US Faith Initiative for Africa: Condoleeza Rice and black pastors to fight AIDS

[Akyeame Kwame]

I am responding to this recent email. Many of you have received this communique previously. The latest feedback states "They must be stopped." Even Tavis Smiley's State of the Black Race on CNN chastised the ministers for even accepting the invitation to meet with Bush. Bush is asking Afrikans to open the way to allow them to recapture Africa under the guise of helping with the HIV/AIDS problem. The very people who created and infected Afrikans with the virus are asking Afrikans on this side of the water to be a part of the solution. Well, we must be a part of the healing of all of our people, but not with them and not their way. I ask are you ready to go to battle and who is prepared to lead the charge. Those of us responsible for guiding, assisting and healing the spirits of our people have a particular leadership role. The work must begin NOW.
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A U.S. Faith Initiative for Africa
Secretary of State Rice and black pastors discuss a
joint effort to fight AIDS.
By Peter Wallsten and Tom Hamburger
Times Staff Writers

May 29, 2005


WASHINGTON — Escalating its courtship of a politically
powerful constituency, the Bush administration is
teaming up with some of the nation's best-known and
most influential black clergy to craft a new role for
U.S. churches in Africa.

The effort was launched last week, when more than two
dozen leading African American religious figures met
privately with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and
senior White House officials at the State Department,
according to administration officials and meeting
participants.

The hourlong session focused largely on how the
administration's faith-based initiative could be
expanded to combat the spread of HIV and provide help
for tens of millions of children orphaned by the
epidemic across Africa.

Some of the pastors said it was a matter of national
security — that those orphans were susceptible to
recruitment by Islamic extremists unless they could be
exposed to churches such as theirs.

The gathering yielded no formal financial commitment
from the federal government for the Africa effort. But
participants said it marked a new era of engagement by
black clergy with U.S. foreign policy.

The Rev. O'Neal Dozier, pastor of the Worldwide
Christian Center in Pompano Beach, Fla., and a
longtime Republican, said Rice's decision to huddle
with the pastors gave them a "mandate" to craft Africa
policy. He said the group had laid plans to meet again
soon with State Department officials.

A senior aide to Rice, James Wilkinson, said the
meeting reflected her belief that more African
American organizations "need to get involved in the
president's Africa agenda." Administration officials
described it as a natural step in an Africa policy
that has gained heightened priority under Bush in the
wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and in the face
of the growing AIDS epidemic.

If it goes forward, the collaboration could result in
a substantial expansion of black church participation
in the faith-based initiative, from a largely domestic
focus to a broader overseas portfolio that pastors
believe could make hundreds of millions of taxpayer
dollars available for the churches to combat AIDS and
related social ills internationally.

Rice and the pastors discussed the possibility of
establishing an office of faith-based initiatives
within the State Department that would direct federal
funds for overseas aid to church and community groups,
as similar offices have done in other Cabinet
agencies.

The meeting reflected the expanding relationship
between some of the country's best-known black clergy
and the Bush administration — a relationship that has
been nurtured through a White House program that
encourages funneling government grants to religious
charities.

Illustrating the political benefit of that
relationship, White House officials injected some
Capitol Hill strategy into the session. They solicited
support among the black pastors for controversial
legislation that would allow faith-based charities in
the U.S. to discriminate in hiring based on an
applicant's religious beliefs — a provision that has
spurred opposition from some Democrats and civil
rights groups.

"Compassion has a way of cutting across partisan
lines," said James Towey, the top White House official
in charge of the faith-based programs, who asked the
pastors to sign a letter endorsing the legislation.

But rather than lowering partisan suspicions, the
meeting raised them. The high-level session occurred
the same day that the all-Democratic Congressional
Black Caucus conducted a long-planned outreach meeting
with 200 black pastors from across the country seeking
to solidify bonds between the Democrats and religious
leaders. Some saw the State Department meeting as an
effort to upstage the black caucus.

It was the latest sign of increasingly fierce
competition between Republicans and Democrats for the
support of religious voters, in this case a key
element of the Democratic base.

Though past White House meetings have drawn mostly
Republican-leaning pastors, the State Department
session was broader, attracting longtime Democrats
such as Andrew Young, former Atlanta mayor and onetime
United Nations ambassador, and administration critics
such as the Rev. William J. Shaw, head of the National
Baptist Convention.

The meeting was dominated, however, by evangelical
pastors — many of them, like Bishops T.D. Jakes of
Dallas and Charles E. Blake of Los Angeles, known to
national television audiences.

White House strategists view black ministers as a path
into a voter bloc that has traditionally been
Democratic but is conservative on social issues such
as abortion, school vouchers and same-sex marriage.

