On Prayer Day, Trump creates new faith office
President Donald Trump in a Rose Garden ceremony Thursday announced an executive order he said would expand government grants to and partnerships with faith-based groups.
A top faith adviser to Trump said the aim was a culture change producing less conversations about churchstate barriers “without all of these arbitrary concerns as to what is appropriate.”
Trump has shrunk the infrastructure built by presidents Bush and Obama, the latter of whom created offices across most agencies with staff, including dozens of people at the State Department.
Under Trump, many of those staffs have shrunk and director positions have been left unfilled. However, he has greatly expanded the access to the White House of conservative Christians, evangelicals in particular, but also Catholics who feel alarmed by the growing legal tension between gay rights and conservative religious rights.
It wasn’t clear if there were concrete changes that would come with the executive order, though Johnnie Moore, spokesman for the president’s evangelical advisory group — his only faith advisory group with regular access — said the initiative included an order to every department “to work on faith-based partnerships.” That, Moore said, “represents a widespread expansion of a program that has historically done very effective work and now can do even greater work.”
Moore mentioned an emphasis on faith-based partnerships focusing on prison reform, education, mental health and “strengthening families.” Faith-based groups have always been in such partnerships, but federal law requires that the government not show preference for one faith or put recipients in the position where they are essentially proselytized to in order to receive care.
The ceremony was held on the National Day of Prayer and featured prayers from various faith leaders, including Cissie Graham Lynch, the granddaughter of the late evangelist Billy Graham; Cardinal Donald Wuerl, Catholic archbishop of Washington, D.C., and Levi Shemtov, the longtime Washington leader for the Chabad Lubavitch movement, and also the rabbi where Jared and Ivanka attend services in town.
The office, which has its roots with the Clinton White House in the 1990s, has always faced legal challenges, as various groups jockey for resources and others focus on guarding Constitutional protections against government-backed religion. Trump is the first to present such a homogenous group of advisers and goals described in such a sectarian manner.
At the ceremony Trump said he’s responsible for people saying “Merry Christmas” more, and talking more openly about prayer. “Don’t you notice a big difference between two or three years ago and now? Now it’s straight-up.”
Melissa Rogers, who served as executive director of the White House Office of Faithbased and Neighborhood Partnerships under Obama, said in a statement that protecting religious freedom should be a key aim of the government.
“At the event today, President Trump should retract and apologize for his call for ‘a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,’ ” she wrote in an email. “President Trump should also pledge to respect and vigorously protect the equal rights of Americans of all faiths and none, including the rights of American Muslims to religious freedom.”
Rabbi Jonah Pesner, who runs the policy-outreach arm for the Reform Movement, the largest segment of American Judaism, said in an e-mail that he has “grave concerns” about the new order and its ability to let faith groups play a key role in government programs while also protecting “the rights all people, regardless of their faith. We have already seen efforts by this administration to undermine essential rules ... thereby threatening religious liberty.”
The timing of the event comes as Trump continues to receive attention for a settlement his lawyer paid to Stormy Daniels, an actress in pornographic films who has said she had a sexual encounter with the president more than a decade ago.
Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, who serves on Trump’s legal team, said Wednesday that Trump made a series of payments reimbursing his attorney for the settlement.
Trump confirmed Thursday that lawyer Michael Cohen was reimbursed, but said the payments were through a “private agreement” and did not come from campaign funds. Trump said last month that he didn’t know anything about payments to Daniels.
Faith-based offices were considered major announcements under the past three presidents. However, Trump’s expected announcement came as a surprise to many observers. It was absent from the White House daily schedule and some attendees said they were told only of the National Day of Prayer blessing.
A similar version of the office was first created by President George W. Bush in 2001 with a mandate to serve as a resource to the faith community. The office was intended to put religious groups on equal footing with other nonprofit organizations when competing for federal funding, setting off a wave of criticism and questions about whether funding could breach a separation of church and state.