose concern stems from a very different point of view.
Faith plays a very important role in our country and is a large part of the diversity that makes us so unique, but it often plays a disproportionate role in public debate. People of faith have every right to speak out on the issues that are important to them, but a line is crossed when we put religious concerns about political issues before all else.
It may be impolitic to say so, but my concern with the role of faith in the Obama Administration is not whether or not faith leaders are being listened to. It’s the fact that the faith-based office is still operating under the rules of the Bush Administration, which are deeply flawed and of questionable constitutionality. We all need to keep in mind that, since the government accepts taxes from and represents every person in the country, whatever their beliefs, it is not free to create policies or pass laws that favor any one, or several, belief system or systems. That would be the establishment of religion, prohibited by the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Which, guess what?, exists to protect religion as much as it does the government.
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Why don’t those religious leaders worry about getting the Republican Party and Corporate leaders off their butts and start putting Americans back to work. Religious demoninations can’t get money when their members are out of a job. Furthermore, religious organizations can only do so much about the economic plight of Americans. Newt Gingrich stated that religious organizations should handled the economic hardships of unemployed Americans. Last time, it happen was in 1929 and back then as it is today, religious organizations were overhelmed by the mass economic upheavel. It took government to resolve the problems.
Theocratic governments have traditionally been the antithesis of governments of the free because they are exclusive rather than inclusive of other faiths. We don’t need that here in the United States. I wish people could see the parallel with Sharia law in Muslim countries–would we really want to live in a country where women are second-class citizens? Where religious leaders enforce the laws? Do we really want to live in a country where our laws are based on the Bible? Not to mention that each church has its own interpretation of what those biblical laws mean. Faith-based organizations should be free to proselytize–but not on the taxpayers’ dollar.
You have the extreme right wing conservatives re-writng the entire Bible to eliminate any sort of so-called “social”, “communists”, and “progressive” words from it, so there is no way to interpret the Bible and everything set in stone. God help us (no pun intended).
Government involvement in faith based work will always weaken the church and over time cause it to disappear. Consider Europe, where the Government does a great deal of faith based work. The church is almost nonexistent. As the government in Europe grew in size, the church shrank. This will happen in the US if the government is allowed to oversee faith based work. We must oppose all faith based government work.
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