Obama signs order to reform faith-based office

"President Obama signed an executive order Wednesday (Nov. 17) that reforms the White House's faith-based office in a bid to improve transparency and clarify rules for religious groups that receive federal grants.

The nine-page order reflects numerous recommendations made more than six months ago by a blue-ribbon advisory council charged with streamlining and reforming the office created under former President George W. Bush."

This certainly bears watching. During the 2008 campaign, Obama alluded to "fair hiring" in faith based programs, taking some religious freedoms by strangling churches ability to preach the gospel through what was once a popular Bush I and Bush II program--the 1000 points of light and the office of faith based initiatives. In 2008 I wrote a number of blogs about the dangers churches were facing with the Faustian agreement to take government support and grant money for everything from food pantries to housing rehab in distressed neighborhoods to after prison work programs to immigrant resettlement. I thought he had launched it when in 2009 he had Georgetown University remove all religious symbols when he gave a speech, but he became so embroiled in the healthcare debacle and the financial industry problems, that he wasn't able to turn his attention to it until . . . after the Democrats lost the House in 2010.

Once churches take government money, the administrators of that program by law, law suit, regulation or political pressure can tell them

1. who to hire
2. pull their tax exempt status
3. which in turn can destroy other funding
4. can hold up building plans that need to pass code
5. can deny the retirement plan set in place for employees
6. can affect the Medicare and Medicaid funding for the nursing home the church might run
7. can restrict the adoption agency supported by the church plan to only place children with married couples
8. and most importantly, can dictate what is said from the pulpit on any topic deemed politically sensitive, like marriage, abortion, environment, health, stem-cell research, euthanasia, war, etc.

RNS: Obama signs order to reform faith-based office - Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life
Ten years ago City Journal (Winter 2000) reported that Catholic Charities had lost its soul by promoting government programs rather than traditional church teaching, and the author tosses in Jews and Lutherans for good measure because their charitable acts had also been compromised. "Catholic Charities—and the same could be said about the Association of Jewish Family and Children's Agencies or the Lutheran Services in America—has become over the last three decades an arm of the welfare state, with 65 percent of its $2.3 billion annual budget now flowing from government sources and little that is explicitly religious, or even values-laden, about most of the services its 1,400 member agencies and 46,000 paid employees provide."

I believe if we are to fulfill the Great Commission, we'll have to disentangle ourselves from the federal and state government.