Yesterday, the White House sponsored a gathering of interfaith activists from a variety of college communities around the country. The event was intended to spark a conversation on ways to increase faith-based community service among students, faculties and administrators. Mara Vanderslice blogs for the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships:
The [President's Faith Advisory] Council asked the Administration to challenge the academic community to scale up interfaith service initiatives onto 500 campuses across the country. This event was a response to that recommendation of the President’s Advisory Council…
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College campuses have long nurtured diverse community service efforts and have traditionally been viewed as a vanguard sector for important social movements. These campus leaders were asked to partner with the Administration in the coming year to further advance interfaith and community cooperation on campuses and connect these campus-based initiatives to the Administration’s broader service priorities.
Author Stephen Prothero attended the event and says the Obama approach to government's faith-based partnerships felt both more inclusive and more legal than the Bush administration's:
This event, which included Buddhists and Jains alongside Christians and Jews, provided the strongest signal yet that for this administration “faith-based” is not a code word for “Christian” or even “Judeo-Christian.” I sat with a Hindu to my right and a secular humanist to my left, and the speakers repeatedly followed President Obama in folding non-believers into the rhetorical mix. In this White House, it seems, secular humanists are one faith among many.
This creative new approach is bad news for those who don’t want to see the government get into bed with faith-based organizations, because it co-opts the two constitutional criticisms of the faith-based initiatives of President George W. Bush — that they favored Christianity over other religions, and that they favored religion over irreligion. If Bush's initiatives were suspect on constitutional grounds (as I believe they were), Obama’s more inclusive approach will in my view withstand any legal challenges.
