I first talked with journalist and author Jeff Sharlet in August 2008 when he gave an interview on my radio show Writers Voice to talk about his book, The Family. It's about a shadowy group of elite Christian fundamentalists who wield great influence in the halls of American power and around the globe.

When I read the book, I was surprised to learn that the National Prayer Breakfast was created and is hosted by The Family. The group was also a seminal force behind the creation of government-supported faith-based initiatives that started in the 1980's. So when I read in the news about President Obama's appearance at the national prayer breakfast, February 6 to announce his new Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships I asked Jeff Sharlet to give his take on the event.

He told me he would have been “stunned” if Obama hadn’t been there. “At this point [The Family] has managed to put a lock on civil religion--you have to go. JFK was the last president who actually contemplated not going--and Jackie Kennedy, much to her credit, actually refused to go...at this point, you have to go. But what you don't have to do is pander and that's what I think happened with Obama's announcement that he was going to expand Bush's faith-based program.”

One bad sign was that Obama has already backed away from his campaign promise to end the discriminatory hiring practices that were allowed under Bush's executive order concerning faith-based organizations. Sharlet told me that these hiring practices are primarily aimed at gays and lesbians. One organization, World Vision, threatened to pull out of the program if they were restricted from discriminating in hiring and firing decisions. Sharlet said, "Not only did Obama not put restrictions on their ability to hire and fire based on their view of homosexuality, he actually put one of the leaders of World Vision on the committee that will be making decisions on the organization."

But there's an even more important issue, according to Sharlet: the cozy relationship between church and state and how that undermines our democracy. It's a two-way street: government exploitation of faith-based initiatives and the corollary: church exploitation of federal funding.

Sharlet says the Family’s real purpose in creating the idea of the Faith based initiatives -- and followed by government policy for the last thirty years--is to privatize federal efforts to work with the poor.

The other purpose, as has been documented by David Kuo in his book Tempting Faith, is for faith based initiatives to be a vote-getting machine. (Kuo, a long time member of the Family, helped direct the Office of Faith-based Initiatives under George W. Bush and helped write the legislation that created it.) "Even he was stunned by what faith-based initiatives turned out to be: essentially a modern update of Tammany Hall, a way of passing out walking-around money" said Sharlet. "And I think Obama in some ways signaled that."

He did that, Sharlet says, by picking Josh DuBois, a twenty-something Pentacostal associate pastor, who's never even run his own church, let alone a federal office overseeing many millions of dollars in grants. "That's not someone who has clout in Washington. That's not someone who is going to have the connections and the resources to push back when someone like a Senator Sam Brownback is arranging money for a church he likes in Kansas--a very conservative curch that's going to use the money perhaps for prosyletizing".

Using tax dollars for prosyletizing was something Sharlet witnessed in the faith based court program called Fugitive Safe Surrender--Sharlet calls it “church court”. He sees signs it will continue under Obama. It’s been praised by Josh du Bois and has support from some Democratic Senators, according to Sharlet. 

The program operates in poor, often African American, neighborhoods, moving the entire legal appartus into a local megachurch and adjudicating cases for people who have outstanding warrants. They can choose to go through a regular court officer, or a church-connected “judge”. If they go with the latter, they get special consideration. It's not that people are getting a legal break that disturbs Sharlet, but that it makes defendants vulnerable to being proselytized. "I witnessed judges asking people who were there to turn themselves in and clear up their legal business whether they intended to come back to church."

I asked Sharlet whether this was a violation of the separation between church and state. "It's a stunning violation," he said. 

Francesca Rheannon is host and Producer of Writers Voice, a weekly syndicated radio show and podcast. You can hear the entire interview with Sharlet at the Writers Voice website.