A relatively small group of sympathetic pastors has
enjoyed extraordinary access to Bush and his top
aides. Now, as the GOP outreach grows wider and more
aggressive, some Democrats accuse the White House of
expanding the promise of government grants to woo
political support.

"I am concerned that this may be another enticement
offered by the administration to African American
clergy along the lines of the faith-based initiative,"
said Rep. Major R. Owens (D-N.Y.), a member of the
Congressional Black Caucus.

Sending U.S. grants to well-established faith-based
groups in Africa such as Catholic Relief Services is
nothing new. But a former diplomat who handled Africa
policy under President Clinton expressed concern about
an initiative that might favor denominations that were
politically friendly to the administration.

"There is a huge pressing need for care for AIDS
orphans," said Susan Rice, now a senior fellow in
foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution.
Noting that past high-level meetings had been
dominated by African American churches sympathetic to
the White House, she said: "It's important to involve
mainline African American denominations … so that the
effort is not viewed solely as an effort at Republican
Party base-building."

Brett Schaefer, an expert on Africa and foreign aid
for the conservative Heritage Foundation, applauded
the idea of engaging more black churches in the fight
against AIDS in Africa. But he questioned the wisdom
of using the program to counter Islamic extremism.
"The U.S. should be careful that these projects … be
focused on actual assistance rather than
proselytizing," he said.

Several ministers at the State Department meeting
signed the letter distributed by Towey endorsing the
White House-backed provision on religious hiring,
giving the administration a weapon to neutralize
opposition to the measure when it comes before the
Senate as early as next month.

The pastors' support "will be very influential," Towey
said in an interview. "They speak with authority on
the issue, and they are listened to by a lot of the
members [of Congress] that are Democrats."

The discussion left at least one minister at the Rice
meeting with mixed feelings. Shaw, head of the
National Baptist Convention and pastor of a church in
Philadelphia, said he refused to sign the letter,
calling it a "political move." He also said he was
pleased to hear about Bush's Africa agenda but was
worried that the administration's outreach was more
about politics than substance.

"I don't think [the Africa effort] ought to become
simply another exercise of political operations," said
Shaw, whose National Baptist Convention is the largest
and oldest African American church denomination, with
more than 7.5 million members. "I am not closed to
it…. I need to see what fruitful comes from it and how
nonpolitical it is."

The meeting's guest list seemed like a who's who of
African American religious leaders. Blake is head of
the West Angeles Church of God in Christ, whose 24,000
members include celebrities such as Denzel Washington
and Stevie Wonder. Jakes, who has been a regular at
White House meetings, leads Potter's House Ministry in
Dallas, which reaches millions through television
broadcasts and massive conferences.

Perhaps the most unlikely guest was Young, a former
aide to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and past
president of the liberal National Council of Churches.
Young surprised the audience when he rose to offer an
emotional tribute to Rice. Young said it would have
been unthinkable during the days of the civil rights
struggle to imagine that Rice, a black preacher's
daughter from the segregated South, would become the
nation's top diplomat.

Young, who traveled overseas after the meeting, could
not be reached for comment.

Several of the pastors said that interest was growing
among their congregants in taking more responsibility
for Africa's welfare.

"We encourage churches to adopt Africa as a priority,
just as Israel is a priority for Jewish Americans,"
Blake, founder and director of the Pan African
Children's Fund, said in an interview after the White
House meeting.

Blake presented literature for Rice and the White
House, explaining what he called the "Pan Africa
movement" and the work his organization did to help
AIDS orphans. He cited the potential benefits that an
expanded U.S. church effort would have on the war on
terrorism in countries such as Sudan, Nigeria and
Kenya, where cells of Islamic extremists have been
tracked. The millions of orphans in those countries
are "susceptible to recruitment" by terrorists and
their sympathizers, Blake wrote.

In many ways, the differences over the discrimination
issue — and the dueling meetings in Washington last
week — illuminated the larger tug of war in national
politics for the sympathies of black clergy and,
ultimately, the electoral support of their
congregations.

Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman
maintains a heavy schedule of meetings with black
religious and political leaders and travels nearly
every week to speak at historically black colleges. In
addition, African American pastors are being courted
by white evangelical church leaders, including the
Rev. Louis P. Sheldon of the Traditional Values
Coalition and James Dobson of Focus on the Family, who
seek — and find — allies for their opposition to gay
marriage and abortion rights.

In the first years of the Bush administration, many
Democratic strategists dismissed the Republican
outreach to blacks as pandering. But they no longer
wave off its potential.

