For New Post, Bush Puts Faith in an Unlikely Champion of the Needy

When President Bush unveiled his long-promised plan to give federal money to faith-based organizations that help the poor and troubled, he was keeping one of his earliest campaign pledges to religious conservatives. He was also rekindling one of the most sensitive debates in American history: the relationship between church and state.

Yet the man Bush picked to lead the effort, 42-year-old Democrat John J. DiIulio Jr., is a controversial social scientist who has often seemed more inclined to pour gasoline on fires than oil on troubled waters.

It was DiIulio, after all, who enraged liberals, minority groups and some of his fellow academics a few years ago by coining the inflammatory phrase “super predators” to describe young, predominantly black and Latino criminals. In a book called “Body Count: Moral Poverty and How to Win America’s War Against Crime and Drugs,” written with conservative guru William J. Bennett, he said the nation was threatened by a new breed of “radically impulsive, brutally remorseless youngsters” spawned by “moral poverty.”

DiIulio was also a prime mover behind mandatory minimum prison sentences for drug offenders, an initiative that he now concedes has misfired--choking an expanded prison system with low-level, nonviolent addicts instead of the narcotics kingpins it was aimed at.

Shift to Pragmatism

Paradoxically, supporters argue that for all his controversial ways, the University of Pennsylvania scholar--who has never held public office--might turn out to be just the man for the job.

For one thing, his record as an influential--generally conservative--voice in policy debates on crime, drugs and other social problems could give him enough credibility with Republicans to permit compromises with Democrats. For another, associates insist, his fiery rhetoric has begun to cool toward pragmatism.

“At the core of his being, there’s not nearly as much ideology as there is pragmatism,” says Don Kettl, a social scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has worked with DiIulio. “He operates from a deep sense of moral conviction, and he’s pragmatic--and he’s always looking for ways to marry the two.”

What seems to drive DiIulio most of all is a passion for improving the lives of the urban poor that burns unusually deep for an Ivy League academic who was trained at Harvard University and who became one of the youngest tenured professors ever at Princeton University.

With DiIulio, it’s personal--not so much an intellectual issue as a debt owed to friends and family in the urban battleground of South Philadelphia, where he grew up.

St. Thomas Aquinas Parish, around 18th and Morris in South Philadelphia, was where all the ladders started. At the turn of the century, wave upon wave of immigrants settled there and--amid poverty, disorder and crime--began to climb toward the American dream.

First Irish, then Italians, Slavs, Jews--it was never a melting pot, always a checkerboard of national, ethnic and racial enclaves. Divided by language and culture. But united by a will to take root and grow that was so fierce that many refused to join the white flight to the suburbs of the 1960s, when racial balances tipped and crime rates soared.

John DiIulio’s grandmother was one who stood her ground. She paid the price--mugged three times. So did DiIulio’s uncle--stabbed to death by a drug addict out on parole.

Small wonder that DiIulio came to see the world from the bottom up--through the eyes of a Philadelphia street kid who knew the victims better than the perpetrators.

It was this perspective that led him to focus his early criminology research on prisons. He found a system that seemed to return habitual, often violent criminals to their old neighborhoods with little regard for the effect on those who lived there.

This perception, colleagues say, led to his early advocacy of building more prisons and locking up criminals for longer periods.

In recent years, however, DiIulio seems to have made a surprising intellectual and emotional odyssey, shifting away from his emphasis on hard-line punishment in favor of greater emphasis on rescuing those at risk and even trying to retrieve some who crossed the line.

“There was almost a softer tone. The objective almost became saving souls,” Thomas E. Mann says of DiIulio’s more recent work. Mann was instrumental in bringing DiIulio to the Brookings Institution, the moderate-to-liberal Washington think tank at which DiIulio is a nonresident fellow. (DiIulio is also associated with the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank in New York.)

The kinder, gentler stance was on display the day Bush appointed him. At a conference in Washington that was about evenly divided between supporters and critics, DiIulio extended a hand of peace:

“Debates we ought to have--and we ought to sue each other, because when Americans are serious about something, they sue . . . but when the suing is done,” he said, “the spirit of this ought to be, let’s have that fight but let’s be looking for ways to get things done.”

He still sees crime, drug addiction and children in troubled families through the eyes of those who bear the consequences most personally. And he can be moved to anger by what he considers the insensitivity of some academic and other liberals to the victims’ pain.

But whereas earlier in his career those feelings carried DiIulio toward locking potentially dangerous individuals away in prison, “now” Mann says, “the emphasis is on trying to turn around their lives.”

As DiIulio’s focus has shifted, he has developed surprisingly close ties to storefront churches and urban ministries whose leaders are far closer to liberal Democrats than to Republicans, including “compassionate conservatives.”

Over the last few years, one associate says, “He has spent more time in black churches than anyone except Bill Clinton.” Adds another, “He’s spent more time talking to criminals than any academic I know.”

Moreover, some colleagues say that DiIulio has never been as easy to pigeonhole as his critics and his own penchant for lobbing rhetorical hand grenades suggested.

Although a supporter of prison construction and long-term incarceration of violent criminals, he has backed gun control, called for expanding the parole system, suggested states consider abolishing the death penalty, and opposed the 1996 welfare reform law.

Moreover, when it comes to his rhetoric, even some who disagree say it is a necessary--and widely used--tool for academics who want to influence public policy decisions.

“My feeling is that sometimes you have to be an alarmist to make sure people hear the alarm,” said James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Boston’s Northeastern University.

History of Support

In one sense, the idea of funneling government money to private groups that provide social services is not new, even organizations with religious affiliations. Church-affiliated hospitals and other medical service providers have long gotten government support.

The kinds of programs that Bush and DiIulio want to bring into the fold are different in some important ways, however.

First, in fields such as medicine and health, there is widespread agreement about what constitutes proper treatment and best practices. That makes for broad agreement on who qualifies for financial support and who does not.

Second, in these fields, there are relatively few direct links between the services provided and any religious doctrine.

Often, neither of those things is true when it comes to faith-based social programs that target drug abusers, convicts and at-risk youth.

What works and what does not is often in dispute. And although Bush supporters are convinced that faith-based programs work, DiIulio admits there is little research evidence to support the belief.

Also, in many of these programs, the religious component is “almost the yeast in the bread,” as one analyst put it.

“Who decides what is a legitimate religious organization and what is a questionable cult?” asks David H. Watt, a Temple University historian who has studied church and state issues. “Given the Bill of Rights, we would have to be very careful not to discriminate against any group on the basis of beliefs and practices. How do you do that without funding groups that many Americans would find deeply disturbing?”

Difficult as the choices may be, DiIulio wants to try, because of what could be achieved by expanding the reservoirs of energy that he sees in storefront missions and other religiously connected institutions.

As he told skeptics at the Washington conference when he was named, “There are a lot of needs that we have that are unmet.”