On January 30th, the Bush administration announced its new "Faith-Based Initiative" to allow faith-based organizations to compete with secular social services groups for federal dollars intended to help the needy. That is, as long as they don't use the money for, well, faith-based initiatives. Bush says he wants to help churches, etc., pay for beans, not bibles.

Which raises some tricky questions. After all, how do you tell when a bean is just a bean, and when it's God's little messenger? And besides, what happens when religion "competes" for government dollars? Will religion rule the White House? Or is Bush offering an I.P.O. of the Lord?

Killing the Buddha asked a group of journalists, activists, and scholars what Bush's plan will mean for God, country, and the economy of the divine.

The Perks of Post-Ideological Piety
Chris Lehmann is an editor at the Washington Post.

When George W. Bush staged his photo op / press conference announcing his new White House office devoted to "faith-based" charity and social service, one of my work colleagues pointed out that an old friend of his was among the dozen or so spiritual leaders marshaled behind the presidential podium as prospective beneficiaries. My workmate's friend is a dedicated minister who helps oversee a Boston agency for at-risk youth. It's certainly hard, on the face of things, to begrudge him a share of the federal money that otherwise gets earmarked for upper-middle-class tax cuts, corporate welfare or obscene defense subsidies.

But as my eye lingered on the Page 1 photo, I couldn't help but notice that my workmate's friend looked none too happy: He appeared to be simultaneously clenching his teeth and praying silently for strength. And my colleague quickly confirmed that his friend regarded George W. Bush as, well, something less than a spiritual witness to the suffering poor.

The dilemma spelled out plainly on this man's face is, I confess, of more pressing interest to me than the constitutional questions of church-state separation that have swollen, predictably, into snowdrifts of punditry about the new federal Office of Faith-Based Panaceas. Try to imagine, say, the leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference composing federal grant applications instead of staging sit-ins and marches and landing in jail. Think of Theodore Parker, Frances Willard, Walter Rauschenbush, Abraham Heschel, Roger Williams, or Joseph Smith as appointed state bureaucrats instead of self-styled prophets and reformers. Nor do we need merely to entertain this as a hypothetical thought-experiment: the intellectual career of protestant theologian Reinhold Niehbur pretty much went into eclipse-and lost much of its prophetic power as well-when he was retained as a de facto house preacher for the Cold War liberals of the Kennedy age.

None of this is to say that religious-minded critics of contemporary injustices, or of their likely authors in a W. administration, will be automatically silenced by virtue of being on the government payroll. But it is to suggest that some elusive, important defining trait of religion gets subtly downgraded when our leaders single out religious experience for special praise, and special treatment, on grounds of its social utility.

All major religions stake much of their moral authority on observing some version of St. Augustine's two-cities cosmology, elevating the divine imperatives of conscience and the individual believer's allegiance to a "higher law" over the everyday tributes exacted by earthly powers. (Insert your preferred variation of "Render unto Caesar" here.)

There's been a steady erosion of this key, critical tension in American life over the long boom of the 1990's. On the one hand, a market-happy culture has propelled religious thought toward mushy feelspeak homilies, and on the other, a post-ideological politics has sent all manner of commentators and political leaders clamoring for quaintly inoffensive public virtues such as bipartisanship, community and (the present real whopper from the House of Bush) "civility." As a result, religious figures become steadily more mind-curish and/or power-mindful (cf. Deepak Chopra, Jesse Jackson, and Matthew Fox), while your everyday rock stars, athletes and celebrities grow conspicuously more, uh, spiritual (cf. Jewel, Evander Holyfield, and Oprah).

A good deal of this unsightly slipperiness between the latter-day sacred and profane comes across in the very term "faith-based" -- it rings of all-purpose advertising euphemism. One can, after all, base anything on a faith, as the daily returns of the stock market and the career of Keanu Reeves both attest. Then there's the allied notion that religion is but the most suitable instrument in hand for summoning our long-slumbering social sympathies. (It's grimly entertaining to imagine other, starker government initiatives described as, say, "Kissinger-based" or "Archer Daniels Midland-based.") This tacit logic does discredit both to believing souls, who have a good deal more staked on their faith, and to the hard-won provisions of our now lapsed postwar social contract, which sought to identify and rectify inequalities of condition as secular challenges to the whole society's sense of justice, fairness and democratic promise.

The present federal mania for the faith-based now commands, fittingly enough, inertly bipartisan support. Even longtime liberal secularists tend to regard it, like the advent of the entire accidental presidency of George W. Bush, with a certain weary, if vaguely nonplused, resignation. That is scarcely surprising, since the perks of pious, this-worldly moralizing now proliferate in all corners of our political world, from sanctimoniously shocked congressional hearings on media violence, to Bill Clinton's post-Monica prayer breakfast performance, to the smugly self-advertised religiosity of Joe Lieberman and Little Lord W. And that, come to think of it, was what seemed to be behind the stricken look on the face of that Boston minister: His presence there as a designated symbol of the social boons of private faith bore indirect witness to a wider failing of our public world, and a spreading poverty of our moral imagination.