Some analysts maintain that the GOP's success in
boosting the black vote for Bush in Ohio last year
from 9% to 16% — an increase attributed to outreach to
black pastors — secured the president's reelection. To
fight back, the Democrats and their allies have
launched an array of countermeasures, including last
week's conference with ministers and the Congressional
Black Caucus.

"We did not want these ministers to be in a position
where they come to Washington, meet with the White
House and just pass the black caucus," said Rep.
Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.), who is heading the group's
outreach to pastors.

Cummings said the caucus was establishing regional
forums, which would begin this summer, to educate
clergy on national issues.

This month, a separate organization of black ministers
backed by the liberal group People for the American
Way met to mobilize black church opposition to
President Bush's judicial nominees.

The group met May 6 at the Washington Hilton hotel to
hear Democratic leaders, members of the Congressional
Black Caucus staff and the National Assn. for the
Advancement of Colored People blast Bush
administration policies.

The leader of the black ministers' group, the Rev.
Timothy McDonald III of Atlanta, said the effort was
necessary to build a "countervailing force" against
efforts by the GOP and their allies to woo black
church leaders.

"We're losing ministers every week," McDonald said.

Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada has
hired three new staffers to reach out to faith-based
groups, including African American constituencies.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) has also joined
in the effort. In a January speech at Boston's Azusa
Christian Community Church, Clinton gave an
endorsement of the faith-based initiative that sounded
as though she were reading from a Bush White House
script.

"We cannot come in, through the government, and
dictate to faith-based organizations how they should
best minister in their streets, and in their churches,
and in their synagogues and mosques," she said. "We
need to not have a false division or debate about the
role of faith-based institutions; we need to just do
it and provide the support that is needed on an
ongoing basis."

*

Guest list

These religious leaders were among the more than two
dozen who met last week with Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice and senior White House officials.

Bishop T.D. Jakes

An author of bestselling books, Jakes is also a
Grammy-winning gospel singer who was the subject of a
2001 Time magazine cover story titled "Is this the
Next Billy Graham?" His Potter's House church in
Dallas has 30,000 members, and his sermons are
broadcast nationally.

The Rev. Donnie McClurkin

When he is not ministering to congregants at
Perfecting Faith Church in a former supermarket in
Freeport, N.Y., McClurkin performs, occasionally
sharing the stage with music stars. McClurkin is a
Pentecostal minister and a Grammy-winning gospel
singer whose work has crossed over to mainstream
audiences.

The Rev. Eugene Rivers

Pastor of Boston's Azusa Christian Community, Rivers
earned national attention for his work combating youth
crime. He is an advocate of Pentecostal activism and
its entry into Africa. Rivers has been a visitor to
the White House under Presidents Bush and Clinton.

Bishop Charles E. Blake

A member of the 12-person board of the Church of God
in Christ, a denomination with more than 5 million
members, Blake launched an organization providing aid
to African children. He is the pastor of West Angeles
Church of God and Christ in Los Angeles, whose
24,000-member congregation includes celebrities.

Bishop Eddie Long

Senior pastor of New Birth Missionary Baptist Church
in Atlanta, Long has an international following. He is
a staunch opponent of same-sex marriage and led a
march in Atlanta advocating a constitutional amendment
to ban such unions. His TV show "Taking Authority" is
broadcast in more than 100 countries.

The Rev. Andrew Young

The pastor, whose previous posts include ambassador to
the U.N., Democratic congressman and mayor of Atlanta,
has long been at the center of national and
international civil rights struggles. He serves as a
director of several major corporations and leads
GoodWorks International, a consulting firm that
promotes economic development in Africa and the
Caribbean.

The Rev. William J. Shaw

The Philadelphia minister presides over the National
Baptist Convention, a long-standing organization that
has had missions in Africa since the 19th century.
Shaw has been a critic of the Bush administration,
opposing the war in Iraq and the president's proposed
overhaul of Social Security.

Bishop Sedgwick Daniels

Bush had the backing of the pastor in the 2004
election. Daniels presides over Holy Redeemer
Institutional Church of God in Christ, a fast-growing
church in Milwaukee that has gained notice from
Republican and Democratic candidates.

The Rev. Herbert Hoover Lusk II

The senior pastor of the Greater Exodus Baptist Church
in Philadelphia, Lusk is a former star running back
for Cal State Long Beach who later played for the
NFL's Philadelphia Eagles. His church biography calls
him an advisor to Bush.

The Rev. Frank Madison Reid III

Reid is the senior pastor of Bethel African Methodist
Episcopal Church, a fast-growing church in Baltimore.
A fifth-generation minister with degrees from Harvard
and Yale, Reid became one of the first AME church
leaders to have a syndicated television program,
"Outreach of Love," which has been broadcast
nationally for a decade.