Many of these issues will be hashed out in court and in policy debates over the next several years, especially if Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., and other presidential contenders continue to promote religion-based social services. "For faith groups interested in government partnerships, and for everyone interested in the issues of church and state, these are heady times," Richard Nathan, director of the Albany, N.Y.-based Roundtable on Religion and Social Welfare Policy, said at a December 5 conference in Washington. But he cautioned, "Whether and where the lines can be drawn to separate religious activity from that which can be supported by public funds is complicated, subtle, and very much, especially right now -- very much in flux."

Seed Money
Although large, religiously oriented nonprofits such as Catholic Charities and Lutheran Social Services have long worked with the government, federal outreach to smaller faith-based charities began in earnest with the 1996 welfare reform law. Signed by President Clinton, the act established the principle of "charitable choice," which encouraged states to work with faith-based and community charities in providing services to the poor. During the 2000 presidential campaign, both George W. Bush and Al Gore promoted deeper ties between government and faith-based groups.

Within days of taking office in January 2001, Bush began issuing executive orders establishing the White House's faith-based and community initiatives. To lead the effort, he chose John DiIulio, a political scientist who had often said that small religious charities were forced to "make bricks without straw," a biblical reference suggesting that the groups could use help from the government.

Bush also created satellite offices within various Cabinet departments, including Health and Human Services, Education, and Housing and Urban Development. A March 2006 executive order created the faith-based office at the Homeland Security Department, bringing the total number of such satellites to 11. Bush pushed Congress to authorize his faith-based initiatives in law, but the effort was derailed by a dispute over whether faith-based groups receiving federal money could limit their hiring to people of their own religion. DiIulio resigned in mid-2001. He later criticized the White House as home to "Mayberry Machiavellis" who were more interested in politics than policy, and he blamed the administration for not seeking bipartisan compromise in Congress.

After DiIulio's departure, the administration's faith-based initiative became less visible but, in many ways, more far-reaching. DiIulio's successor, Jim Towey, spent four years helping to cement the faith-based offices in executive departments and encouraging religious groups to apply for federal grants. When Towey left for academia eight months ago, Bush hired Jay Hein, founder of the Indianapolis-based Sagamore Institute for Policy Research.

Last October, former White House faith-based adviser David Kuo published "Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction," which labeled the administration's faith-based initiative a hollow endeavor, big on rhetoric but short on money and presidential attention. "The Faith-Based Office was the cross around the White House's neck showing the president's own faith orientation," Kuo wrote. "That was sufficient."

Kuo said that Bush had promised that the federal government would distribute $8 billion a year to faith-based groups. The White House now reports that faith-based groups got about $2 billion in federal grants and contracts last year; that's about $500 million more than they were getting in the last year of the Clinton administration (although the Clinton White House did not track the money that way).

But that is only the tip of the iceberg. According to the White House, faith-based organizations can now compete for about $20 billion a year in federally managed programs, and another $55 billion or so in programs managed by state and local governments. The grants range from community development block grants to housing assistance to the poor.

The federal government is helping to foster this process, most directly through the Compassion Capital Fund at HHS, which has a $50 million annual budget. It provides grants of up to $2.5 million a year to a few dozen "intermediary organizations," which in turn give smaller grants to faith-based and community groups to help them grow. HHS also provides up to $50,000 directly to these groups to help them train volunteers, build fundraising operations, improve management systems, and publicize their services. According to Hein, from 2003 to 2005, the number of grants to faith-based groups from five departments -- Education, HHS, HUD, Justice and Labor -- jumped a total of 38 percent.

In addition to cash awards, AmeriCorps and its parent agency, the Corporation for National and Community Service, send volunteers to help faith-based and community organizations do things like learn better accounting techniques or create lists of volunteers. The corporation, which is an independent federal agency, estimates that in 2005, it awarded nearly $81 million, or 13 percent of its competitive grant funds, to faith-based organizations, up from $70.5 million the year before.

"This was about a culture change in the way government worked with faith-based groups," Towey said in an interview from his office as president of St. Vincent College in Latrobe, Pa. "And that wasn't something just for Washington grants; that was at the state level too."

Greg Morris, director of HHS's Center for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, said that direct federal grants to faith-based organizations represent "a relatively small piece of federal dollars that go out." He added, "The biggest piece of the pie is those formula block grants that go out from the federal government to the states, and then there is wide latitude at the state and local level to administrate those funds."

This is where the initiative can generate the most bang for its buck. For the faith-based centers in the various federal departments, Morris said, "the focus going forward is on targeting the administrators of those programs at the state and local level," to make sure that they are not shutting faith-based organizations out of competition for grants.

