I have never believed that religiosity was the primary underlying reason for George Bush’s hallmark “Faith Based Initiative.” I see it as primarily an updated and expanded version of the spoils system: sending resources to prop up the base, reward friends, buy off or neutralize opposition.

I want to say a bit about this as an example of the Republican spoils system, but I mostly want to unpack some other pivotal aspects of the Faith Based Initiative and what it means not only for public policy, but for religious organizations and individuals.

The Los Angeles Times recently published an investigation of this program that demonstrated that most of the money went to relgious groups in swing states, particularly African-American churches. The Times demonstrated a direct correlation between money going in and a significant increase in the African-American vote for Bush between 2000 and 2004. In one sense, there is nothing new in this. There have been many GOP efforts to divide the African-American churches over the years, and this is but one of them. The GOP has sought to degrade the historic Democratic coalition, and to reduce the volatile issues of race as a moral and political factor working against them. Conservatives, including conservative Christians, were mostly on the wrong side, or on the sidelines of one of the great moral struggles of the 20th century — the African-American civil rights movement — and they are still paying the price. Recently, GOP National Chairman Ken Mehlman noted that the party intends to further improve their numbers among African-Americans, Jews, and women over the next four years. So we can reasonably expect to see more such taxpayer funds directed to selected religious communities over the next few years. Journalist and blogger Max Blumenthal calls it “bribery.”

That said, let’s recall that Bush was unable to get legislative authorization for a broad “faith based” agenda during his first term, so the adminstration did everything it could to use executive orders to fast-track cash to “faith based” groups. This, while doing everything it could to underfund, and over-regulate public agencies. Its an old GOP strategy to discredit and hobble government agencies and programs they don’t like, and to turn taxpayer money over to private business. Now religious groups are beneficiaries of the spoils as well. (That the justification for this is often “efficiency,” is beyond preposterous, and warrants reframing from a reinvigorated Democratic Party.) What we are seeing in this, and of course in the attempted privatization of social security, no-bid defense contracts for the war in Iraq, tax-cuts for the rich, among other things, is the transfer of wealth — the common wealth — to base constituents and prospective constituents of the GOP.

We have seen this at the state level in the efforts to direct money for public education into religious and for-profit “charter” schools. Lack of rigorous evaluation and oversight, has meant more than a few scams, and more than a few grants handed over to incompetent operators, and overt prosteletizers, as has been documented by Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and reported in Church & State magazine. This, and Americans United’s effective public opposition to the program has not gone unoticed at the White House.

James Towey, director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, reiterated the president’s commitment to the program in a speech in December. In the same speech he denounced opponents of the program as “secular extremists” and singled out Rev. Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Not only is Lynn a minister in the United Church of Christ, but the AU Board and chapter leaders are believers of many faiths, and many of them are clergy.

Towey’s attack on the religious faith of people who oppose the political program of the administration is a symptom of exactly what is wrong with the Faith Based Initiative: it is not now, nor has it ever been about faith, except in the sense that the idea of faith is being cleverly used to promote a political program.

What then to do? For starters, lets stop using the term “faith-based,” as much as possible. Its a Bushist frame that conceals and clouds the political and policy purposes of administration programs. (I find it bizarre that mainstream and progressive religious groups have internalized use of the term to describe many religiously oriented activities and programs.) More specfically, when we mean government grants and contracts to religious groups, let’s say so. Try saying it out loud: “Government grants and contracts to religious groups.” Hmm. Doesn’t have the same ring or meaning does it? Now say out loud “Faith-based programs.” Sounds so soft, safe and noncontroversial. In fact, the term itself and the reality behind it, is a classic cooptation of faith itself. Most religious traditions recognize that the state can never be the source of faith, even as many, if not most people in politics in government have religious ideas of their own. Their personal faith may have everything — or nothing — to do with their jobs, or their idea of public service. But the conflation of faith, with government, with its programs, policies, staff and elected leaders, is a distortion and often an abuse of faith itself. (And the Bush adminstration effectively misuses the idea of “faith” as a cover for the real intentions of its programs.) A politician or program may share values and ideals consistent with one’s faith, but it is not the same thing, even though clever politians know how to play to religious communities, just as they do any other constituency.

