http://www.salon.com/politics/feature/2001/01/31/diiulio/print.html
Bringing faith to the West Wing
John DiIulio, who once spread fear about juvenile "superpredators," will now
run President Bush's faith-based charity programs -- and build an army from
GOP patronage.
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By Bruce Shapiro
Feb. 1, 2001 | Back in the mid-1990s, John DiIulio, an ambitious Princeton
political scientist and scholar of prison management and crime, made a stir
with what turned out to be one of the most disastrously wrong predictions in
the annals of public intellectuals. Relying upon reams of supposedly
irrefutable data, DiIulio predicted a massive coming wave of crime by
children and teenagers -- crime of unprecedented brutality. Situating this
prediction in the erosion of family and faith, DiIulio warned of a
"generational wolf pack" of "fatherless, Godless and jobless" teens wreaking
havoc on the American landscape. "Superpredators," he called them.
The tidal wave of superpredators never arrived. Instead, juvenile crime
plummeted. But seizing upon DiIulio's incendiary predictions and
prescriptions, politicians in both political parties created their own tidal
wave -- a tidal wave of unforgiving punishment. Harsh juvenile prison
sentences, the incarceration of teenagers, massive expansion of juvenile
prisons: All were propelled forward by DiIulio's superpredator theory.
Now John DiIulio -- his academic chair shifted from Princeton to Penn -- is
back, in a public-policy role at least as controversial: He is director, and
the intellectual guiding force, behind the Bush administration's new White
House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. His job, as he put it
on CBS's "The Early Show" this week, is to cultivate "a little government
friendliness" toward social-service programs based in communities of worship.
I have my own minor history with DiIulio. Back in 1995 I wrote a long article
critical of his "wolf pack" theory and his analysis of crime; DiIulio
responded with a furious letter to the editor, denouncing me as anti-Italian
because I compared his theories to the views of a liberal police chief who
also happened to be of Italian-American extraction. Then a few months later I
met DiIulio at a public-policy forum in which he talked about finding common
ground between liberals and conservatives on crime -- a stance that startled
me given his inflammatory rhetoric up to that point. Afterward I introduced
myself, expecting the usual sardonic dance between a journalist and aggrieved
subject. Instead he smiled warmly: "God bless you," DiIulio said, and it was
without a trace of sarcasm.
I've watched DiIulio's evolution -- that search for common ground -- with
interest. By the end of the 1990s, he was disillusioned by the national
punishment regime he had helped inspire, arguing in the Wall Street Journal
and scholarly publications for investment in community-based youth programs
instead of more prison cells. His conservatism turned away from penology and
instead into research promoting the success of social service outreach by
African-American churches. Last year he edited a book on religion in American
life with the decidedly liberal Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne.
DiIulio's new White House appointment prompts an interesting question: Are
his new policy prescriptions -- for broader government partnership in social
services by churches, synagogues and mosques -- any better founded or any
more reliable than his wolf-pack predictions? What the new DiIulio calls "a
little government friendliness" toward religious charities has civil
libertarians -- and some religious denominations -- alarmed about breaches in
the church-state wall. DiIulio says the plan is designed to "level the
playing field" between sacred and secular; Laura Murphy, the ACLU's
Washington office director, calls the new plan "a faith-based prescription
for discrimination." The Rev. Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans
United for Separation of Church and State, warns that the Bush-DiIulio plan
threatens to create "a giant, new kind of conglomerate bureaucracy of church
and state sitting in the White House."
I'm a die-hard civil libertarian. But I've also lived and reported in inner
cities for the last two decades and find the question more vexed -- and
vexing -- than either DiIulio's reassuring rhetoric or the ACLU's abstract
invocation of principle.
It's a simple fact, for instance, that in New Haven, Conn., the city where I
live and the seventh-poorest municipality in the United States, religiously
affiliated outfits are the social-service providers of last resort, keeping
their feet firmly planted in the asphalt during the years that government --
thanks to Republican presidents and Congresses -- cut back and left the poor
to fend for themselves. Jewish Family Services provides post-traumatic
counseling to kids who've witnessed violence. My stepdaughter's Catholic
church runs a soup kitchen. Low-income housing construction, prisoner
re-entry, after-school mentoring: Religious communities are doing as much as
anyone to sustain a safety net. And many of them are already getting
government money to do so. I've seen no convincing evidence that religious
agencies do their job better than their secular counterparts; but I've seen
plenty of evidence that they often do their job alone.
