DiIulio defends faith-based initiative

After announcing his faith-based initiative on community and social services in January, President George W. Bush faced opposition from people arguing he had breached the division of church and state.

The program — which would allow faith-based groups to compete against secular ones for government funding — aims to bring responsibility to the local and familial level, removing it from the hands of bureaucrats.

As an architect of Bush's campaign plank of compassionate conservatism, former University politics professor John DiIulio is trying to remove the "leaky buckets" of welfare spending and make government money more productive.

DiIulio, now the head of the first White House Office on Faith-Based and Community Initiatives delivered the final lecture of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions in McCosh 50 on Friday.

Speaking in personal terms, DiIulio recalled the days when his grandmother would take him to church and light three candles — one for former President Franklin Roosevelt, whom she called "the revered figure who got the Americans to help."

Though his grandmother was grateful for Roosevelt's New Deal government spending, DiIulio said she never relied on "welfare rights."

What happened since then, he explained, was a shift of responsibility to the central government.

"A welfare state modeled on subsidiary may have worked but it never materialized," DiIulio said. What did emerge, he argued, was a reliance on the government.

During the Great Society under President Lyndon Johnson, "everybody ate from [the] trough," DiIulio said. The money went "not to the poor but to the middle classes."

Government aid programs came with a disregard for local governments, he explained.

Standing behind the podium as if delivering a campaign stump speech himself, DiIulio asked the audience whether it was too late to recast the welfare state and whether it was too late for a political philosophy of compassionate conservatism.

"We're doing ridiculously well," he said of the record long economic expansion, "but we must realize we don't live in a post-poverty America or else the compassion is empty."

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The working poor is the face of modern poverty in America, according to DiIulio, and we must confront and accept it as "not just personal responsibility but also social justice."

The place to respond to poverty, he said, is in the hands of local community members.

"Keep it all if possible in the family," DiIulio said, adding that at that level of care, the country can have a "true and permanent regard of well-being of others."

Money should be directed to groups that keep care and community services at these levels because "we all would like to look first to those close by, not to the distant others," he said.

What DiIulio argues has happened during the last 35 or 40 years at the hands of the political left is a shift away from the non-statist ideas of subsidiary.

"Too much has flowed to the central government and to the professionals," he said. "We've become habituated to transacting our moral and social responsibility for the welfare of others through distant others."

Commenting on the almost complete inversion of people's natural tendency to look to those closest for aid, DiIulio said, "We have pushed back the closest because of government law."

Local organizations have fought battles of credentials and degrees over experience because of the regulations for government funding, he said.

"Religious groups have had to secularize their missions to comport with the government process," he added.

Almost every government-funded program is a large non-profit organization and by the time the aid arrives at the local level, it has been watered down because of the leaky buckets spilling money along the way, DiIulio said.

By allowing smaller faith-based community initiatives to compete for the same funding as other non-profit organizations, DiIulio's White House office and Bush's compassionate conservatism aims to improve aid at the local level, he emphasized.

To answer the opposition — coming from those who argue the program blurs the separation of church and state — DiIulio said that a group could not receive funding if there was not a secular alternative.