Deepening Faith
Many religious charities have several streams of government support. A good example is "A New Entry," an Austin-based group that provides housing to ex-offenders and also administers drug and alcohol counseling, anger-management classes, and employment assistance such as helping clients renew their state-mandated worker registrations. The group isn't affiliated with any church, but a crawler across the top of its Web site declares, "You too can become more than an overcomer by accepting Christ."

Executive Director Peter Daniels, a licensed social worker, created the group in November 2004; it already has two homes with space for 12 clients and agreements with other organizations that allow it to serve up to 50 ex-offenders. Daniels's organization operates almost entirely on government money.

A New Entry got a $74,000 grant from the Labor Department to support job-training activities; a $24,000 Compassion Capital grant from the OneStar Foundation, which acts as the Texas intermediary for HHS; a $45,000 annual grant from a county substance-abuse program; and a contract from the same program that pays a monthly housing fee for each client. The organization's office has a full-time AmeriCorps volunteer and a staff member paid for by HHS under the Access to Recovery program, which aims to boost the number of substance-abuse treatment programs. A local charity, the Religious Coalition to Assist the Homeless, gave Daniels's group an $11,000 grant; that money came from a city program that allows churches to divert a portion of their water bill to help the homeless, so it is essentially government money as well.

"Anybody and everybody is welcome to participate in any of the activities that we offer," Daniels says. "Our value system underlies everything that we do, but it is not proselytizing." Despite the dominance of government grants, "we would exist without government support," he insists. "We started before we had any government support. But we wouldn't have the growth curve that we have." With assistance from his government grants, Daniels is registering his organization with the IRS as a 501(c)(3) charity, to make it easier to attract private donations and foundation money.

Just like the federal government, many states' faith-based offices are actively seeking to help religiously inspired groups. Krista Sisterhen, outgoing director of the Governor's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in Ohio, said that the state views the faith-based initiative as "a way to revolutionize and improve the way government purchases social services and gets social services delivered. The promise of this is only beginning to be recognized."

Her office gets about $300,000 in state funding to cover administrative costs, $1 million a year in a Compassion Capital grant from HHS, a $3 million HHS grant to support African-American marriages, and $11 million a year from the state's federal welfare funds to support the "Ohio Strengthening Families Initiative," which focuses on reducing out-of-wedlock birth rates and nurturing healthy marriage.

The state has created a curriculum of 12 six-hour training courses in organizational development and management, and it has hired consultants to provide the training at no cost to faith and community groups around the state. "We have trained 2,000 organizations," Sisterhen said.

Most of the 35 state faith-based offices are closely associated with the governor's office. The Ohio office grew out of a legislative task force and was established by state law as a division of the governor's office. In Arizona, the initiative is run out of Democratic Gov. Janet Napolitano's office. Florida's faith-based programs are supervised by a nonprofit foundation called Volunteer Florida, which has close ties to outgoing Gov. Jeb Bush. In Alaska, the four-person faith-based office is in the state's Health and Social Services Department and is supported by department funds because the state Legislature has not appropriated money for it. Tara Horton, the associate coordinator of Alaska's office, said that she and her colleagues have spread the word about government funding to religious groups.

"The one thing I always go back to is that faith-based and community organizations can provide services at a lower cost than government," Horton said. "These faith-based organizations are doing it because they want to serve their community, whereas the government is obligated to provide these services. Our purpose is to build their capacity to provide more services, more efficiently, and at a better cost to the state."

The Line Of Separation
No proselytizing. That's the rule for religious organizations using tax dollars. At a recent training conference in Washington, Wade Horn emphasized that dictum to several hundred leaders of groups that will be providing federally funded marriage counseling and fatherhood training this year. As assistant secretary for children and families at HHS, Horn oversees the largest pot of federal funds for religious charities, and he has been one of the administration's primary advocates for the faith-based initiative.

