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A Faith-Based Opportunity for Obama
http://www.religiondispatches.org/dispatches/sarahposner/6823/a_faith_based_opportunity_for_obama/February 8, 2013 10:26am
Post by SARAH POSNER
At the annual National Prayer Breakfast yesterday, President Obama announced the departure of Joshua DuBois, the director of his controversial Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. DuBois, who has long frustrated civil liberties and religious freedom advocacy groups with his resistance to their concerns about constitutional problems plaguing the office, is off to teach at New York University and to launch "a new organization to help organizations and local governments partner with faith based organizations," a White House official told me. Michelle Boorstein at the Washington Post also reports that DuBois also will be writing "a book of devotionals for leaders based on the ones he sends the president each day."
A successor has not been announced. But DuBois' departure gives the White House an opportunity to recast the office with a director focused on overseeing significant constitutional protections, rather than sending the president scripture, tweeting Bible verses, and further entangling the White House with religious organizations.
DuBois has his admirers, to be sure. For many of them, his daily emailed devotionals to the president—which Obama took pains to highlight yesterday—are frequently cited as evidence not only of the president's piety but also to counter conservative claims that the White House is somehow hostile to religion, or insufficiently committed to the country's "Christian heritage." While the president is undoubtedly entitled to receive and read whatever religious materials he desires, should they really be coming from a White House staffer?
Two years ago, Jacques Berlinerblau, the Georgetown professor and proponent of secular government, criticized Obama's "platitude fest" at the National Prayer Breakfast and compared the faith-based office to the Kremlin. Instead of starting the president's morning with scripture, Berlinerblau wrote,
"I wish Mr. DuBois would start off my morning with explanations of what exactly that Office is doing—a never-ending source of confusion, and even awe, among reporters, policy analysts and professors in Washington, DC." DuBois has defended his work by claiming that government partnerships with faith-based organizations help serve the needy. Later that year, DuBois told a gathering in Colorado, "If your focus is first and foremost serving people in need, then there's not a tremendous amount of time left to debate the finer points of the church-state relationship."
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