Keeping the Faith, If Not the Promise

When Barack Obama took office, I wrote a column speculating on whether he would dial back the rather sectarian approach the Bush administration took to dealing with government funding of religious organizations. I got mixed views from the representatives of secular organizations I spoke to; some were cautiously optimistic, but others thought little would change.And it turns out the latter group may have been right. Sarah Posner explains that on the campaign trail, Obama said he would reverse an executive order George W. Bush signed which allowed religious organizations that discriminate in their hiring to get taxpayer money. But once he took office, he backtracked, and Bush's executive order stands:

Privately funded religious organizations can legally discriminate in hiring based on religion, but before Bush issued his executive order, those receiving federal funding could not. Obama the constitutional lawyer campaigning for president understood that. Obama the president, anxious to satisfy certain supporters of his Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships who want to retain discriminatory hiring by religious organizations receiving federal funds, changed his mind...

Obama's right that under civil rights laws generally, a religious organization that is completely privately funded must show any religious discrimination in hiring is related to its core religious function (i.e., you can't refuse to hire a non-co-religious janitor, but you can refuse to hire a non-co-religionist clergy). But that's not the question here. The question here is whether any organization that receives taxpayer dollars can discriminate in hiring based on religion. And that was the question Obama didn't answer.

So when Obama says the Jewish food pantry, for example, has "to abide generally with the nondiscrimination hiring practices," he's dodging the real question: why he won't rescind the Bush rule, and prohibit any organization that receives federal funding from discriminating based on religion in hiring. An organization like World Vision, for example, is not a church but a 501(c)(3); it receives federal funding. Its president, Richard Strearns (who also served on the first Advisory Council to Obama's faith-based office) has long argued that his and other organizations should be able to discriminate against employees, and it has fired employees who denied the "deity of Jesus Christ" and "the doctrine of the Trinity." Last year, World Vision received over $100 million in federal dollars.

As Obama knows very well, while he won't receive the votes of most evangelicals, he will receive some. On the other hand, he'll get virtually all of the votes of secular people, pretty much no matter what he does. He also knows that keeping his promise would cause a lot of news coverage that included religious leaders crying about how much Obama hates Jesus and anyone who loves Him. So keeping his promise doesn't have a lot of political upside.