In Ministers We Trust Peter Elliott, the U.S. marshal for the Northern District of Ohio, was working out on his office's exercise machine a couple years ago when he came up with the idea for Fugitive Safe Surrender. Instead of hunting fugitives down, law enforcement officials obviously prefer to have suspects turn themselves in -- it's safer, easier, and less expensive. But fugitives don't turn themselves in very often. They don't trust the police. And they expect to be locked up while they await adjudication, even for minor crimes. OK, fugitives don't trust cops, Elliott thought as he exercised, but whom do they trust? An answer came to him: the clergy. So with the help of consultant Doug Weiner, Elliott enlisted C. Jay Matthews, the senior pastor at Mount Sinai Baptist Church in Cleveland. Their plan involved moving every component of the judicial system -- police, prosecutors, public defenders, and judges -- into Matthews's church for a few days. Matthews would encourage people with outstanding warrants for minor crimes to turn themselves in at the church, get their cases resolved, and get their punishment delivered, on the spot. "This is a law enforcement program instead of a faith-based program," Elliott said. "This is about trust. Whom do I trust? Whom does the individual trust? The clergy. The minister. Everything revolves around that." Matthews put out the word that fugitives could surrender at the church. From August 3 to 6, 2005, 842 people turned themselves in; 324 of them were wanted for felony crimes. Police took violent-crime suspects into custody; those charged with nonviolent crimes were processed or released on bond. By contrast, a traditional fugitive sweep over the next three days nabbed just 65 people. During the second Fugitive Safe Surrender program, held at a Phoenix church in November 2006, more than 1,300 fugitives turned themselves in. The U.S. Marshals Service plans to conduct similar programs at other churches in the coming years. Congress has put its stamp of approval on the program, authorizing it in law and including about $1.4 million in this year's unpassed appropriations bill for nationwide expansion. Matthews, the minister at Mount Sinai, said that his involvement was not driven by a desire to proselytize, but by a wish to help his community. "We don't believe we have to make people believe in our God to serve them," he said. "We offered our care, we offered our facilities, we offered our compassion." Matthews said the fugitives who turned themselves in were looking for a chance to get right with the law, not for a religious experience. "Although, if a person came in and they were adjudicated and let go," he joked, "I think they probably were thanking God." -- Brian Friel

"The Deal," as Horn described it, is that faith-based groups get federal dollars to perform the secular services outlined in their grant applications. They cannot proselytize and they cannot discriminate against people of various faiths who seek their services. "This is binding, and you can't be cute," Horn warned. As an example of a prohibited "cute" activity, he described an abstinence grantee that used Bible stories in its curriculum. The grantee argued that it wasn't proselytizing but just using examples that happened to come from the Bible. Horn cautioned that crossing that line could not only cost the organization its funding, it could also jeopardize the entire federal faith-based initiative.

Civil-liberties organizations have filed lawsuits challenging various programs funded through the faith-based initiative, arguing that they violate the separation of church and state by promoting religion while they provide social services or by hiring and firing workers on the basis of their religion. One frequently cited example is Silver Ring Thing, a Christ-centered abstinence education program that got hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal grants -- through congressional earmarks sponsored by former Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa. -- before the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit and HHS subsequently questioned whether the group mixed religion into its programming. A federal court in June ruled that an Iowa program in which a Christian group provides rehabilitation services in prisons is unconstitutional because it promotes religion. The group is appealing.

The Supreme Court is wading into the issue in a case brought by the Freedom From Religion Foundation. The high court is considering whether the group has standing to challenge the Bush administration's use of discretionary funds for the faith-based initiative. "In America, private religious groups are welcome to do their mission, but the government has to back off and be neutral," said Dan Barker, co-president of the foundation, based in Madison, Wis. Funding for groups such as Catholic Charities and Lutheran Social Services that separate religion from secular services is fine, Barker said, but more and more money is going to services that don't make that separation. "Bush's initiative has crossed that line," he said.

A June report [PDF] by the Government Accountability Office indicated that while government grant-makers generally reminded grantees of their obligation to separate secular services from religious activities, "few program offices use monitoring tools that include checks for compliance with these safeguards." The Education Department replied that it "finds no basis for requiring greater oversight and monitoring of faith-based organizations than other program participants simply because they are faith-based organizations," and other departments filed similar comments with the GAO.

At a discussion on abstinence programs at the Roundtable on Religion and Social Welfare Policy forum in December, Horn challenged the GAO report and said that the administration takes action against grantees that violate rules -- just as it does with secular providers. "It seems to me that there's this new standard for abstinence education, and particularly faith-based organizations, and the standard is 100 percent compliance," Horn said. "The only way to know for certain what everybody's doing every moment of the time with federal taxpayers' money is to have somebody in every program 24/7. That's not possible. And so some errors will be made. We acknowledge that, but we do the best we can with the resources that we have."

Towey joined administration officials in contending that state and federal officials have taken great pains to explain to grantees the requirement for faith-neutral services, and that the rules are likely to scare off any group that wants to use federal money to proselytize.

"There are a lot of groups that want to talk to people about Jesus that aren't taking the government money," Towey said. "They aren't interested in it. And my experience is that a lot of them self-select, and that our screening process on the front end weeds out a lot of applications that were overly religious. If you look at the track record now, there has only been a handful of grants where there has been an allegation of impropriety. We are talking about thousands and thousands of grants. I think it's working."

