The elevation of Barak Obama to the highest political office in the land is a welcome sign that America’s shameful history of racism and slavery is decisively being put behind us. Less clear is what an Obama administration will do to carry out the promise of a rejuvenated and expanded faith-based initiative.

The faith-based initiative began during the Clinton administration with the adoption of Charitable Choice in 1996 as part of federal welfare reform. The core of the initiative from the very beginning has been safeguarding the faith identity and practices of faith-based organizations that agree to partner with government programs to serve the needy. It is in better protecting the faith of faith-based organizations that a level playing field is created. It is when their religious freedom is better protected that more faith-based organizations are ready to respond to the government’s “welcome” sign.

Will the Obama administration continue this vital trend–not only announcing a warmer welcome for faith-based groups but making sure that governmental rules and practices in fact are more hospitable to faith-based organizations? Many faith-based organizations are waiting to see what will happen. Call it hopeful wariness, or watchful hopefulness. They know the new administration will face many pressures from its supporters and allies to downplay religious freedom.

Despite the inevitable controversies, a successful faith-based initiative will protect, not threaten, the faith of faith-based organizations.

Stanley Carlson-Thies, is director of the Coalition to Preserve Religious Freedom, based in Washington, D.C.

…The standard argument presumes that convictions and language fit for the political community can be separated from convictions and language fit for each of the diverse religious communities. The distinction takes for granted independent religious and secular realms each largely defined as the opposite of the other. Secular is not religious; religious is not secular. But this is not reality.

…To distinguish a school from a bank, for example, is to recognize two different organizations, but we learn almost nothing about either of them if we define the bank as not a school and the school as not a bank. We need to know what each one is in its own right. Moreover, both are human institutions and have many interconnections.

…It is not true that the only thing people of diverse religions have in common is a public reason that can be separated from their uncommon faiths. Citizens may share the conviction that human dignity is a fundamental building block of political life precisely because it is fundamental to all of their diverse faiths. Yet at the same time they may differ on the public policy implications of that conviction.

…The First Amendment speaks of protection for the “free exercise” of religion without further qualification. The fact is that almost all exercise of religion is communal or associational in character. Moreover, the organizational exercise of religion is not simply a matter of worship in churches, synagogues, and mosques. Parents’ decisions about how to educate their children and a faith community’s decision about how to serve those in poverty are religious decisions for many people.

If the government of a political community in which these very same people are citizens also has a stake in the education of children and the alleviation of poverty, there is no reason why government should not give the same treatment to religious parents and religious social-service providers as it does to so-called “secular” parents and providers. Government’s obligation to protect the religious exercise of diverse communities of faith should mean equal treatment of all students regardless of the school (religious or otherwise) to which their parents send them and should mean equal treatment of diverse social-service organizations without regard to their religious or non-religious confessions.

…The First Amendment protects freedom of association as well as freedom of religious exercise. These two protections add up to much more than a requirement that government protect only individual conscience in private while remaining free to grant a public monopoly to an imaginary public reason in the political arena.

Skillen concludes:

…Separation of church and state is boilerplate. To express personal faith as a mode of character-witness and as a motivation for service is no longer unusual. To locate one’s faith within America’s civil religion is obligatory. But after that it is a quick and disconnected flight to most public policy issues.

What we have, then, in the campaign rhetoric is civil religion as ground for moral values and morality as ground for self-government. Yet as we know, the policy proposals offered by the candidates are as diverse as what liberal Democrats, conservative Republicans, and those in the middle have always offered. The common values of liberty, equality, and service open onto the familiar disputes about how much (or how little) government the self-governing people want.

What is missing from the candidates’ professions of Christian (and Mormon) faith is a philosophy of the political community that clarifies the responsibilities of government in relation to the responsibilities that belong to all the other institutions, organizations, and relationships of human society. What we need is a Christian public philosophy that connects directly to office holding, policy formulation, and governing. Americanism and the liberal political tradition do not generate such a philosophy, and that is why we have what we have.

Can faith-based clubs meet on public school campuses? What kinds of holiday decorations are permitted in public places? Appel, who is an attorney and lobbies on legislation affecting church-state separation, will give some surprising answers to these and similar questions. The meeting is free and open to the public. For more information, call 925-335-2647.