I posted yesterday about how there are now offices of faith-based initiatives in the Departments of Justice, Labor, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Education, Agriculture; and the U.S. Agency for International Development.
That's scary enough by itself. But oddly, I think this needs to be seen in light of the larger long-term conservative political plan more so than the larger long-term plan of the religious set. Let's talk theory, here.
The ideological conservatives, with their theories of government and economics and society have wedded themselves effectively to those with the vision of a theocratic America. It's an incestuous marriage, to be sure, because a single person can simultaneously subscribe to both of those visions, and plenty do. And religious ideas (see: Calvinism) have certainly played a formative role in conservative ideology, as other traditions influenced liberal ideology. But plenty are just one or the other, united for convenience. To a large degree this is a political alliance of two political forces. The idealogical conservatives are using the overtly religious set as a tool, because they know that religion is a powerful bludgeon, and one that the political opposition cannot argue against without making themselves look bad. But enough setup...
My point is that the conservative ideological vision wants to get government out of the business of social services and programs, period - - this isn't a secret, it's a central tenet of their philosophy - - and this is how they're going to do it. Welfare was the first visible target back in Traitor Bubba's administration. Social Security is the entitlement du jour, and Medicare and Medicaid will have their day after that. As the number of offices of faith-based initiatives can attest, however, there are loads of other, less-visible services suffusing the government which can also be quietly nixed.
The conservative blueprint of ideal government says that social services ought to be delivered at the community level by churches and community groups. (actually, the personal responsibility idea says nobody should need or deserve social services). In my view, the offices of faith-based initiatives are the transitional step between the current system of government programs and services and their ideal vision of church/community-level services, if at all. And really it's not just a plan to cut social services, but to cut all sorts of government functions. This is the fundamental idea of mimimal government. Cut it all.
Get the OFBIs entrenched over time, get the cash handed out widely and deeply and pretty soon people will begin to count on the services it funds - so much so that cutting that funding or eliminating the program would make you look like a monster (can you see the attack ads now? "Senator so and so voted to take the food out of the mouths of children and drive churches out of business" [cut to visual of dirty-faced child crying on the front steps of the nailed-shut church]). At the same time, you starve the government-based programs, cutting their funding more and more each year. Some quietly fizzle out. Some are given a public burial underneath a bunch of faux-righteous rhetoric about efficient government or something. What happens next, I don't know. Does goverment fuse with the church and quit pretending it isn't a theocracy? Does the government turn on the church and quit funding its programs so it can stop collecting taxes so Grover Norquist can be happy? Dunno.
But I think that's what this is all about. Is it about the place of the church in society? Well, yes. But it's more about the place of government in society according to conservative ideological theory. The churches will have a huge new audience to proselytize to, and that'll please plenty of conservatives (need some services? better get right with jesus!), but they'll be a lot happier that they've starved and amputated the government's social arm and whittled down the overall role of government while they were at it.