Moderating Gig

As we blogged last month, Delia moderated a discussion for The Roundtable on Religion and Social Welfare Policy, called "Assessing the Role of Faith-Based Organizations in Disaster Response". Here is the transcript - "From the White House to the State House: Federalism and the Faith-Based Initiative" - just a warning, it's a PDF file.

Interestingly enough, the religious groups' overwhelming response to the Fed's offer of financial assistance was a resounding "NO". But then again, who, in their right mind, would say "YES" in such a public setting?

Here's an excerpt from that roundtable:

MS. DELIA GALLAGHER: Good afternoon. This is the luncheon panel. I’m Delia Gallagher, Faith and Values correspondent from CNN. I have a distinguished panel of guests here and we are going to be talking about the faith-based organizations’ response after the hurricane.

So, of course we all know that after the hurricanes, the faith-based organization response was tremendous and in the media I think that they were lauded for their quick response. What you don’t know is that they didn’t help only the victims of the hurricanes, they helped the journalists, because when we went down there we had no place to stay. People were sleeping in tents, crews, and I went down with a crew of three people and myself, so there were four of us. And we literally didn’t have a place to stay.

We were working on our story. We did not know where we were going to sleep that night, and we got a phone call from a girl who belonged to an Episcopalian church, who was a friend of my producer, and said through her community they found a family for us. And so this family took us in. I mean, let us take over their house with all our equipment. If you’ve ever seen TV crews move, you know you’ve got a lot of equipment, and a lot of lights, and cameras, and things. Meryl, Faye, and Archer; and they cooked us grits in the morning and they gave us all this southern hospitality which I had never seen before. And, of course, I couldn’t tell any of our colleagues because they were not happy that they had to sleep in tents. But this is certainly something which, you know, we experienced first-hand. So, it was easy to report on because we were literally in it. And then, of course I went to the churches and I saw a lot of the activity that was happening.

So, we know that there was a great and good response on behalf of a lot of the faith-based organizations. There was, however, criticism afterwards and some raised eyebrows about what is appropriate collaboration with the government? And particularly about, on FEMA’s website suggesting that Americans send money to faith-based organizations for relief, and also about reimbursement and how that’s going to play out. And whether it’s correct that the government give money to reimburse faith-based organizations that may have been involved in evangelization during this process. And that’s one of the questions that I’d like to get at with our panel. You know, is there evangelization in the relief efforts too?