A common theme among faith-based service providers is that even though they are providing a secular service such as tutoring kids in math or helping couples resolve their conflicts, they are doing so as an expression of their own faith, demonstrating God's love instead of preaching God's love. They say that when somebody asks why they do this work, then they tell them about God. By expanding the number of people they can serve, they are spreading God's love and reaching out to more people who might ask them about God.

Advocates argue that faith-based groups are no different than any other private service provider. "I don't care if you believe the moon is a piece of blue spaghetti, what matters to me is, are you doing service?" said Mark Farr of the Points of Light Foundation. "I'm not here to question your faith, and I'm not really interested in it." Robert Jamison, president of Family Guidance, a faith-based group in Pittsburgh, has just won a five-year, $8.5 million federal grant to recruit churches to provide marriage counseling. But Jamison said that the counseling involves practical skills -- financial planning, anger management, communication improvement -- not scripture. "Should we be disqualified only because of the philosophical underpinnings we bring to this work?" he asked. "Should secular counselors be asked whether they are Jungian or Freudian?"

But isolating faith-motivated service from proselytizing can be dicey.

If the government buys a computer for a church to use in providing job training, may the church use that computer for any other activity? If the government trains a faith-based group in fundraising, may the group use those skills only when raising funds for secular services? Several faith-based providers said in interviews that they believe that the ban on religious activity extends only as long as the government funding holds out. If the government money lasts three years, they say, and a group successfully uses its government training to establish a separate nonprofit, then all shackles come off in year four. Silver Ring Thing, for example, received federal funding for three years, but now that it doesn't, it runs a religious abstinence program.

Even funding for organizations that provide predominately secular services raises such issues. In Pittsburgh, a group of young Mennonite activists got tens of thousands of federal dollars to resurrect a crumbling church in the ragged East Liberty neighborhood and turn it into a community center, complete with a cafe at the entrance and a kiln in the basement to crank out handmade mugs. But the group -- called the Union Project -- also rents its space to a Presbyterian congregation, so the 1903 structure is a church again on Sundays.

Jessica King, the executive director of the Union Project, emphasizes that the renovated building is an engine of economic development for the community, not an engine of faith, even though it was important to her to see a church group use the building. The renovation of the structure, funded in part by federal grants, allowed King's group to train dozens of residents in stained-glass restoration, a skill that is marketable in Pittsburgh's old-world neighborhoods. For King, the emphasis of the Union Project is on teaching, not preaching. Nevertheless, she said, "we very much value faith, and value what it means in the city."

Planting Roots
The most persistent criticism of the White House faith-based initiative is that Bush uses it to pay off his political supporters. Kuo told National Public Radio that his White House job consisted of "recruiting and using evangelical voters -- any Christian voters -- trying to recruit African-American pastors, trying to use, frankly, the initiative of the poor purely for political ends."

Others reject that criticism. "To collapse the faith-based initiative into partisan politics is to miss the larger reality of public-private partnerships and to ignore where the action is today," said Richard Cizik, vice president for governmental affairs at the National Association of Evangelicals. Indeed, the effort to enlist faith-based groups in support of government social service programs crosses party lines.

For example, Daniel Guild is the deputy director of a faith-based program created last summer in the office of the staunchly Democratic mayor of Lansing, Mich. Guild's office was created under an August executive order signed by Mayor Virg Bernero, who took office in January 2006. The office's director -- and only paid staff member -- is Bishop David Maxwell, who is a leader of the Clergy Forum of Greater Lansing, a group of two dozen African-American churches. Bernero announced that Maxwell would be paid an annual stipend of $20,000 to $30,000 from the city's general fund. One of the office's first efforts, Guild said, has been to catalog the social services that churches in Lansing provide so that the city knows what resources it can call upon.

The enthusiastic involvement of Democratic officeholders gives some supporters hope that the faith-based initiative will continue even if a Democrat succeeds Bush in two years.

Government agencies and other large organizations began to realize the value of local faith-based and community groups well before Bush took office, Cizik said. "We're seeing greater public and private support for the smaller and often faith-based organizations that are playing a tremendously important role in meeting social needs," he said. "I'm convinced the Democrats understand this and aren't going to try to kill it."

Farr, of Points of Light, and a few other leaders in the faith-based service community have been meeting to discuss the future of their work after Bush. "I'm not a political person at all," Farr said. "We want to continue it so it just doesn't die away. We're not expecting the White House to lead the way. We're going to do it ourselves."

The service leaders are trying to create lasting partnerships between their groups, private foundations, the corporate sector, and government -- with government as a player but not the leader of the effort.