There is no singular faith at work in any government — including the Bush administration — even as they seek to wrap religiosity around their entire public policy and political agenda. There is great diversity among Christians, (even conservative Christians) as well as non-Christians in the Bush adminstration, and in the nation and in the world. The danger here is the cooptation of religious faith by the most powerful government in the world to justify and promote its domestic and foreign policy.

There is another dimension to the trick of the faith-based framing of grants and contracts. People inside and outside of the government have “faith” in the religious sense. But a government program cannot be based on faith. Exactly whose faith would that be? The many people involved in this program, have as many different faiths as there are individuals. This is also true of any and all other government programs. Similarly the recipients of government grants and contracts from various federal departments are going to be mostly “people of faith” whether or not they are received under the rubric of the “Faith-Based Initiative.” If polls are true that most Americans are religious, then it stands to reason that most contractors are, well, people of faith. How could it be otherwise?

This is an important point because the U.S. Constitution invests the right to religious freedom not with institutions, but with individuals. That’s one of the essential meanings of the idea of separation of church and state. Churches as institutions, as the organizations of people of various faiths are protected from interference by the government. And government may function best on behalf of the citizens, without undue influence of churches. It is the very conflation of the interests of church and state that the framers of the constitution sought to separate. Again, the Constitution recognizes the religious rights of individuals as paramount. The right to believe and therefore to think as one will, is foundational to the right to freedom of speech. The Bush administration’s efforts to buy off institutional churches to influence the beliefs and the political speech and actions of members are exactly the kind of problem that the framers of the Constitution sought to avoid.

The Bush administration’s taxpayer-funded campaign to coopt churches into its political orbit is as coarse and craven an attack on faith itself as we have seen in our history.

Some of those on the Christian theocratic right have seen this clearly for a long time. They see the risk of corruption and compromise of faith by feeding at the government trough, and do not partake. The Rovian politics behind the Faith Based Initiative in all of its manifestations, see it not as a risk but an opportunity. People of faith, of many varieties, and thier institutions (even some of the most conservative theocrats), are a check against the power of the state. Potentially powerful opponents to the direction of a nascent imperial state must be dealt with — with money and the seductiveness of power, or otherwise coopted, neutralized or silenced.

There are deeper consequences of all this. We now have churches and religiously oriented agencies lined up at the faith-based soup kitchen, while the Bush administration carries out the greatest transfer of wealth in the history of the world, and a largely unfettered march towards global domination.

That religious opponents of major domestic and foreign policies of the Bush administistration, have internalized the “faith-based” frame on their own, is a gift that Karl Rove undoubtedly savors every time he hears a mainstream religious leader use the term and try to own it. Every such useage further legitimizes the fuzzy-faithed facade on the adminstration’s poltical program of cooptation of churches.

It is true that government grants have been given to religious agencies for years to carry out projects and social services, and that these were not necessarily corrupting, or violative of church state separation. I have some personal knowledge about this. But what we are seeing here is mostly not benign. In my view, it is an unconscionable attack on the independence of Christian churches of many varieties.

Rev. Dan Schultz, a minister in the United Church of Christ wrote about this in an essay on his blog, faithforward. He sees a “sociopathic administration” at work.

“The technical definition of sociopathy,” he writes, “is… what we used to call psychotic behavior and now call anti-social personality: ‘A personality disorder characterised by a continuous and persistent pattern of aggressive behaviour in which the rights of others are violated.’ In layman’s terms, he continues, “this is an administration that wants to do whatever the hell it wants, whenever the hell it wants to. And it doesn’t want anyone to tell it it’s wrong.”

James Towey’s attack on Rev. Barry Lynn and Americans United as “secular extremists” is an excellent example of Schultz’s insight about the sociopathic character of the Bush Administration — that acts like it owns faith, and that anyone who disagrees with their policies is an opponent of God. (The frame of “faith-based” implies that opposition is somehow anti-faith, which is another obvious reason to use the term with care.) But Towey’s attack is concerning because we are now no longer in the realm of clever political slogans. If Schultz is right — and I think he is — we are witnessing one aspect of the sociopathology of the most powerful government in the history of the world.