Posted by
Joe Knippenberg on Thursday, August 02, 2007 8:27:30 PM
This columnist tries to blame the Bush Administration for what he calls the negative legacy of the faith-based initiative:
It gave spirituality a bad name in social-service circles. Sad, since spiritual or religious beliefs and practices help millions of people recover from addiction, mental illness and criminality. Unlike other social services that provide a generic good, such as housing, rehab programs often invoke spirituality as the very means of recovery. But after six years of faith-based talk and funding by federal agencies, mental-health and addictions-treatment professionals are wary of spiritual interventions, which they associate with one religious brand: the conservative Christianity of Bush partisans. In reality, the spirituality of treatment and recovery ranges much more widely, from the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) to meditation, group confession, or yoga.
This amounts to blaming the Bush Administration for the reactions of domestic opponents of its policy, who sought at every turn to block it, using whatever political or judicial weapon that was ready to hand. Without this opposition (most of it politically motivated and founded on a caricature of the Bush Administration's goals), the programs wouldn't have been malodorous to social service professionals (except to the extent that they provided alternatives to their secular professional ethos).