Religious groups join scramble for earmarks

Saint Vincent College, a small Benedictine college southeast of Pittsburgh, wanted to realign a two-lane state road serving the campus. But the state transportation department did not have the money.

So Saint Vincent tried Washington instead. The college hired a professional lobbyist in 2004 and, later that year, two paragraphs were tucked into federal appropriation bills with the help of Representative John P. Murtha, Democrat of Pennsylvania, awarding $4 million solely for that project. College officials said the work would improve the safety and appearance of the road into the campus, which President Bush visited two days ago when he gave the college's commencement address.

Religious organizations have long competed for federal contracts to provide social services, and they have tried to influence Congress on matters of moral and social policy. Most major denominations have a presence in Washington to monitor such legislation. But an analysis of federal records shows that some religious organizations are also hiring professional lobbyists to pursue the narrowly tailored individual appropriations known as earmarks.

A New York Times analysis shows that the number of earmarks for religious organizations, while small compared with the overall number, have increased sharply in recent years. From 1989 to January 2007, Congress approved almost 900 earmarks for religious groups, totaling more than $318 million, with more than half of them granted in the congressional session that included the 2004 presidential election. By contrast, the same analysis showed fewer than 60 earmarks for faith-based groups in the congressional session that covered 1997 and 1998.

Earmarks are individual federal grants that bypass the normal appropriations and competitive-bidding procedures. They have been blamed for feeding the budget deficit and have figured in several Capitol Hill bribery scandals, prompting recent calls for change from White House and congressional leaders.

They are distinct from the competitive, peer-reviewed grants that have been used by religious institutions and charities to obtain financing for social services.

According to an analysis by the Times, as the number of faith-based earmarks grew so did the number of religious organizations listed as clients of Washington lobbying firms and the amount the organizations paid the firms for services. During the period studied, from 1998 to 2005, the number of religious organizations with representation tripled. The amount they paid for representation doubled.

Sometimes the earmarks benefited programs aimed at helping others. There have been numerous earmarks totaling $5.4 million for World Vision, the global humanitarian ministry, to conduct job training, youth mentoring, and gang prevention programs.

But many of the earmarks address the prosaic institutional needs of some specific religious groups.

Several scholars who wrote books about religious advocacy work in Washington in the 1980s and early 1990s say the push for earmarks identified in The Times's analysis represents a sharp departure from the lobbying strategies traditionally associated with religious groups. Daniel J.B. Hofrenning, a professor at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minn., said: "Getting heavily into the pork-barrel politics of earmarks -- that is a distinctive change."

It is a shift that some religious advocates find worrisome.

"Earmarks are bad public policy," said Maureen Shea, director of the Episcopal Office of Government Relations in Washington. "If earmarks are not in the public interest, I would wonder why the faith community would be involved in them. It would hurt our credibility."