The director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives came to speak at Jefferson Hall on Friday night, but not about politics.
Or so he claimed.
Jim Towey spent about half of his time before the Jefferson Literary and Debating Society recounting a series of moving experiences that he has had throughout a lifetime of admirable service to the poor, the sick and the needy.
But he dedicated the other half of his time to out-and-out attacks. He attacked Sen. John Kerry, Hollywood and Janet Jackson's right breast. And most of all, he attacked "secularist extremists" who he said are saddling our country with a "naked public sphere."
Towey hardly gave mention to what work his office is doing to help the poor, the sick and the needy in this country -- perhaps because what his office is actually doing has everything to do with politics, and little to do with social need.
John DiIulio, who was the inaugural director of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, resigned after seven months, saying that the office had failed to make significant achievements because political considerations and right-wing interest groups have too much control. "What you've got is everything and I mean everything being run by the political arm," said DiIulio, according to the Americans United for Separation of Church and State Web site.
Under Towey's more politically-attuned leadership, the Office has awarded huge amounts of taxpayer dollars to allies in religious organizations that were crucial to President Bush's nomination and election in 2000 and remain critical to his re-election bid today.
Pat Robertson, a major Bush supporter in the primary and general elections of 2000, sharply criticized the faith-based initiative program in 2001 because he was concerned that it could have provided funding for charities run by non-mainstream religious groups. But Robertson silenced his own criticism in 2002 when his "Operation Blessing" organization received a $500,000 "faith-based" grant. On Jan. 2, 2004, Robertson announced on his talk radio program that God had told him Bush would be re-elected in "like a blowout" this November.
During the 2000 Republican National Convention, the Rev. Herbert H. Lusk II gave George W. Bush a ringing endorsement in a satellite television uplink from his Greater Exodus Baptist Church in Philadelphia. And on June 23, 2004, as President Bush was preparing to speak at Rev. Lusk's church in the critical swing state of Pennsylvania, the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives awarded the church's charitable operation a grant of nearly $1 million.
The latest project on which the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives spent taxpayer dollars was a conference in St. Louis on Sept. 14, 2004, organized to "educate attendees about the President's Initiative." Next will be an identical conference held in Miami on Oct. 19, two weeks before Election Day.
The fact that these two conferences were organized to occur just before the election in Missouri and Florida -- two of the swing states most critical to President Bush's re-election hopes -- seems to be a flagrant use of taxpayer money to grab publicity in order to win over key religious and "compassionate conservative" voters in these key swing states.
Even more troubling than the politicization of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives is the degree to which religious arguments and opinions currently drive the work of our government.
America's "public sphere" is not, by any means, "naked" of religion. Republican House Majority Leader Tom DeLay has said he doesn't believe in the separation of church and state, and his belief is eerily close to reality.
The Republican-controlled Congress is currently launching a disconcerting attack on our nation's system of checks and balances, precipitated by the degree to which religion has taken over the federal government's agenda.
The Marriage Protection Act of 2004 has already been passed by the House of Representatives and the Pledge Protection Act of 2004 is on the House agenda. These two bills, if enacted into law, would entrench a heterosexual definition of marriage, and the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, respectively. In order to make these laws irrevocable, the bills would also strip our nation's federal courts, including the Supreme Court, of the power to review the constitutionality of these and certain other acts of Congress. Even the introduction of these bills on the House floor sets a dangerous precedent, calling for a momentous redistribution of power from the judicial to the legislative branch.
Despite being in complete control of our elected federal government, Jim Towey and many other political leaders in the White House and in Congress claim that religion is under attack in America, and blame "secularist extremists" for our society's ills. They employ a rhetoric of fear and paranoia that has proven so effective, not only for the religious right, but for conservatives in general.
In doing so, they marginalize and stigmatize secular morality, convictions and beliefs, and this is wrong. Secularists are not a "problem" that our government should address.
The more time, attention and energy that religiously-inspired political leaders spend on "preserving" marriage and the Pledge of Allegiance, the less they spend addressing urgent problems of national security and economic policy and acting in accordance with the value most Americans -- both religious and secular -- place on helping the poor, the sick and the needy. Is this the true purpose of religion?
Patrick Lane is a fourth-year student in the College.
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