Church (Groups) and State: The problem with the faith-based bit.

President Bush's decision to create a new White House office of faith-based initiatives comes from the success of such initiatives in Texas. But it still requires quite a leap of faith on the part of conservatives: There is a legitimate concern that federal subsidies-with their strings attached-will actually have a harmful effect on religious groups.

In Texas, Bush's efforts to increase the role of small faith-based groups in tackling big social problems sparked a great deal of contention. Liberals claimed to fear the establishment of a theocracy, as well as the dismantling of government programs; conservatives worried that public funds would place limits on the independence of the religious groups. Bush's willingness to take his Texas fight to the national arena reflects his belief in the program's success-and his faith in the ability of religious organizations to change the destructive behavior of needy individuals.

There are, in fact, persuasive examples of how faith-based efforts have transformed the lives of people afflicted with such chronic problems as drug addiction and homelessness. But these examples are invariably accompanied by stories about the government's efforts to throttle the faith-based programs with regulations. In Bush's first year as governor, for example, the Texas Commission on Alcohol and Drug Abuse threatened to shut down a faith-based drug-treatment program for violating a host of state rules, including a requirement that counselors be licensed. Bush backed the private program and implemented a plan that allows for private accreditation of religious organizations that run social-welfare programs.

He also made good use of the "charitable choice" legislation Congress enacted in 1996. Before that year, only strictly secular programs could receive federal funds; the new legislation sought to end discrimination against religious groups solely because they were religious, and this fit neatly with the "compassionate conservatism" Bush espoused at the state level and on the national campaign trail-where Bush pledged that his administration, in its efforts to help the needy, would "look first to faith-based organizations, charities, and community groups that have shown their ability to save and change lives."

The first challenge for President Bush will be to find enough faith-based groups devoted to spiritual renewal and character transformation to illustrate the idea's potential; the great majority of religious-sounding social-welfare programs don't actually have a religious character.

The government spends over $400 billion on antipoverty programs, many of which are administered by secular nonprofit organizations, while the private sector contributes about $20 billion to helping the needy. Private efforts are typically indistinguishable from their value-free public counterparts; in the trenches of the war on poverty, there aren't that many explicitly spiritual warriors.

The most common antipoverty activity of most churches is running food banks, which focus-just as government programs do-on meeting clients' immediate needs instead of trying to transform their characters. All faith-based programs aren't created alike; indiscriminately providing public funds to those that lack a specifically religious component will merely foster a parallel, private-sector version of the government programs that have long failed to transform the lives of the poor. One of Bush's top advisers on the faith-based initiative explains that its architects recognize the need to begin with modest expectations. "There is a significant note of realism," he says gently, "about the need to ...