Marvin Olasky

Marvin Olasky, Professor of Journalism at the University of Texas, Austin, and long-time advisor to Bush, is the man some people consider the architect of Bush's plan to inject religion into the public sphere.

Some readers may remember Olasky's name from a controversial interview in the Journal for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, in which he blamed feminism for just about everything he finds wrong with our culture, then proceeded to explain that God did not really intend for women to be leaders:

"God does not forbid women to be leaders in society, generally speaking, but when that occurs it's usually because of the abdication of men. ... [T]here's a certain shame attached. Why don't you have a man who's able to step forward?

An American Atheists report described him as "a man who would seriously alter the relationship between church and state, and use religious belief as a tool in reconstructing civil society." As editor of the Christian newsweekly World Magazine, Olasky is a vocal advocate, not only of removing the wall between church and state, but of reshaping society to fit his idealized 19th century vision of a public sphere dominated by religion and "Christian values."

Olasky had a place at the table in the meeting where Bush announced his initiative to some thirty leaders of faith-based organizations. He report to readers of World Magazine, "In From the Cold" described the initiative as a "proposal to bury an official secularism imposed during the 1960s and restore earlier understandings of church-state relations."

John Ashcroft

The former Senator and current Attorney General is the author of the Charitable Choice provision included in the 1996 welfare reform law. Since that law was passed, Ashcroft lobbied for it's inclusion in almost every other federally funded health or social services program legislation that came through the Senate. In 1999, he sponsored the "Charitable Choice Expansion Act" (S. 1113), which would automatically apply "Charitable Choice" to every current and future public health and social service program that receives federal funds - essentially the same proposal President Bush has stated he intends to send to Congress as part of the expansion of faith-based organizations' delivery of social services.

Ashcroft's conservative religious views became a hot topic during the controversy over his nomination to the post of Attorney General - not the fact that he had those beliefs, but the fact that he seemed to feel a moral duty to impose his beliefs on others, through both policy and legislation.

John DiIulio

John J. DiIulio Jr, Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania is the man Bush picked to spearhead his Faith-Based Initiative. DiIulio is a right-leaning Democrat who strongly criticized the Supreme Court decision that handed Bush the Presidency. Apparently the President had no hard feelings.

Bruce Shapiro, national correspondent for Salon News, cites John DiIulio as the architect of "what turned out to be one of the most disastrously wrong predictions in the annals of public intellectuals." DiIulio, a highly regarded expert on prison management and crime, predicted the coming of a wave of "superpredators" - "fatherless, Godless and jobless teens wreaking havoc on the American landscape." While the superpredator crisis never materialized, DiIulio's predictions - and his suggestions for dealing with the crisis - sparked a massive prison-building boom, and a trend toward ever-harsher punishments for juvenile misdeeds.

But while conservatives ran full tilt in the direction of prisons and punishment in response to DiIulio's predictions, DiIulio himself took another path... one that lead to the soup kitchens, literacy workshops and after-school intervention programs of inner city churches. Writing in the urban policy quarterly City Journal, DiIulio profiled one such effort to reclaim the "minnows" - first-time juvenile offenders still reachable with patience and attention - before the urban streets turned them into city "sharks" - the toughened kids on their way to becoming the "superpredators" his earlier work predicted. DiIulio sounds very much like a man convinced of the efficacy of such programs. Of course, as Shapiro points out, he was convinced of the accuracy of his "superpredator" prediction at the time, too.

Stephen Goldsmith

Stephen Goldsmith will chair a new advisory board -- the Corporation for National Service -- which will work with DiIulio and his White House staff. Goldsmith, during his two terms as mayor of Indianapolis, became known in conservative circles as a pioneer in free-market solutions to urban issues. Goldsmith axed hundreds of patronage jobs, required city agencies to compete against private organizations for contracts, and pushed to let religious organizations provide social services.

Goldsmith is another member of the Bush faith-based initiative team that seems unaware of the "fungibility of money" principle. Writing in the Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal, he stated that opponents to Bush's proposal simply misunderstood the principles that will guide the partnerships the President envisions. Goldsmith wrote that Bush understands that "government dollars must not subsidize religion or evangelizing," but adds that "government support can be targeted to specific, nonreligious purposes. The Salvation Army, for example, should be able to apply for government funds to feed or house a homeless person through any government program that applies, so long as it provides Bibles and conducts prayer sessions with its own money, not with government funds."

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