One danger is that small service providers may get fed up with the bureaucracy that comes with government funding. Witness the after-school tutoring program under the No Child Left Behind Act. The Education Department wants faith-based groups to provide tutoring to students in struggling schools. But local school districts dish out the tutoring funds, and state education departments are responsible for approving the providers. So the Education Department in 2003 hired five intermediary organizations to guide faith-based and community groups through the state-level approval process and then through the school districts' bureaucracies.

Many churches and faith-based groups provide after-school care, so they're a natural fit for the tutoring program, said Leigh Hopkins, vice president for education initiatives at the Philadelphia-based Public/Private Ventures, one of the intermediary organizations brought in to help organizations get into the tutoring program. But even with the extra help, the churches have had a tough time dealing with the red tape involved in the tutoring program. Of the 180 groups that Public/Private Ventures has encouraged to become tutoring providers, 133 applied for the program and 124 got approved, but just 67 are actively tutoring.

Many of the faith-based groups that Hopkins has helped told her that the paperwork required for dealing with the government was too onerous. "I report to a higher power, but this is too much," one church-based administrator told Hopkins.

One of the largest tutoring providers is faith-based but not tied to a church. Mrs. Dowd's Teaching Service enrolled 900 students in two years at schools in Prince George's County, Md. Eileen Dowd, the head of the company, previously worked at the Maryland General Assembly and as a teacher, experiences that helped her handle the application process. She says that the only way her Christian tutors demonstrate their faith is by how they treat their pupils. "We are compassionate, we are peaceful, we are gentle, we are patient, we are loving, we are kind, we are self-controlled," she said.

One big question is whether the emphasis on local and faith-based programs achieves better results than traditional social service structures.

Hein at the White House says that while the public debate has focused on whether a service organization is religious, inside the White House the focus is on the size of the provider. In essence, he argues, smaller is better. The faith-based and community initiative is really about locating small, locally based charities and helping them get access to government assistance that had been presumed to be available only to larger, more established organizations.

Jedd Medefind, director of Labor's faith-based office, said that government resources are better spent with organizations that are already grounded in communities. "They can draw upon dedicated volunteers that share the same ZIP code as the problem," he said. "They have a personal commitment to the people they are serving."

Still, in dozens of interviews over the course of more than a year, National Journal asked government officials and providers for proof of results -- and received variations on the same answer: The program is too new to tell; we have begun a study but the results are not in; it may take many years to see the lasting impact.

Towey says that part of the problem in measuring results is that no one is sure how to do it.

Government is well practiced at measuring outputs, "like beds provided, meals served, job-training hours delivered," he said. "But it doesn't do a very good job of measuring outcomes -- addicts that recovered, jobless people that found decent paying jobs." That is why the White House has emphasized training sessions for providers that "help to develop internal capacities to measure results."

One oft-cited example of an effective faith-based program is the program funded by the Labor Department and the Annie E. Casey and Ford foundations. Public/Private Ventures served as the intermediary organization, contracting with local faith-based groups in 11 cities to help 4,500 former prisoners get jobs and stay out of prison.

An initial evaluation suggests success. Of the eight cities for which data is available, only 1.9 percent of Ready4Work participants were charged with a new offense and returned to state prison within six months of their release, well below the national average of 5 percent. And only 5 percent of Ready4Work participants were back in prison after a year, compared with 10.4 percent nationally.

But Public/Private Ventures is upfront about the limitations of this data. For one thing, the group doesn't draw a direct cause-and-effect link between the program and the participants' recidivism rate. Because the program was voluntary, the motivation of the participants themselves, not the program's design, could have been the key factor in keeping them clean. "More research, such as a random-assignment evaluation, would be needed to draw definitive conclusions about the effectiveness of the intervention," the group's report [PDF] said.

Ready4Work's designers are nonetheless heartened by the initial numbers. Throughout the growing world of government-faith collaboration, such faith is commonplace. "Many women report that they have improvement in their self-esteem, their self-worth," said Michele Jones, founder of Time to Fly, a faith-based domestic-violence counseling service in the Washington area. "Their anger issues have been resolved, they are more sensitive and compassionate as a mother, and they realize they have a greater purpose in life."

With such outcomes difficult, if not impossible, to quantify, billions of government dollars are pouring into faith-based charities with no guarantee that the groups are providing valuable services. Promoters of the initiative argue the same is true of secular service providers. "How do we give money to anybody when we don't know what success means?" Stanley Carlson-Thies, a former White House faith-based adviser, asked.

For now, at least, the government is relying on faith.

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