Atheists and secularists meet with Obama's religious affairs director, Joshua DuBois

April 28, 11:18 AMAtheism ExaminerTrina Hoaks

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Last Thursday a meeting took place between Joshua DuBois, Obama's director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships and Card (Coalition Against Religious Discrimination). Ron Millar, Acting Director of the Secular Coalition for America, who is a member of CARD, attended that meeting.

I had the privilege of speaking to Ron after the meeting to get his impressions of the proceedings. He has also issued a press release about the meeting. He said in the press release that he "...entered the meeting with very mixed emotions. Although I was glad that the Secular Coalition for America has the political connections to meet face-to-face with the person who runs President Obama's new faith-based office, I was saddened that this meeting was even taking place -- saddened that our new president has decided to continue the failed faith-based policies of his predecessor." (His emphasis.)

Here is more of the press release, followed by my conversation with Ron. (All emphasis below are his.)

"The meeting was an open and often lively discussion of our concerns -- and each of us clearly expressed our disappointment that the Obama administration had decided to continue Bush's faith-based program without first dealing with the critical constitutional and civil rights problems it presents: direct funding of houses of worship, religious discrimination in hiring, and entangling secular and sectarian program content.

"I left the meeting with the same kind of mixed feelings I had going in. One the one hand, Mr. DuBois seemed sympathetic to our constitutional and civil rights concerns; on the other, it's clear we will have a long wait to see if and how these concerns are going to be addressed.  Nearly three months after he was appointed to run it, DuBois told us the new faith-based office is still getting organized and they are just beginning their information collection and policy review.

"Unfortunately, until this process is complete, faith-based programs will continue to operate under the Bush administration rules.

"We face a very difficult challenge in getting this administration to address all our concerns, so we will continue to put pressure on the White House -- but this meeting did reinforce that we do now have a place at the table.

"As the cover story in the National Journal recently reported,"

'In the past, politicians in Washington and elsewhere could largely ignore the Godless. But those days are over. With their numbers growing, nonbelievers are intent on pushing a political and legislative agenda governed more by cool reason than by faith.'

When I spoke with Ron, I asked him what his impression was of what the Bush administration faith-based initiative was about.

He chuckled before saying, "That's fairly easy. They were very correctly criticized for using the office to reward their political friends. The prior administration was very good at telling the big lies to promote their policies. The big lie for faith-based was that they were leveling the playing field. Of course, the playing field was level prior to the faith-based office. I mean, the religious groups could participate if they followed the same rules as all the other social service providers. They’d have to set up a C3; they couldn’t discriminate; they couldn’t proselytize; they couldn’t mix in religious content with secular content. But, what Bush did was make the playing field unlevel and privilege religious groups and he did so with a political motivation behind it to forward their policy goals."

I asked him what the hope was when the Obama administration was coming in in regard to the faith-based initiative?

"When he was on the campaign trail [Obama] said that if [groups] get a federal grant [they] can’t use it to proselytize or… discriminate against people when hiring, and that federal dollars would be used only for secular programs. So, our hope, which apparently was too great a hope, was that we would just go back to the prior system that worked fine for many, many years. But, instead, he decided to maintain the program. He essentially changed two words in the program and nothing else. And, he set up the advisory board, but it’s still the same Bush program. And, we’re all very concerned about where it’s going to go from here."

I asked him, "What was the purpose of the meeting Thursday?"

He replied, "It was with the Coalition Against Religious Discrimination (Card). This is a groups of civil rights groups, church-state separation groups. Actually, the coalition was first formed when Ashcroft first put forth charitable choice through the welfare reform program under the Clinton administration. Its purpose has been to fight against charitable choice and the faith-based initiative. It’s a large coalition. There are over 100 groups involved. There were 20 people participating in the meeting yesterday. It’s a wide-ranging group that is very active. Americans United, ACLU, Baptist Joint Committee, American Jewish Committee, a lot of great groups are involved with it. So, the meeting yesterday was organized mainly, I think, by AU [Americans United]. It was set up to present our concerns regarding the faith-based programs. Joshua gave us a full hour of his time and listened to our concerns."

I asked Ron if Joshua seemed concerned about their concerns.

He laughed and said, "Well, with all these meetings it’s asked that we not go into too much detail of what the back and forth was to maintain the relationships. But, my general impression is optimistic. He seems very sympathetic to our constitutional concerns of mixing religious and secular content and proselytizing and the civil rights problems of discriminating with regard to religion in hiring. So, yeah, he seemed sympathetic to us. But, the question is where will they draw the line on those items and how vigorously will they enforce them. The bad news is that we are still operating under the Bush rules, which are completely unacceptable to us, and we’ll be operating under them until they put forward new rules. They are still in the information collecting stage so we’re going to be going down this road making funding decisions based on the old rules for quite a while, I believe."

I said, "Well, it is good to hear that you’re optimistic because when that “two word change” happened, many people who were previously optimistic weren’t so much so anymore."

Ron responded, "Right, not only that but they created an advisory board that is made up predominately of religious groups to give advice on how to move the program forward. That again just reinforces that religious groups are driving the program."

"Did you address that concern with him – the religious domination of the board?" I asked.

He said, "Yes, that was brought up in the meeting. We’ll see how that is interpreted in policy. We also discussed how transparent the meetings will be and that’s very important to us…. This way we can see the tone and the scope of the meetings. They did take the religious discrimination issue out from this committee rule, though…. Constitutional questions shouldn’t be assigned to the advisory committee because these are recipients of the aid. The basic constitutional questions should be handled by constitutional scholars."

I agreed and said, "It concerns me when overtly religious people interpret the Constitution based not on what it says but what they want it to say."

He said, "It’s true that the religious right has been quoting all sorts of theories as to what the first amendment means, but I think there’s enough established research and opinion out there that we can negate that fairly quickly and move toward a true separation of church and state."

*end*

As he mentioned, there was only so much he could discuss. I agree that it is good that we do seem to have a place at the conversation table. This is a first. Now the question remains whether our voices will be heard or if they will fall on deaf ears. Hopefully this "invitation" is more than just a "gimme" for show. Hopefully what we have to say will actually mean something.

For more on the issue of faith-based initiatives:

Faith Based Initiatives continue to fund proselytizing by Staks Rosch - Philadelphia Atheism Examiner
How church and state can work together, separately by Dylan Otto Krider - National Skepticism Examiner
Our Government’s continuation of the Faith-Based Initiative by Barbara L Bell - Manchester Atheism Examiner