Report Details Faith-Based Barriers

When Chris Groccia ran a Head Start program from the Sunday school room of a Worcester, Mass., church, she helped each week to cover up the religious images, icons and verses displayed on the classroom walls.

Officials of the child development program believed the law required them to obscure the religious materials “because [Head Start] is a federally funded program,” said Groccia, who now heads Missouri’s state Head Start collaboration office.

In fact, no Head Start statutes or regulations of the Department of Health and Human Services, which administers the program, have any provisions requiring that religious imagery be covered.

In a report released Thursday, the White House cited the misconception as just one example of the many barriers faith-based groups encounter in government agencies when they seek to participate in federal social service programs.

“Systematically, the government has been hostile to the participation of faith-based and community initiatives, when it ought to have been neutral,” said John Bridgeland, director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, while unveiling the report at a Brookings Institution forum.

The White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, which President Bush created in January, issued the report, titled “Unlevel Playing Field.” It was drafted after an audit of institutional practices at five Cabinet departments: HHS, Labor, Housing and Urban Development, Justice, and Education. Bush has created offices in those departments to coordinate government social services with faith-based groups.

The report sternly criticizes federal agencies for erecting numerous roadblocks for faith-based groups with an almost paranoid suspicion of any such group.

“Overly restrictive agency rules . . . are repressive, restrictive and actively undermine the established civil rights of these groups,” the report says. “Such excessive restrictions unnecessarily and improperly limit the participation of faith-based organizations that have profound contributions to make in civil society’s efforts to serve the needy.”

John J. DiIulio Jr., director of the administration’s faith-based initiatives, decried the “government-grass-roots gap,” saying that the bulk of public funding is directed toward large, established--and mostly secular--nonprofit organizations.

“One explanation [of the gap] clearly is the raft of barriers to the effective and full participation of smaller grass-roots and community groups in government social services delivery,” DiIulio said.

“Merely being religious or being perceived as religious is an immediate bar on the door to consideration” for federal funding, he added.

The report said much of the bias against the involvement of faith-based groups in federal programs is rooted in the long-standing American tradition of separation of church and state.

“There’s a subtle unwelcoming atmosphere for religious groups, given this kind of suspicion that maybe it’s unconstitutional to work with these groups,” said Stanley Carlson-Thies, the White House’s associate director of Cabinet affairs.

Critics of Bush’s faith-based initiative maintained that Thursday’s report was the latest step in the administration’s quest to overturn the church-state separation and allow religion to become a part of government operations.

“When Bush talks about removing ‘barriers’ to funding religion, it’s clear he wants to bulldoze the wall that separates church and state,” said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, in a statement. “Taxpayers must never be forced to support religions they don’t believe in.”

Asked whether a series of Supreme Court decisions has provided the administration with a constitutional green light to federally fund faith-based organizations, White House domestic policy chief Bridgeland said, “Probably it’s a shade between green and yellow. I think we ought to proceed with caution.”

In 1993, the Supreme Court upheld a Christian group’s right to hold night meetings in a high school auditorium. Two years later, the court ruled that college students who published a campus-based Christian magazine had the same 1st Amendment rights to school funding as other groups. And in June, the court ruled that a Christian youth group must be allowed to hold an after-school Bible study class in a public school.

On the legislative front, the House last month delivered a major victory for Bush by passing a bill to allow religious groups to compete for an increased share of government contracts to provide housing, domestic violence and hunger relief, and other services.

But the bill is expected to face more potent opposition in the Democrat-controlled Senate. Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) has condemned elements of the legislation and has been unwilling to commit to scheduling a debate on the bill before next year.