James Towey discussed the benefits of religiously motivated service and humanitarian work, arguing that the Bush administration’s faith-based initiatives are a necessary component of the government’s social welfare system in a speech on Thursday in ICC Auditorium. Towey related his experiences in serving as a former legal counsel for Mother Teresa to his current position as the director of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives at the White House.

“Mother Teresa’s life was a faith-based initiative,” Towey said. “Her life was evidence to the performing power of what faith-based organizations can do.”

Towey discussed his work with the poor, disadvantaged and ill, including his work with Mother Teresa’s Calcutta mission and in an AIDS home she established in Washington, D.C.

“In a world of so much affluence, we still see pockets of despair and hopelessness,” he said.

Speaking from his experiences with state- and federally-run social welfare programs, Towey discussed the faults of such programs to provide fully for the physical and spiritual needs of the people they serve.

While he said that he felt such programs had a place and a purpose, they sometimes became “little fiefdoms” – programs mired in red tape and long application processes that demand inquiry into their true value to the communities they are meant to serve.

“If we measure compassion based on the size of the block grant, we should be asking these questions about effectiveness,” he said. “You patronize the poor with failed solutions.”

Compassion, he said, is a crucial element in service to the disadvantaged that many government-funded social welfare programs lacked. Faith-based aid organizations can make up for this deficit, he continued, by offering both effective aid to the destitute and an opportunity for spiritual nourishment.

“So many of [the poor] are hungry for something deeper than just a government handout,” Towey said.

The concept of faith-based initiatives, Towey said, would not only provide funding for these larger faith-based organizations, but also ensure that smaller organizations – groups that may be the only major service provider in a given neighborhood, but lack funds without government support – are still able to continue with their work.

Towey addressed the common criticism that government funding of religiously based organizations breached the tenuous line between church and state by inadvertently sponsoring religion.

In order to receive government funding, faith-based groups must first conform to certain specifications. The groups must be open to serve all, regardless of their faith, and they may not force any recipient of aid to participate in a religious service. These groups, however, are not required to completely expunge all vestiges of their religious roots.

Towey also said that he felt that in an effort to uphold the freedom of religion, contemporary American society has “blurred” the founding fathers’ intentions for the role of religion in public life. In doing so, they have shut out the positive effects of religious profession in favor of a forced secularism.

“There’s been a hostility towards religion, not a neutrality,” he said.

At a reception in McGee Library following the event, students discussed the speech.

“Using faith-based initiatives is an unnecessary breach of the Constitution,” Arielle Holland (COL ’07) said.

Susie Dyer (SFS ’07), however, disagreed with Holland’s view

“Faith based initiatives are not to favor religion, merely to level the playing field,” she said.

The Lecture Fund sponsored the speech.