Under storm cloud, Trump pushes faith-based effort
President signs order amid news of porn star payoff
WASHINGTON — 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 church- state barriers “without all of these arbitrary concerns as to what is appropriate.”
Trump has shrunk the infrastructure built by Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the latter who 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 expanded greatly 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 great- President Donald Trump shakes hands with Pastor Darrell Scott, co-founder of the New Spirit Revival Center, before signing an executive order Thursday. er 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 Kushner and Ivanka Trump attend services in town.
The office — which has its roots with the Bill 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 governmentbacked religion.
Trump is the first to present such a homogeneous group of advisers and goals described in such a sectarian manner.
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.
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 and nothing of the executive order.
A year ago, Trump issued an executive order on religious freedom that drew mixed reactions among religious conservatives. Several of his evangelical advisers praised him at the time, but many in conservative religious freedom advocacy circles said that the actual text of the executive order did not change much. An executive order, critics argue, doesn’t last long because the next president can come in and rescind it.