The Faith to Outlast Politics

In his State of the Union address Monday evening, President Bush asked Congress to permanently extend the federal laws permitting religious nonprofit organizations to compete for federal grants.

Seven years ago this week, Mr. Bush started his faith-based initiative. He promised to build on these “charitable choice” laws, which were begat by bipartisan compromises between President Bill Clinton and Senator John Ashcroft. “Government cannot be replaced by charities,” Mr. Bush declared, “but it should welcome them as partners, instead of resenting them as rivals.”

The president’s original plan called for making federal grants and vouchers more readily available to the thousands of religious nonprofit organizations that provide job training, affordable housing, after-school programs and other social services. The initiative prescribed $8 billion in tax credits and new spending, including at least $700 million in a “compassion fund” to benefit exemplary programs. It was designed so that small congregations and ministries that had long served needy neighbors on shoestring budgets — and not just large, national religious charities — could get their fair share of government aid.

It did not happen. The number of faith-based organizations receiving a federal grant rose from 665 in 2002 to only 762 in 2004, according to a Rockefeller Institute study. A program that was projected to finance mentoring for 100,000 children of prisoners has so far paid for only 33,000, according to the White House. Over the past six years, federal grants to faith-based programs have shifted away from the local “armies of compassion” praised by Mr. Bush and toward large, national organizations with religious affiliations.

Every nonpartisan study has concluded that the initiative has not delivered the grants, vouchers, tax incentives and other support for faith-based organizations that the president originally promised.

In a book published last year, Michael Gerson, Mr. Bush’s former speechwriter, concludes: “The faith-based initiative was not tried and found wanting. It was tried and found difficult — then tried with less and less energy.”

President Bush has promised much. It will be left to the next president to deliver on those promises. The good news is that every major presidential candidate seems open to doing just that.