Missionary Thinking

I feel faith based initiatives won't work because religion is a virus and like all viruses, the main goal is to spread itself. The fact that Robertson's Operation Blessing's first concern was supplying 80,000 Bibles to drowning Gulf Coast citizens comes as no surprise. Currently a war is going on at Wikipedia about Mother Theresa with some claiming she is a saint and others pointing out that Mother Theresa used charitable contributions to establish convents and baptize dying people rather than supply basic medical care. Religious people think "spreading the Word" is more important than any other thing.

Giving US government funds to religious groups has been tried before.

When President Ulysses S. Grant faced the "Indian problem" — that is, the restriction of Native Americans to reservations, where they were both banned from hunting and too inexperienced to farm productively enough — he declared that government could not do the job. Rather, urged by religious leaders, he looked for mainstream religious denominations to "Christianize the Indians" using federal funds. In a scenario with eerie similarities to the present, the federal government declared itself incapable of delivering social services but determined to fund them.....Thus, the Grant Administration instituted the "Peace Policy," assigning particular reservations to particular Christian denominations. (One of the most immediate effects of this, unfortunately, was to generate interdenominational conflicts, especially between the Protestants who received the assignments and the money, and the Catholics, already out West, who did not. There were no enforceable requirements of success for the religious organizations. Partly as a result, under the Peace Policy, denominations used their limited funds to proselytize–rather than to teach the agrarian techniques that were sorely needed–and many of the Native Americans starved.

Read the whole article on why faith based initiatives are a bad idea.

P.S. An earlier, more critical version of the Wikipedia article on Mother Teresa is here.