THE CITY
F AITH IN THE A GE OF O BAMA ,religion0and0politics.< Joseph Knippenberg s a political observer and scholar, I spent the better part of the first decade of this millennium (the part when George W. Bush inhabited the White House) trying to follow the peregrinations of the faith-based initiative. This was to be the core of Bush’s ”compassionate conservatism,” a well-meaning but ultimately ill-fated attempt to build upon the “charitable choice” provisions included, most prominently, in the 1996 welfare reform legislation in an effort to mobilize “armies of compassion” to deal with America’s social problems. Inspired in part by Marvin Olasky’s The Tragedy of American Compassion and in part by Roman Catholic social thought (above all, the idea of subsidiarity), Bush thought that churches, faith-based organizations, and neighborhood groups could be more effective than government bureaucrats in touching the hearts and transforming the lives of those in need. Back in 2000, this sounded like such a good idea that even Al Gore endorsed a version of it. Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons—the hyperpartisanship born of Bush’s disputed victory in Florida, the new emphasis on national security in the aftermath of 9/11, and the narrowly political and ultimately unimaginative focus of many White House staffers and Congressional Republicans, to name just a few—the initiative was marginalized at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. Efforts to pass legislation extending the principles of charitable choice to a wider array of government programs foundered on Capitol Hill. And those who headed the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives—good men, all of them—might have had the sympathy and well wishes of the President, but they never seemed to 60