But if my experience here in New Haven makes me appreciate the work of
religious charities and activists, it's no less revealing of a very specific
reason to find the Bush plan worrisome. Back in the 1980s, when I was a
reporter and editor at local newspapers, this city's chairman of the board of
education was an influential minister. Mysteriously, a disproportionate
number of jobs in the school system -- from cafeteria to principal's office
-- went to his congregants. And when that minister decided to back a mayoral
candidate, so did those people whose jobs he'd arranged. Another minister a
few years back got millions in city grants to build low-income housing. He
did the worst job of any nonprofit housing developer in the city's history,
but somehow the grants kept coming -- and somehow the minister's church buses
kept showing up to support the mayor on election day.
Both of these scandals, as it happens, involved Democrats. But they are a
minor-league preview of the scandals the Bush religious-aid package threatens
to unleash. Which churches and which denominations are rewarded with funds
that fit their profile is a profoundly political matter.
DiIulio goes to great lengths to describe the new White House office as an
equal-opportunity funder of religious and secular projects. "No one is
talking about funding religion directly," he said on CBS. "If that were the
proposal, I wouldn't support it. We're not talking about giving government
money to religious groups. We're talking about making it possible for groups
that are out there performing valued social services to compete, whether
they're faith-based or secular community-rooted nonprofits, on the same basis
as any other nongovernmental providers of those services."
But in fact, what Bush and DiIulio plan is a new funding stream specifically
tailored to fit the profile of religious charities: a multibillion-dollar
fund specifically going to small charities like those run by churches; seed
money to existing groups venturing into social services for the first time.
It's clear that those groups mean churches, not bowling leagues.
This funding stream may pay for some good programs. But it will also create a
massive expansion of the base of GOP political influence. What City Hall jobs
were to urban Democrats in an earlier era, church-based charities will be to
the GOP. Governors (2-to-1 Republicans these days) will see to it that block
grants flow to congregations whose church buses show up at the polls on
Election Day. Favored denominations will be rewarded with programs crafted to
fit their profile.
Mark my words: the greatest impact of the White House's faith-based outreach
will be to lay the groundwork for a national GOP patronage machine to rival
the old days of Richard Daley and Boss Tweed.
At the same time, it's also alarming that the very same religious lobbies
that want to breach the church-state wall when it comes to funding, want
impermeable First Amendment protection from public accountability. In both
George W. Bush's Texas and John Ashcroft's Missouri, churches claim the First
Amendment right to run their religious schools, daycare centers and drug
programs free from licensing and performance standards applied to all other
agencies in the education or social-service arena. Because of the First
Amendment, they claim they can discriminate in hiring against gays or women
or anyone else routinely protected at secular agencies.
Again, it's a question of patronage as much as principle: Can we really
expect the Bush White House, already bending over backward to grant the
religious right every symbolic victory, to hold the line against special
rights for religious charities?
When John DiIulio first started shifting his rhetoric from the wolf pack to
black churches, I found myself responding with some cynicism: He's shrewdly
recognized the end of the crime panic, I thought, and is changing the
subject, advancing his career in a new direction.
I don't think that anymore. Having read DiIulio's recent op-eds and articles,
I'm convinced that his affection for church-based charities is genuine and
often well-founded -- especially when it comes to dealing with prisoners and
their families, two groups to whom churches both black and white have shown
notable dedication.
But still. The last time John DiIulio rose to national prominence, he helped
inspire a national wave of prison-building he later claimed not to want. The
damage done by DiIulio's superpredator rhetoric in the 1990s wasn't really
caused by his bad data, or because it turned out to be a false prophecy. The
damage came because DiIulio -- judging from his subsequent regret -- failed
to see the cynical political uses to which his research, his heartfelt alarm
at social decay, would be put. The same, I fear, is true of his new elevation
to the White House. DiIulio wants to promote good works. Instead, he's been
hired as chief engineer for a patronage machine.
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About the writer
Bruce Shapiro is national correspondent for Salon News.
