Courting conservatives

Courting conservatives

Philadelphia Inquirer: Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s announcement last week that he, like President Bush, wants government to bankroll faith-based efforts to help America’s downtrodden is being written off by some as a political ploy.

Let’s hope not. The work that could be done is too important.

Both Obama and Republican candidate John McCain have had a hard time gaining traction with evangelical Christians, whose votes could be key in several battleground states.

Some polls show as many as 10 percent of Americans think Obama, whose father was a Kenyan Muslim, is also Muslim. Obama again and again has stressed he was raised Christian.

McCain still suffers from a speech he made when running for president in 2000, linking Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell to Louis Farrakhan and Al Sharpton as “agents of intolerance.”

But the Christian right appears ready to forgive McCain. About 90 of their leaders met Tuesday in Denver to discuss endorsing McCain. Many want McCain to choose former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, a Baptist minister, as his vice president. Regardless, many Christian conservatives will vote for McCain whoever his running mate is.

“The only evangelicals who will support Obama are the ones who haven’t read their Bible,” said Phil Burress, leader of an Ohio group called Citizens for Community Values. “The more and more we learn about Obama, the closer and closer we get to McCain.”

So, there was a political incentive for Obama to reach out with his own faith-based initiative, taking the opportunity to declare: “While I could sit in church and pray all I want, I wouldn’t be fulfilling God’s will unless I went out and did the Lord’s work.”

A track record

But it doesn’t take an act of faith to believe Obama. After law school, he worked as a community organizer for a Roman Catholic group in Chicago. In his book “The Audacity of Hope” he wrote that it was its community outreach that drew him to the black church.

Those questioning Obama’s motives for proposing a new faith-based initiative should also consider that the move risks alienating liberal voters who insist on a strict separation of church and state.

Anticipating that complaint, Obama said his program — unlike Bush’s — would not permit church groups to discriminate against nonbelievers in hiring staff for outreach programs. He also said government money could not be diverted toward proselytizing.

It makes sense to aid religious groups that are helping people get off drugs, find a job, get an education and find housing. At least 40 percent of all welfare-to-work organizations in Philadelphia are faith-based. Typically, such groups provide services at a fraction of the cost of a government agency.