Why does'religious'suddenly need a synonym?
"Government should welcome the help of faith-based institutions," Gov.
George W Bush of Texas said in 1996. In April of this year, a spokesman for his brother, Gov. Jeb Bush of Florl
da, told The News
and Record of Greensboro, N.C., "The Governor supportsfaitb-based initiatives."
"For too long," said Vice President Al Gore to the Salvation Army in Atlanta last month, 'fai'th-based organizations
have wrought
miracles on a shoestring." He weli comed "the voices offaitb-based organizations."
In covering Gore's speech, John Harwood of The Wall Street journal noted "both political parties' growing
acceptance of faitb-based
solutions since Republicans began promoting the idea several years ago." But Kevin Sack of The New York
Times, though reporting
Gore's usage in direct quotation, did not use the suddenly popular phrase 'in his own writing; instead, he used the
more traditional
noun in discussing "government financing of religion-based welfare-to-work initiatives."
Faith-based is hot enough to be enshrined in the official canon. In Wisconsin, the Joint Legislative Council
established the Special
Committee on Faith-Based Approaches to Crime Prevention and justice. Assembly Speaker Scott Jensen's legal
counsel defines those
approaches as "the acknowledgment of and faith in a higher power,* the belief that social pathologies include
"conditions of the soul"
and that treatment involves "a fundamental transformation of character."
The earliest use of this modifier now so in vogue was in criticism, not affirmation, of religion in public life. In 1981,
Clarence
Martin, a lobbyist for the Association for the Advancement of Psychology, wrote that scholars of the social
sciences, heirs to Darwin,
Marx and Freud, "are the empirical left who may challenge the views, or more importantly re'ect the faith-based
values, of the
creationists, the moral majority, the laissez-faire 'industrialists, the economic determinists, the sexists, the militarists,
the coalition
who put Reagan in office."
The linguistic mystery: why are political figures all usingfaith-based rather than religion-based or, more simply than
that adjectival
compound, the old-fashioned adjective religious?
Religion (probably from the Latin religare, "to restrain") is a set of beliefs; faith, (from fidere, "to trust") is the
unquestioning trust in
the truth of those beliefs.
American political tradition, following its metaphor of "a wall of separation between church and state," shies away
from "religion in
politics" but not away from religious values in public life. By substitutingfaith (trust in the truths) for religion (the
organized set of
beliefs), the new compound ad'ective gets around the traditional objection. The i Rev. Bill Callahan of the Quixote
Center in
Hyattsville, Md., says, "The language of faith-based signals to people our motivation while separating us from the
institutions."
-Based is a hot formative suffix. Though broad-based is two centuries old, zero-based took off around 1970 and
missile lingo gave
us land-based, sea-based and space-based. A discussion of this particular parasynthetic derivative is
based-based.