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CNN Sunday Morning

Bush's Faith-Based Initiative Stuck on Capitol Hill

Aired September 01, 2002 - 07:17   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

CATHERINE CALLAWAY, CNN ANCHOR: As Congress heads back to Washington, still stuck on the Hill, President Bush's faith-based initiative. The legislation is meant to channel federal funds to religious organizations as never before. It briefly created an alliance between many Democratic inner city ministers and a Republican administration.
But as CNN's Bill Delaney tells us, that was then.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BILL DELANEY, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): It takes a lot of faith to believe in a place like Brockton, Massachusetts, down at the heels, shaken just in the past few months by a rash of murders.

ALEX HURT, REV., KINGDOM CHURCH: We all live in the same country.

DELANEY: Local minister Reverend Alex Hurt though does believe in the city. What he's lost his once strong faith in, President Bush's faith based initiative, meant to channel government aid money to the poor in places like Brockton.

Were you sold a bill of goods?

HURT: Well, I think that what happened is that the church was used as a pawn, that we were used to advance an agenda that I believe strongly that the president really did care about, but because of the war on terrorism and other priorities, really got lost in the shuffle.

DELANEY: As for why the initiative stalled now in Congress, Hurt says arguments against mixing church and state obscured hardball politics in the now Democratic Senate.

HURT: No one ever was interested in using public money to evangelize anyone. They thought that if they allowed the Republican party to get inroads into a core constituency to black church, that the electoral map would be against it.

DELANEY: Wherever fingers point, Hurt's moving on his own, to create with no government money a new church, school, community center, and revenue-generating low income housing.

HURT: This vision is the kind of things that we were thinking that the faith based initiative would be helping to support.

DELANEY: So much for the faith based initiative?

HURT: Nice try.

DELANEY (on camera): How the faith based initiative seen at the grassroots level by some as a good idea that's not working. Contrast with how it's seen by its advocates in Washington as a work in progress.

(voice-over) Patients please, ask Bush administration officials, saying legislation will pass, and that they're already working through federal agencies to help faith based organizations access federal aid, while trying to change regulations that discourage that. Trouble is, that still makes civil libertarians nervous.

RONALD MADNICK, REPATRIATION OF CHURCH AND STATE: So at leads to an entanglement between the government and religious parties. And these are non profit organizations. They don't pay taxes. So they're already getting government benefits.

DELANEY: But one attendee for groundbreaking of Reverend Hurt's planned apartment complex, Steve Wagner, director of HUD's Center for Faith Based Initiatives. Up from Washington on a Saturday morning to support a project not government funded, but that's the sort of thing he hopes someday could be.

STEVE WAGNER, HUD FAITH BASED INITIATIVES: What we need is people like Pastor Alex Hurt. Regulations actually discriminate against faith based organizations. And we have to get rid of that.

DELANEY: So that depending on your point of view, stopped, stalled or evolving faith based initiative. And approach, Reverend Alex Hurts been saying for a year and a half now, he can't wait for, literally.

Bill Delaney, CNN, Brockton, Massachusetts.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

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