The Carpetbagger Report: "This Week in God"

Indeed.

From another Vermont blog with national and international focus, The Carpetbagger Report:

First up from the God machine is an interesting poll gauging support for "faith-based" funding among the one constituency that's supposed to support it most.

Half of the nation's evangelical Christians do not support government funding of faith-based organizations, a survey shows.

New data released Wednesday (Oct. 25) from the Baylor Religion Survey show that 50 percent of evangelicals, and 65 percent of the total population, think federal funding of religious organizations is inappropriate. Twenty-six percent of the total respondents surveyed said they agree with such funding.

That's rather surprising. The conventional wisdom, particularly in the White House, is that evangelicals are anxious to see the government finance ministries' work. Indeed, it's almost a foregone conclusion — whenever Bush speaks before a religious audience, he touts his (alleged) commitment to funding faith-based groups as proof that he's one of them.

But a poll like this one suggests otherwise. It also hints at one of the reasons the president's faith-based scheme struggled to make progress in Congress during Bush's first term — it had plenty of critics, and lacked key allies. After all, if religious minorities didn't like it, and civil libertarians didn't like it, and constitutional scholars said it was legally dubious, and half of the evangelical community rejects the very idea, you start to get the sense the only real supporters of the White House faith-based initiative are actually in the White House.

For that matter, thanks to David Kuo, we know that the Bush gang wasn't all that committed to the project anyway, and simply saw the initiative as a political gimmick. No wonder the whole thing flopped.